In the late summer of 1998, a group of migrant workers from Dayaoshan, Guangdong, set foot on Shanghai. Among them are Zhou Zi, Zhou Xuan, and Zhou Sheng, young men from the same village who are full of energy; Zhou Huan, Zhou Luan, and Zhou Yu, girls with worries; Zhou Chao, Liang Fang, Huang Jian, and Li Li, who carry the hope of their whole family; and brothers Hu Gan and Hu Kun. Brothers, Liu Zai and Liu Fei, Peng Jie and Peng Fen, Zhang Ju and Zhang Fu; and a group of middle-aged people who shoulder the burden of the family, including Peng Yu, Peng Zhang, Lin Min, Zhou Jie, Huang Wu, Liu Qing, Liu Jia, Liu Tao, Tao Jie, Tao Hong, etc.
In this rising Pearl of the Orient, they are each looking for a place to stand: the husband-and-wife team enters the steaming small restaurant, the brothers go into the dusty brick factory, the young men and women welcome the salty sea breeze at the fish drying ground, while more middle-aged people flock to the roaring construction site. Brothers and sisters from the Liu family and Peng family hold up the brands of "Cantonese roast duck" and "Cantonese rice rolls" respectively, recreating the taste of their hometown in a foreign land.
Time flows like the Huangpu River. The Hu brothers transformed from brick factory workers to building materials store owners and married Zhou Huan and Zhou Luan respectively; the Zhou Dynasty couple turned from a small restaurant to a Cantonese restaurant, and Huang Jian and his wife found their world in the fish market; Zhou Yu married a Shanghai native and started a new life in an alley; and the three Zhou Zi boarded an ocean freighter and sailed to a wider world. The Liu brothers and sisters took advantage of the real estate wave and took off. Liu Zai became the son-in-law of a Shanghai real estate company, and Liu Fei married a businessman from Shenzhen. The Zhang brothers successively became friends with Shanghai locals and took root in Shikumen. The middle-aged people who once sweated at the construction site eventually gathered in Liujia Real Estate's projects and became witnesses of the city's construction.
This is an epic of group struggle spanning twenty years, recording the wanderings, struggles and transformations of small people in a big era. They used the unique tenacity and shrewdness of Cantonese people to carve out a world in Shanghai, and also redefined the meaning of home in the struggle between foreign land and hometown.
Purpose: To praise the unique tenacity and spirit of Cantonese people by describing the wanderings, struggles and transformations of big and small figures in the great era.