Zang Guang-xing is a veteran soldier from Mainland China who married a young Taiwanese woman. He has been working as a supervisor in a construction company for seven years. Everyday he rides the same motorbike to work. He suffers enough misery from riding that motorbike, and dreams of buying a car. So he asks around for decent second-hand cars. His son doesn't like any car he chooses. His wife, a typical Taiwanese woman who lives frugally, shaves any penny she can. She is the one who pays for the family's new car. They go out on trips happily, and become the envy of the neighborhood. Zhang thus gets the new car he's always dreamed of, but he starts to worry about it getting dirty, because it's simply too new, too nice for him. The car thus becomes his son's vehicle. He rides the old bike to work again, just like he has during all these years.

The essence of progress in civilization has always been handiwork. In traditional Chinese civilization, the emperor was supreme. Vested with the authority to enjoy the best of handiwork, all crafts used for residence, clothing, food, and travel were the most refined and splendid.

A polyptych of interconnected stories in different time-zones, shifting between a Yunnan village, a campus, and the Gobi Desert.

When she was seven, Elise Gardet witnessed her mother’s brutal murder. Ever since, she has tried to forget this unsolved crime. Now she’s 18 and beautiful, but her bourgeois family and her stepmother’s anxiety are suffocating her.

Lin is a plain-clothes cop in the crime-riddled district of Mongkok who bungles a vice operation directed at mainland prostitues. He falls for a ditsy hooker who tells him the love of her life is a killer who once svaed her life in a shootout.

A female director decides to make a autobiographical film on her love life and we see it through the use of flashbacks and brilliant intercutting.

In 1940s Taiwan, during the last days of Japanese rule, an impoverished farming village is less concerned with colonial politics than with feeding their families. One day, an American bomb falls onto a field, where it lies unexploded.

Vicky recalls her romances with her exes Hao Hao and Jack in the neon-lit clubs of Taipei.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.