During the Cultural Revolution, Xie Zhixin (Yuan Yue) learns that his son Xie Feng (Ma Xiaowei)'s lover Ulan (Zhang Xiaolei) is the daughter of his student, Lu Yan (Gao Ying), from many years ago. After watching Ulan's performance, Xie leaves in a hurry; Ulan mistakenly believes that Xie's father has scorned her because he knows that her mother is a "rightist."

In the mid-sixties, love between husband and wife was taken to task by political vicissitudes in a seaside village at Fukien province right opposite the Quimoy islets.

Fang Xiuying (played by Li Lan) is a female worker in a textile workshop, she and her boyfriend Zeng Qiang (played by Mao Yongming) have been in love for many years, and they plan to get married after waiting for their work unit to assign them a house. Fang Xiuying is a very kind and helpful girl, but no good deed goes unpunished, and her good-hearted nature is challenged at every turn by bad luck and the bad intentions of others.

In the 1920s, bandits and gangsters gather at a hotel in South China seeking a treasure supposedly buried on the hotel grounds.