Mother's Last Gift

Li Jianguo wants his family to go on living the plain and decent way it always has. His mother, Zhao Guihua, has Alzheimer's and her memory is going a piece at a time. Then the 20,000 yuan she saved over her whole life, the money she called her coffin money, goes missing. The family was poor before this. Now nobody in the family compound trusts anyone else. Relatives start dropping in to ask after her health and all of them are really asking about the money. As the eldest son, Jianguo is the one everyone presses to explain, and he answers with one line, "This family lives decently." He calms the others down and turns the old house over corner by corner. In a rusted tin he finds letters his mother wrote to his father when they were young, a yellowed land contract, and a set of handwritten notes on growing sugar-heart apples, a plan she had put together for the family before the illness. He gets the whole village to plant apples by the notes. The crop comes in and the sugar-heart apples sell for a high price. His mother meanwhile gets worse, and one day she is gone from the house. The family goes out looking for her.