Ning Ying follows her acclaimed fiction films (On the Beat, I Love Beijing) with this off–the–cuff documentary about Chinese migrant workers on a cross12/14/2004country train ride from Sichuan in the east to Xinjiang in the northwest. Shoved into compartments, often literally stacked on top of one another, they are traveling for a summer's cotton harvest, hoping to make enough to support their families. Documenting the trip both expansively and expressively, the film uses candid shots and open–ended questioning for an unexpectedly intimate glimpse of contemporary Chinese life.