It begins with Hou recounting how his father, who was a public servant in the Nationalist government, brought his family to Taiwan to live in Hsinchu and then moved to the dormitory in Fengshan, Kaohsiung due to his ill health.

While marks of tanks on the asphalt road indicated that Taiwan was in a state of war, it did not prevent Ah-ha from picking fights with other students or local gangs.

The narrator ends the film by saying that he was often reminded of the road he walked with his grandmother to go back to China and the many guava they picked on the way home.

Yu An-Shun (游安順) was introduced to Hou Hsiao-hsien by actress Yang Li-Yin (楊麗音) and cinematographer Chen Huai-En (陳懷恩).

Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised its cinematography and wrote that "much of the film is about suffering and loss, detailing the painful circumstances in which family members, one by one, grow ill and die.

[7] Derek Malcolm has compared Hou Hsiao-hsien to Satyajit Ray and wrote that the film's honesty and truth "manage[s] to summon up this little microcosm of the world perfectly…Everything is right: the miraculous use of sound, the limpid cinematography, the natural acting create an atmosphere you can't forget".

[8] Jonathan Rosenbaum praised its long takes and deep focus cinematography and called it "unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical significance that may not be immediately apparent".

[9] Geoff Andrew of Time Out wrote that "it is the unflinching, unsentimental honesty that supplies the elegiac intelligence: Hou's quiet style bursts forth, here and there, into sudden, superlative scenes of untrammelled emotional power.