Xiao-Li is a devoted housewife and an active member of her local Catholic church in the farmlands of southern China. Her faith is put to the test when her husband is hospitalized with respiratory illness caused by unsafe working conditions.
A policeman investigates an introverted signal-station manager suspected of raping a hotel clerk.
A Chinese couple visits the daughter they gave up for adoption 30 years ago.
Yu Hong leaves her home village and starts university in Beijing, where she develops a consuming and compulsive relationship with another student. The student riots from 1989 then ensue and take a toll on their lives.
Wu is in her mid-twenties and lives with her mother in a traditional one-story house in one of Beijing’s hutongs. Both consider themselves to be writers, but success has so far eluded them. The fact that Wu is supported by a divorced, elderly man helps the women through lean periods. Their unhealthily close relationship is characterized by reproaches and quibbling; only during meals do they appear to lay down their verbal weapons. The situation escalates when both Wu and her mother hit an emotional low.
Gu Wentong learns the whereabouts of his father, who lost contact with him more than 40 years ago. Encouraged by new friend, photographer Ouyang Wenhui, Gu Wentong decides to face his father and rebuild the long-lost father-son relationship.
Four wraithlike figures of different ages and pasts, haunted by memory, drift along Nanjing's wintry riverbanks. They share an abandoned ruin where talk turns to poetry, painterly pauses, instrumental reveries and the unabashed group therapy of karaoke.
