Based on Zhou Keqin's excellent novel, Xu Mao and His Daughters weaves a story about the life and sufferings of Xu Mao, an aging peasant and his four daughters in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. They struggle to make ends meet since his wife's death. Preoccupied with worries, he loses touch with his maturing daughters. It takes the stubborn but kindly intervention of a woman making a governmental inspection tour to cause father and daughters to appreciate their loving family.

Set in an old time in China, a young man buys a bride for marriage. The marriage brings new thoughts to the village because of the resistance of the bride.

This tale of familial warfare and sacrifice takes place in hard-pressed Shanghai at the end of the 1940s. Hu Zhiqing can barely support his wife and children, and his situation is worsened by the unexpected arrival of his mother, brother and sister-in-law. When he is fired by his unscrupulous boss, the whole family becomes embroiled in one emotional/economic struggle after another.

San mao (3 hairs) was a very popular Chinese comic strip first published in 1935-37, continued from 1948 into the 1990s, about a young orphan boy struggling with life in Shanghai.