Emancipated and tough Qiao is in love with a minor gangster, Bin. When she gets entangled in a shoot-out with Bin's rivals and kills one of them, she ends up in prison. Upon her release five years later, she tries to continue where she left off with Bin, but nothing is the same. The Chinese direc-tor and scriptwriter Zhang-ke Jia observes dramatic transformations of present-day China against the backdrop of this love story.