The story begins in the early 1980s. After graduating from high school, the hero and heroine separated due to study and other needs. From then on, a long and different life path of getting to know each other, falling in love, falling in love, and finally breaking up began. The male protagonist's name is Zhao Xiaodong, and the female protagonist's name is Qin Xuemei. Combining the popular elements of Tomato novels and taking the social transformation of China from 1980 to 2000 as the background, it shows the ups and downs of the fate of ordinary people in the wave of reform and opening up through the emotional entanglement between Zhao Xiaodong (a rural Phoenix man) and Qin Xuemei (a township talented woman) spanning twenty years. The whole novel closely follows the three core contradictions of "misplaced love", "class gap" and "individual struggle under the torrent of the times", with "Sophora japonica" as the running image throughout, strengthening the tragic aesthetics.
