ABSTRACT
Yearnings is a heart-wrenching Chinese television drama about the intertwined lives, loves, and tragedies of two ordinary families, the intellectual Wangs and the worker Lius, as the vicissitudes of their joys and sorrows unfold over the two decades from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) through the late 1980s. A melodramatic tale of romantic loves found and lost, of a baby abandoned and raised with no one (except viewers) knowing her “true” identity, of families rent apart and tenuously held together – it is a tale that those who engage with popular culture might find moving, though other, unsympathetic critics might find sentimental.
