In 1992 the
filmmaker Christine Choy returned to Shanghai for the first time in over thirty
years: to track down the title of her family’s house. She also wanted to locate
an old schoolmate. She found her quest was like going down the rabbit hole with
Franz Kafka as a tour guide. Her mother had abandoned the family’s house on leaving China for the U.S. in the early 1960’s. Christine was sent to innumerable city housing authorities and agencies only to find that the house had never been registered with the city of Shanghai and the government had taken over the property when her mother left. Trying to take it back from the city now would "shame the city and therefore the country" and would be considered traitorous.
Christine finally located her old girlfriend, Li Dao Wen, at the Music Conservatory after several baffling interviews with Li’s estranged relatives and innumerable fortune tellers. The filmmaker found many people in Shanghai still haunted by the ghosts of the Cultural Revolution and guarded in their speech to avoid being labeled "anti-social. Her trip had become a frustrating voyage into the nature of modern China.
