Two aliens come to Earth to collect emotion particles, but end up straying into the urban-rural fringe of China. They meet three groups of ordinary people one after another: Zhang Jianguo, a repairman, uses his daughter's protective amulet to rekindle hope for life and charges their malfunctioning spacecraft; A Fang, the proprietress of a Sichuan restaurant, works off her debt by washing dishes and defends the craft of stir-frying over an open flame with the warmth of her cooking; and at the labor market, elderly men and women squeezed by age discrimination and cutthroat competition conquer the alien recruiters with their "side-lying philosophy". Beneath its absurd science-fiction shell lies a tender tribute to the everyday warmth and resilience of those at the bottom of society.