Heartstrings

Jingjing, ten-year-old son of Peking Opera actors, is sent to stay with his grandfather in the Guangdong countryside while his parents get divorced. The boy hates Opera; the old man used to be an Opera star. Sun Zhou follows their progress from prickly estrangement to rapprochement with unblushing sentimentality, pausing only to dwell on the old man's emotional perplexity in romancing the local grass widow. Mushy stuff with rather too many ideas recycled from Hou Xiaoxian's A Summer at Grandpa's.