Bukky Post 19 - Movie: Stolen Life

The movie I watched is titled "Stolen Life". The Director was Shaohong Li. It is based on an original story by Ann Dun. Spoken in Mandarin with an English subtitle.

This is a modern film set in Beijing and tells the story of a young beautiful girl (Yanni) whose whole life has been filled with rejection. She was first rejected by her parents (she later found out why) and left with her grand mother and aunt to raise her. The visit from her parents when she was 14 yrs old was the first time she had seen her father. They never even hugged her when they saw her and she did not say a word through out their visit. The parents and relatives talked about her as if she was not present and she herself did not make an attempt to speak up for herself. The mother wanted her to go and work because she did not think she had a future and the father interverned on her behalf that she should go to the university and they would pay if she got admission.
Against all odds, she was accepted into the university and that began her second most painful journey down the path of rejection. This time she was not the only one hurt, an innocent baby was also hurt in the process. On the first day at the university, she met Muyu, who would be the one to change are destiny for bad and set her on a disastrous course. Muyu was an uneducated young man who delivered food to the university and other places around. He became friends with Yanni and she innocently placed her trust in him. She thought she had finally found
someone who accepted and loved her. It turns out that Muyu was a crafty, evil young man.

Along the way, Yanni moved in with Muyu and became pregnant. She was asked to leave the university and never had the chance to complete her education. She also lost contact with her family and they actually thought she was dead. Muyu isolated her from everyone and everything she knew. Her aunt finally saw her with her pregnancy selling snails on the roadside and told her parents where to find her. When her mother visited she explained to her the reason she had been so distant from Yanni was because she also became pregnant when she was at the university and never had the opportunity to complete her education. This was history repeating itself.

Yanni's mother signed an agreement with Muyu that she would give him some money if he gave the baby away for adoption after Yanni gave birth. All this was done without consulting her. Muyu finnaly found adoptive parents and despite Yanni's heartfelt cries, he allowed the adoptive parents to take the baby away. She never recovered from that. It later turned out Muyu was a pro at impregnating innocent young girls and selling off the babies to adoptive parents. He had done the same thing to the girl he was with before Yanni came into the picture. He did the same to the Yanni and the girl he left Yanni for. He told Yanni he knew he did not have a future and he was an uneducated man yet he had been able to get these univeristy girls to like him and have babies for him. Obviously, his actions were well planned and well thought out.

It was a very sad story but Yanni was able to set her life back on course, at least a little at the end of the movie. Obviously, she would never go to university again and she may never become who she would have been with a good education under her belt. She's also doing menial jobs unlike the more professional jobs that she would have had access to if she had completed her university. I'm not sure she'll ever recover from the loss of the child because even at the end of the movie she was appealing to whoever may know the where abouts of her son.

Very sad but lessons learned. Especially for young people who are easily mislead by the idea of love and loose focus on what in important.