Xu Yun, Xiaopei Liu, grows up in a rural village in Sichuan that's slated for relocation to clear space for a government industrial zone. He carries only a basket with two ducks and a large knife engraved with his father's name, a tangible link to a father who vanished six years earlier. With little money and a heavy sense of purpose, he sets off for Zigong, determined to find the man who raised him in memory as well as in myth.
On the bus toward Zigong, Xu Yun encounters a scar-faced older man who moves through the city with a rough wisdom earned from harsher streets. This enigmatic figure captures a pickpocket to claim a reward, and his words linger: the truly desperate have a different kind of courage from the shameless, and a man should never bow to bullies. He shows Xu Yun how to eat watermelon “like a man,” a tiny lesson in resilience as they share the ride. The older man also helps Xu Yun find a place to stay, but trust is short-lived: once he departs, Xu Yun is kicked out again and ends up at the police station, briefly under the jurisdiction of people who seem to know more about the city’s hard edges than any map could tell.
Released but homeless, Xu Yun drifts through the city until a sympathetic police officer offers shelter for a night. The officer’s kindness is brief and practical; he urges Xu Yun to return to his village the next morning, but Xu Yun resists any attempt to erase the choices that brought him to Zigong. A radio broadcast interrupts the hush of the city with news that the scar-faced man is now wanted for murder, a revelation that both unsettles and clarifies Xu Yun’s perilous path.
The search for his father stretches into a maze of dead ends and misdirections. A break comes when the officer takes Xu Yun to a riverside enclave to momentarily escape the city’s gravity. Xu Yun dives into the water, a moment of calm before the storm, while the officer is suddenly ambushed by a gang. In the hospital, Xu Yun overhears a woman speaking to his father on the phone, a fragment of life that hints at his father’s possible whereabouts. He follows the woman home, and as a flood warning blares through the city—evacuate, evacuate—the tension thickens: Xu Yun contemplates meeting the father he hasn’t seen in years, yet the moment never arrives. Instead, in a jolt of fate, he witnesses the scar-faced man being beaten by a gang and hauled away in a van. Back at the hospital, the building’s evacuation seals Xu Yun off from the world he hoped to navigate.
With both father figures in flux and removed from his reach, Xu Yun returns to the river and frees the two ducks, releasing the weight of the city back into the water. The act feels like a cleansing, a symbolic release of the life he has carried through the urban maze.
Back at the father’s house, a stepmother—tired of the city’s storms and the debts that chase a man who left long ago—tells him where to find his father. Xu Yun finds the man under siege by creditors, fending off the aggression with the knife engraved with his father’s name—the same blade that carried him through the journey. The father, however, does not recognize the son standing before him; Xu Yun introduces himself simply as a villager, hoping to coax him into returning to the village. The father refuses, but he invites Xu Yun inside for a cigar, a fragile moment of shared humanity before the storm returns.
What follows is brutal, and the film’s gaze lingers on consequence. Xu Yun leaves the shack with his own hands bloodied and his father dead, a consequence that is not mourned as tragedy so much as a stark culmination of a city’s merciless economics. He discards the knife, the instrument of so much meaning, and the room grows quiet as the weight of the knife’s absence settles.
The film shifts to black and white, a stark tonal pivot that shows floodwaters swallowing the city’s edge, erasing traces of the murder and the night’s violence as if nature itself is rewriting the record. On the bus back toward the village, Xu Yun catches another pickpocket, earning a reward that mirrors the earlier scene with the scar-faced man. The parallel—two moments of swift justice in a city that never forgets its own—highlights Xu Yun’s transformation from a vulnerable boy to someone capable of seizing control, even if the cost is steep.
As the river’s memory deepens, Xu Yun returns to the village and buries a lock of his father’s hair alongside some money, a small but potent ritual that signifies an attempt to bring the father’s presence back home. The act ties together city and village, memory and present, and the last image returns to color as the camera focuses on Xu Yun’s bloodied hand, a testament to the journey’s price and the lasting imprint of both loss and resolve.
Throughout this pilgrimage, the film threads themes of perseverance, the uneasy blend of tenderness and brutality in urban life, and the way a single, quiet mission can stretch across landscapes as vast as a river and as immediate as a doorway left ajar. The protagonist’s arc—driven by a father’s absence and the hope of restoration—unfolds in a world where luck, violence, and small acts of mercy collide, leaving Xu Yun forever marked by the city’s floodlit nights and the river’s patient, inexorable current.
