Ma (Liu) and Luo (Chen) are two young men who are sent to a re-education camp during Mao's Cultural Revolution. The two teenagers have questionable "bourgeois" habits. Ma is a violinist and manages to save his instrument from destruction when he convinces the party chief that a Mozart sonata has an underlying Maoist message. Luo is the son of a dentist, who had stigmatised his family because he had treated one of Chiang Kai-Shek's molars. Later, Luo redeems himself when he treats the chief's toothache with improvised tools. The two young men discover that a camp member, whom they dub "four eyes", has a stash of forbidden Western literature consisting of Balzac, Flaubert and Dumas. They steal the books and read them in hiding. The literature opens up a whole new world for them that enables them to escape momentarily from the stultifying atmosphere of the camp. Both use the literature to impress the granddaughter of the local tailor, Little Seamstress (Zhou), and vie for her affection.

This is a gentle film about the pursuit of culture and intellectual freedom in a time of political turmoil. Director Sijie Dai adapted his own semi-autobiographical novel to the screen and the film's stunning locations were former re-education villages scheduled to be flooded.