This article focuses on The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (Yima de houxiandai shenghuo 姨妈的后现代生活, 2006, by Ann Hui), in which the eponymous aunt Ye Rutang is a woman in her 60s living alone in Shanghai. After a series of encounters with her nephew and strangers, Ye loses all her savings and is forced to abandon her neighbourhood in Shanghai to return to her estranged husband and daughter in Anshan, Liaoning in North East China where she faces her painful past – as an intellectual youth during the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1976). The North East, despite recent industrial development, is no match for the vibrancy of Shanghai, or the latter’s postsocialist rebirth, and the monochromatic landscape of the region serves as a symbol for “the past” that co-exists with the futuristic metropolis in contemporary China. The disjuncture between the two parts is a spatial metaphor for the breakdown of the grand narrative in postsocialist China. Through employing the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope, supplemented by a discussion of the production of space (Lefebvre) and temporal markers, the study examines how space and time interact with plot, history, and the individuals’ journeys in the narrative, visualized by the geographical shifts between Shanghai and Liaoning. Postmodern Life is a narrative about the effects of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent economic reforms, a delayed manifestation of how the past has caught up with the protagonists. As such, the private life of a female protagonist opens up an avenue to consider the cinematic-geographical intersections which give meanings to the social and political contexts in the chronology of China’s recent past through the characters who embody the generations, and occupy different subject positions according to their age, class and gender.