Rookie policeman Tai Lin yearned to be an artist before he failed an examination and followed in his father's footsteps. One day he interrupts an apparent suicide attempt by a woman standing on the edge of a bridge.
Li Yifan
General Feng Shi and Dr. Lu Guangda return from America to lead a team of scientists and soldiers to research and develop China's own atomic bomb.
Father
An old postman has spent his whole life delivering mail to the mountain of Hunan and is about to retire. His only son is due to take over his duties. As father and son journey through the mountains, the son begins to appreciate the toil and burden his father has to bear as postman for the villagers, and the old postman is also deeply moved as his son relates his mother's anxiety as she waits for him to return home from every trip.
Tian Gongshun (as Rujun Teng) / 田恭顺
Hailed by the Chinese government as one of the ten best films of the 1996-97 season, this irony-laced light drama is based on a novel by Fang Fang, and begins with the brutal slaying and robbery of a dock worker's family. The city assigns one of its best detectives, Yan Gao to find "the Wise One," the crime lord behind the murders. To do this, Yan sets up a series of surveillance sights around the city. When port guard Ye learns that he and his supervisor have been chosen to monitor one of the Wise One's main hideouts, he is delighted. It is the most exciting thing to have happened to him in years. But problems come because he must work nights and is sworn to secrecy. His girlfriend Bai Lin misinterprets his absences and this causes trouble. More trouble comes when her old lover shows up. Matters are made worse when a message for Ye and Tian to stop their surveillance does not get through.
Uncle Luohan
An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
