A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

Four vignettes, each set in different decades from the 1950s through the 1980s, deal with protagonists at different stages of life between childhood and young adulthood.

A senior chef lives with his three grown daughters; the middle one finds her future plans affected by unexpected events and the life changes of the other household members.

The story follows a young man as he changes from an intelligently aware youth, to a teenager with much less confidence than he once had, and finally, to a stable adult.

Defying his parents, disaffected youth Hsiao Kang drops out of the local cram school to head for the bright lights of downtown Taipei. He falls in wit Ah Tze, a young hoodlum, and their relationship is a confused mixture of hero-worship and rivalry that soon leads to trouble.

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life’s meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

When a family makes the move from China’s mainland to Taiwan, the elder members struggle to adapt in their new environment while Ah-Ha, a young boy, gradually reaches maturity. The generation gap grows fearsomely wide, threatening to alienate the young man from his family and their traditions.

Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.