Mr. Zhou is a migrant rural worker from Sichuan province. Together with his wife and his son he lives in Guangzhou, the capital of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where he works at a small company that assembles solar panels.
Mr. Zhou is going to travel back to his remote hometown in Sichuan Province, a place he hasn't been to for almost three years. This journey will take nearly 35 hours and will require all means of transportation: train, bus, motorbike and his own feet.
This journey brings Mr. Zhou back home, back to his relatives, back to the place he was born and where he grew up, where his parents died and are buried.
But it is also a trip in time that brings him from Guangzhou, a great 21st century city of modern China and the starting point of his journey back to the 19th century like impoverished rural provinces in the Chinese hinterland.
And it is a journey that shows how globalization and China's economic boom tear traditional family structures apart.
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