ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EASTA STORY OF GROWING UP

Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea.