This novel explores the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal. When professor Yang has a stroke, his student Jian Wan is assigned to care for him. The burdensome duty becomes more problematic when the professor begins to rave and denounces his family, his colleagues, and a system in which a scholar is "just a piece of meat on a cutting board". In a China convulsed by the Tianmen uprising, those who listen to the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it.