During the final phase of the Huaihai Campaign in 1949, Sheng Peng, an injured Republic of China Army captain, leads a small squad—alongside his subordinates Huang Te-shun and Fan Chung-yueh—through a retreat that grows increasingly desperate as the battle above them spirals toward defeat. As they trudge across the northern Jiangsu countryside, they encounter an abandoned boy, a quiet figure nicknamed "Dog Two," whom they eventually bring along on their journey. Their path to safety takes them back to nationalist lines, and they eventually board a ship bound for Keelung, Taiwan, where they cross paths with Chiu Hsiang and her scholarly family.
In Taiwan, Sheng Peng is discharged for his injuries, and Huang and Fan desert the army to stand with him. The trio squeezes into a flat in a military dependents’ village in Taipei, but soon military police close in on the deserters. Their fate shifts when Sheng manages to bribe clerks to secure National ID Cards, opening the door to new possibilities. The boy—now named Feng-hsien—begins school, and Sheng rekindles his connection with [Chiu Hsiang], who offers to teach Feng-hsien piano at her home. The music lessons deepen a bond between Sheng and Chiu Hsiang, and also bring him closer to Chiu Hsiang’s baby sister, Chiu Mei.
Meanwhile, Huang and Lin Ah-yu—the Taiwanese woman who barely speaks Mandarin—grow close, marry, and build a life together, though Fan remains deeply unsettled and eventually withdraws to the southern mountains. Years pass, and Huang dies in a fire while trying to rescue a child, leaving Fan to return and mourn him.
Sheng Peng, now a man still haunted by the past, finds himself quietly drawn to Chiu Hsiang. But Chiu Hsiang plans to travel to the United States to marry Chang Ming-jui, an old acquaintance. After a sequence of exchanged gifts and a confession of love, their fragile happiness is touched by danger: Chiu Hsiang’s professor father is swept away by secret police for alleged dissidence, and with Chang Ming-jui having many “connections,” she is left with little say in her fate and must depart.
Lin Ah-yu’s presence lingers in Sheng Peng’s life as well; though widowed, she remains in the same hut and privately confesses her love, only to be met with a firm rejection from Sheng, who pushes her to leave the next day.
In the 1970s, [Feng-hsien] and Chiu Mei’s friendship blossoms into romance, bringing a new sweetness to the old story. Sheng Peng encounters Lin Ah-yu again and is invited to the wedding of Feng-hsien and Chiu Mei. At the ceremony, he also meets Chiu Hsiang, who has relocated to the United States. The years take their toll, and Sheng Peng dies of a heart attack in 1987—the same year Taiwan ends its White Terror and lifts the travel ban to the mainland.
Decades later, in 2010, Sheng Feng-hsien, now an elderly man, travels from Taiwan to his late uncle’s homeland in Shandong to meet Sheng Peng’s brother-in-law. He learns that Sheng Peng’s wife Ma Chiao-lin and their baby died within a year after Sheng Peng left, a sobering coda to a life shaped by migration, memory, and the long arc of divided families.
