Love Birds, Fly South

From 1978 to 2012, during the thirty-four years of reform and opening up, hundreds of millions of farmers turned into migratory birds flying south in pursuit of the warmth, traveling between urban and rural areas, physically wading through the torrent of transformation of the times.   Chen Xiangnan, a farmer from Anhui, bid farewell to the land and worked his way up from a construction site worker to a construction boss. He spent half his life chasing profit and wandering, owed to his country and his marriage; Lin Chunhua, a Henan woman, escaped the fate of domestic violence and worked on the Pearl River Delta assembly line on her own, transforming from an exploited lower-class female worker to a ruthless factory owner; Wang Guangming, a Sichuan worker, insisted on simple justice and used a "Labor Law" to fight against the suffering of the lower class, and eventually became a martyr of the times.   A generation of people went south to survive and struggled to break through. In the era of temporary residence permits, assembly lines, infrastructure construction sites, and the financial crisis, they experienced the replacement of dignity and money, the game between humanity and capital, and the separation of rural and urban areas.   Their parents were burdened with the fate of being left behind, in debt, and wandering. Their children, Chen Xiaoyu and Lin Pengfei, grew up with original trauma. One wrote to inquire about the truth of the times, and the other entered the game with capital to reshape the rules of survival.   In 2008, when the Labor Contract Law was implemented and the financial tsunami swept across the country, the values of the two generations completely collided. Some people went bankrupt and returned to their hometowns to reshape their hometown; some people were iterative and reborn and embraced new life.   This is a family epic of Chinese migrant workers, describing the fate of migratory birds, the pain of tearing apart urban and rural areas, the brute force of ordinary people growing barbarically in the great era, and the loneliness of modernity with nowhere to return after material abundance.