Everyone is up to something. The city is ugly. The traffic noise is constant. The rural family is as grasping as the businessman in the city. The television news reports some family massacre, along with the reunification with Hong Kong.
Relations are almost entirely without intimacy.
Xiao Wu has managed to stifle his emotions. So has everyone else. In the bar, he refuses to sing or dance with Mei-Mei, then complains that she has not treated him properly. Diffident, awkward, repressed, behind his glasses and the smoke of his ever-present cigarette, Xiao Wu looks like someone hiding out in the open. His only form of contact is slipping his hands surreptitiously into people's pockets.