In a world brimming with magical realism, a young girl in Communist China confronts a malicious member of the Red Guard when he threatens her ailing grandmother.

As a Chinese-American widower and professor of philosophy contemplates the life he has provided his two daughters, he recalls a traumatic memory from his youth as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant, riding through the dangerous streets of New York City.

A Japanese businessman reflects on his experience with Chinese people and longs to visit China.

In a Chinese village during the Qing Dynasty, a crippled man acts as a lawyer for the poor with the help of the trickster Monkey King, but his peaceful life is turned upside down when he comes into possession of a book that details atrocities committed by the government.

Young woman recounts her childhood growing up in China in the 1970s and meeting the old maid that the village has ostracized, this encounter forever changes her.

A white American man and a Chinese-American woman visit the woman's family in China. After the woman's cousin compares the woman's Chinese to a toddler's, she stops speaking English and decides she wants to stay in China for awhile before returning, to reconnect with her family and her place of birth. Upon returning to the United States alone, the man, initially disinterested and unmotivated, begins to learn Chinese.

An old (76) man returns to his hometown in China after 66 years, to find that his mother has just passed away. With fanciful ideas of his assured prosperity in America, the village women seek to marry the old man.

As the People's Liberation Army ravages China, a resentful young woman charged with a strange mission leaves home to work in the city. Once there, she discovers terrifying connections between her rich new employer and the village she left behind.

Caught between two dimensions of spacetime, a poet shares stories with two women in need of his narrative insight, all the while meditating on the meaning of stories and the intricacies of interpersonal connection.

In 21st-century China, a journalist and a former dissident, once the best of friends, lead very different lives. When one goes to jail, the other confronts rampant corruption to find his friend.