The Three Stripes of the 1980S

In the rural areas of western Sichuan in the 1980s, Cheng Gen, who grew up in the soil, struggled to move forward in the aftermath of the reform wave with his honesty and tenacity. He has heard the stories about getting rich on TV, and has seen the motorcycles returned by migrant workers, but he is trapped in a few acres of thin fields and the expectations of his parents. While guarding the countryside where "honesty is the foundation and the roots are the earth", he is eager to move into the unknown world. Although he had excellent grades, he could not afford high school tuition due to difficult family conditions. Dropping out of school to work, going from factories to restaurants, constantly encountering setbacks, and then picking up his bags and heading off to a foreign country, Chenggen lost his youth amid the bumps in reality. He once lost his way under the neon lights, and secretly cried because of his low self-esteem in childhood, but the stubbornness in his bones never lost his purity and dream - to complete college while working part-time, and thus become a "white-collar worker." This is a story about perseverance and struggle, farewell and return. It witnesses how a rural youth born in the 1980s used his hands to dig out the answer to his own life in the gap between the land and the times.