Wu Yigong

A provincial boy related to a Shanghai crime family is recruited by his uncle into cosmopolitan Shanghai in the 1930s to be a servant to a ganglord's mistress.

Yingzi is a young, impressionable girl living on the southern side of Beijing in the late 1920s. Encountering people in the city, she tries to understand how people are really like inside through her own eyes.

Two party members escort a poet and political prisoner of the Cultural Revolution on a ship to Wuhan. They sleep in a cabin with other victims of the era, who sympathize deeply with the poet.