After losing her job as a garment worker, Ling sees her prospects dim dramatically: in her mid forties, she lives in a small, dilapidated apartment in the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung and spends much of her time locked in arguments with her testy daughter. Her elderly mother is ailing in hospital. On one of her many visits to the ward she notices an injured man and tentatively starts to care for him.

Raised in a broken family, Cat runs away from home as a teenager to escape her stepfather. In high school, she begins living with boyfriend Liam, but puppy love eventually ends in betrayal. While Liam is in the army, Cat, feeling lonely and poor, meets an older man through the Internet; Xiao Gu is looking for sex, Cat is looking for money. From lust comes love, until Cat discovers Xiao Gu is actually married. After ten years of ups and downs, Cat begins anew at age 28 when she meets the rich and kind-hearted Sunshine, but is he really her heart's final home?

Ming-Hsang, a deaf college student, meets interesting people as he cycles around Taiwan before he graduates from college.

Specialized in abstract art, Hsu Pao-Ching is a middle-aged painter who struggles in his career. By chance, he begins giving at art lessons in a prison, where he discovers that Chou Chang-Ting, one of the inmates, has great talent for painting. He holds am exhibition of Chou’s works, however as Chou committed random attacks and killed several people, a protest is staged against it. In the end, Hsu gets hurt and the exhibition is withdrawn. Hsu cannot understand why the public cannot appreciate art without prejudice and decides to approach the victims’ family. Moreover, Hsu goes to Chou’s old family home in search of the inspiration for Chou’s paintings.