A young woman is caught between opposing desires and family expectations in this brilliantly colorful entry into the “healthy realism” movement of the 1960s. In an oyster- farming village in southwest Taiwan, trouble ensues when Lan falls for a fisherman who can’t pay the pricey dowry set by her widowed father. Once the young man casts off
fishing for months, Lan is left pregnant and humiliated in a town undergoing its own developmental turmoil.