Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature at a provincial university, has had a stroke, and his student Jian Wan--who is also engaged to Yang's daughter--has been assigned to care for him. What at first seems a simple if burdensome duty becomes treacherous when the professor begins to rave: pleading with invisible tormentors, denouncing his family, his colleagues, and a system in which a scholar is just a piece of meat on a cutting board. Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? And can the dutiful Jian avoid being irretrievably compromised?