"Qingsong Village" in the southwestern mountainous area has suffered from three years of natural disasters. The production team's granary is empty. The village party secretary Wang Guicai (village tyrant) colludes with black market grain vendor Zhou Laosi to embezzle relief grain and monopolize the material transaction. The villagers dare not speak out. The male protagonist, Chen Tiedan, has a family of six crowded into a leaky adobe house. His mother is seriously ill and has no medicine, and his younger sister is starving to the point of swelling. His father was labeled a "production saboteur" for resisting Wang Guicai, and the whole family became the laughing stock of the village.
