Wu Fang is shy, unassuming, and never without her glasses, a Beijing University graduate student who keeps landing on blind dates she doesn’t quite feel fit her. She tends to order a glass of green tea on each outing, observing people with a quiet, perceptive humor that often goes unnoticed by men who judge her by her conservative clothes and awkward manner. Throughout the story, she never talks about herself, choosing instead to muse about a close friend she has.
On a subsequent date, she encounters Chen Mingliang and shares how her friend is clairvoyant, claiming she can read a stranger’s fortune by swirling and studying their tea leaves, a claim Mingliang greets with skepticism. After a string of awkward exchanges, Wu Fang lands a blow when he makes a perverted suggestion, and the two part ways. Yet Mingliang begins to track Wu Fang across the campus, first out of irritation, then through extended conversations that gradually reveal a warmer, more intimate side of her. Wu Fang’s gentle, understated humor slowly draws him in, and she openly states that the one thing she hates is when men hit women.
Through these conversations, the backstory of Wu Fang’s fortune-telling friend is unpacked. The friend is described as someone who can make even smoking seem graceful, someone who changes boyfriends faster than the weather, and whose father is terrifying. Wu Fang mentions that her friend’s mother worked as a makeup artist at a morgue, a fact she kept secret from her husband until after they had children. When the husband learns the truth, he sinks into alcoholism and violence.
As the confidences deepen, Wu Fang reveals more about that life: the husband forcing his wife to wear gloves at all times, even in sleep, insisting that the gloves and the woman’s hands—seemingly tied to her work—are destroying his life, especially amid drunken beatings that he directs at both his wife and their daughter. The tale culminates in a night when the father attempts to assault Wu Fang’s mother while she’s cooking, and the friend inadvertently pierces his throat with a potato peeler, leading to his death and the mother’s subsequent murder conviction and long imprisonment. The retold ending is that the story was fictional, a point the friend makes with a laugh, leaving Mingliang equally entranced by the narrative and by Wu Fang herself, who remains emotionally elusive and enigmatic.
Meanwhile, Mingliang’s artist friend Jun tries to set him up with a sultry piano player known for dating people but only once—the musician Lang Lang. The pianist, who bears a striking resemblance to Wu Fang but without the glasses, seems to dismiss the notion that she is Wu Fang, at first. Mingliang is convinced they are the same woman, and after a playful moment when he rips Wu Fang’s glasses away, Wu Fang overreacts and leaves. For several days, Wu Fang disappears, giving Lang Lang and Mingliang a chance to get closer, and Lang Lang’s easy charm, her carefree laughter, her smoking habit, and her poised confidence with men distinguish her from Wu Fang in this stretch of time.
Lang Lang also reveals fragments of her own history: her father was a dissatisfied “one hit wonder” composer who was violent at home, and she explains that her mother supervised a glove factory. When Mingliang asks about her mother’s work, Lang Lang’s answers hint at a difficult, intimate family past that mirrors the darker stories Wu Fang has shared.
As Jun continues to scheme for a couple’s dinner, Wu Fang remains unseen, prompting Mingliang to seek out Lang Lang to fill the evening. Lang Lang agrees to pose as Wu Fang for a single night and performs a fortune-telling routine using the tea leaves in her glass of green tea. The gathering erupts in drama as Jun’s girlfriend drunkenly flirts with Mingliang and stirs trouble with Lang Lang, who responds with a firm stand against violence, slapping Jun in return and declaring that the thing she hates most is when men hit women.
The film closes with a deliberately unfinished, ambiguous note. Mingliang and Lang Lang retreat to a hotel room, where the camera shifts to a time-lapse shot beneath a translucent glass table. Above the table, Mingliang and Wu Fang share a conversation, with Wu Fang’s glasses resting on the table beside a glass of green tea, leaving the audience to ponder what is real and what has been imagined.
