In the early 1970s, teenage friends Ma Jianling (Ye Liu) and Luo Min (Chen Kun) are forced to move to a remote mountain village for re-education during China's Cultural Revolution. Luo falls in love with a beautiful girl known as the Little Seamstress (Zhou Xun), who thirsts for the Western music and literature that the village chief (Chen Tianlu) considers insufficiently Maoist. The friends read to her from a cache of suppressed European literature that opens her mind to new possibilities.