I loved this film (slow, gentle, beautiful... set in Hunan) - like Sunflower it revolves around a father-son relationship, and it also considers the changes that rural China is beginning to see under reform - practically and in terms of values. It is also a deeply moral film (maturity, responsibility, community)... And it reminded me in a completely dumb way of my various encounters with other outposts of the post office experience in China. Every visit I have made there since 1984-85 has ended with visits to post offices, this being what happens when you have serious book-buying habit. The only time that I think I encountered a blatant attempt at fraud in China was in a post office in Nanjing, but otherwise post offices have seemed like oases of calm and certainty (how sad is that? but how true?)... even though rules can vary from one place to another (do we wrap books in cloth or paper? what are we allowed to put in a box and how heavy can each box be?) there is a strong sense that those rules are stable, and that they work. Compared to, for example, railway ticket offices (in spring 1985, I heard someone behind me in a queue in the foreigners ticket office in Beijing station declare "Communism's ruining this country" ['cos it was lovely before 1949, eh?]), post offices are a paradise of public service. Watch me eat my words and big chunks of carpet if I lose a parcel of books on my next visit, but right now I love the Chinese post office.
I'm also quite fond of NHS paramedics, but that's another story.
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