Based on an Eileen Chang novel, this is a story of passion and fate set in 1930s Shanghai. Manjing (Wu Chien-lien), a young woman from a once-affluent family, works in a Shanghai factory where she meets Shujun (Leon Lai), the son of prosperous Nanjing merchants. Despite Shujun's worries about Manjing's family (her sister, Manlu (Anita Mui), is a nightclub "hostess"), they manage to fall in love in stages. The planned progression from engagement to marriage is thwarted, first by Manjing's hesitation to take this step, then by Shujun's rejection of her family, and last by that family's baroquely constructed abuse and captivity of Shujun. Shujun and Manjing reunite after a lengthy separation, but learn that their pleasure exists only in memory, in a nostalgic re-imagining of squandered possibilities and unresolved conflicts.