20 year-old Lynn is told she needs English classes, flight attendant school, and a go getter-attitude. She perseveres along this path of upward mobility until she finds out she's pregnant. Indecisive and running out of time, she tells her boyfriend she's had an abortion and instead returns to her feuding parents and their failing clinic to try and figure out what's next.

Lynn lives with her grandparents in Meicheng, a small Hunanese city unsettled by an ongoing rape-murder investigation. With little structure to regulate her life outside of school, where she is bullied, Lynn begins smuggling and reselling confiscated mobile phones with her friend, which leads to encounters with the city’s seedier inhabitants.