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This movie was one of the first few US movies authorized to be shown in China after the establishment of foreign diplomatic relationship between the People's Republic of China and the United States in 1979, after a three-decade long hostility between the two countries.

The movie was really an eye-opener for the Chinese audience, as well as the Chinese movie industry, mainly because of the way some scenes were shot. In particular, the scene where the characters were falling down was filmed in the way that it appears the filming crew was falling with the characters, thus creating a realistic impression of point of view from the characters themselves. As a result, there was a few Chinese audience with heart problems had to be carried out from movie theaters after they passed out, resulting from seeing these tense falling scenes. After several incidents like this occurred when this film was shown in China, some Chinese theaters banned patients with known heart problems from seeing this film, for fearing that they might have heart attack again.

Though the story is fictional, the event described in this movie is real, and many cases actually happened in real life in China. In most of these cases, the blackmailers were caught and sentenced to serve times in jail, while at the same time, many families also broke up due to the affairs the lonely wives left behind.

What is not described in the movie is another tragedy of this (illegal) immigration: even when the wives left behind was finally able to go abroad to unite with their husbands, the marriage is already damaged and ended in divorce. Divorce in foreign land with unfamiliar custom took further tolls on the people involved

This movie is made in the early era of Chinese reform that first started around 1980, when China was far less open and free as it is today, despite the fact that it was on the right track of development and reform.

By that time, the traditional hardline communist influence was still extremely strong, and the conservative commies were extremely unhappy with the way China was going, such as the welcome of western influence in the cultural, economical, social, and even political arena, and the hardline commies are trying to halt, or at least, to slow down the trend. One of the most obvious example is in the media censorship, an area hardline commies still had strong influence, and this movie is the reflection of their futile struggle to reverse the trend.