The plot line of this movie strongly resembles a Taiwan-made movie called (in English; I don't remember the Chinese exactly) "Five Girls and a Rope." Both movies concern five girls in pre-revolutionary China (twentieth-century, I think, although it's very rural---their feet are not bound, as was the custom in the old days) who are really, really unhappy about their lives. Basically, they know that as women, their lives are going to be really bad---one of them figured this out when her beloved grandmother wasn't allowed to sit and eat with the men at a banquet ostensibly in her honor, another is to be married off to a sickly old man, and so on. So, they form a five-girl suicide pact.