 Back in Shanghai, the impoverished Sufen continues working and living among the refugees, supporting her mother-in-law and son, now a young boy, until the Japanese decide to dismantle the camp for military purposes.The soldiers force the refugees to live in an open field surrounded by barbed wire and allow them only starvation rations of rice.When one of the prisoners escapes, the others, many of them elderly women, are collectively punished by being made to stand all night in the waist-high, freezing waters of a canal.