Towards the end of Wang Quanan's new film, Apart Together, one character, the pensioner Qiao Yu'e, is seen reminiscing about the day in 1949 which changed her life forever.
It was on a wintry afternoon that she waded through the crowds to reach Shanghai's Wusong pier, as she attempted to bid farewell to her husband Liu Yinsheng, a soldier who was being evacuated to Taiwan by the Kuomintang authorities on the eve of the communist takeover of the city.
Supposedly a temporary separation, she did not realise she would only see her husband again 60 years later, when a thaw in cross-strait relations reunites the couple, who have both remarried since then.
It's a story Lisa Lu Yan, the veteran actor who plays Qiao, is familiar with. But rather than being the one left behind on the quay, Lu was the one who sailed away, as she set off for Honolulu to further her studies in 1947.
'I remember my neighbours, with whom I studied together, came to see me off on the boat and they cried and cried,' says Lu, who was 20 at the time. 'I think they were planning to come [to America] to study after they graduated. They just wished I wasn't leaving them.'
Most of her friends never got to join her in the United States, and Lu found herself unable to return home when she eventually finished her business administration degree at the University of Hawaii.