Shen Yang

A street-wise and tough orphan called Maverick is arrested for a petty theft and sent to an orphanage, but succeeds in concealing a watch he had stolen from an old shopkeeper just before his arrest. At the orphanage, he is recruited by a crooked warder for further and more serious crimes. But when two more children are admitted to the orphanage -- a boy called "Fatty" and a girl called "Little Mouse" -- he makes the first friends he has ever had. But when Maverick learns the girl is the granddaughter of the old shopkeeper he stole the watch from, and what ruin it brought to her family, he has a crisis of conscience.

In pre-communism China, a widowed man falls in love with a young colleague who's the same age as his own children.

Fifty years of modern Chinese history (1900-1950), including wars, revolutions and corrupt politics, as seen through the life and times of a simple Beijing policeman and his family.