While the fervour of the Red Guards consumes 1970s Beijing, Mei comes of age in a once-grand courtyard dominated by her grandmother, a survivor of violence who inflicts the same kind of control upon her family that she once resisted. But the matriarch is unable to repel the political storm that comes to their home and leaves death and a traumatised young girl in its wake.
Years later, Mei becomes an artist, slowly committing memory to canvas. When the faultlines of the revolution are recorded as scars, can she learn to reframe the female form as a subject for liberation?
