Director Hsiao Chu-chen points her camera at her father, a retired soldier. In 1949, the Nationalist government retreated from mainland China to Taiwan with 600,000 soldiers. In his twenties at the time, Hsiao’s father believed as did many others they would soon return to China with the Nationalist government. But it took forty years for relations across the straits to be re-established, and it was futile even to dream of returning home. Hsiao uses an ornamental hairpin that belonged to her grandmother left behind on the mainland as the key to her father’s world, bringing forth his feelings towards the China of that era and the remembrances of other retired soldiers.