In the sixties, love stories portrayed women as sentimentalists or sacrificial lambs. Later on, directors like Chu Yuan replaced these themes of sacrifice with abandonment. The Forbidden Past is a heart tugging, rare Chinese Christmas story about a bar girl (Ching Li) serving drinks to a man that looks like her husband from five years ago. She convinces him to fulfill her son's wishes of having the father he's never seen, show up for Christmas.