An orphaned girl in a poverty-stricken neighborhood is adopted by a kindly neighbor. He struggles to support her honestly, despite opportunities to participate in a neighbor’s scurrilous get-rich-quick schemes. Invoking the pain of Chinese exiles living in Taiwan, or missing relatives still in China, the touching film posits an in-between historical period during which it is crucial for displaced residents to maintain virtue as a bedrock of identity.

In a mountain hamlet in eastern China, a poor woman faces trial after trial. Sold into marriage as a child, she is left a young widow and enslaved by her mother-in-law, who sells her to a poor peasant. Her second marriage turns out to be happy until fate takes away her husband and son. Now seen as a bearer of bad luck, she becomes a social outcast.