Adapted from the novel, Days of Watching the Sea written by Huang Chun Ming, the film portrays the journey of a prostitute who is determined to become a mother to regain her dignity as a human being.
It is one of the few commercially successful films of the New Taiwan Cinema in the 1980s, in which its box office reached TWD$23,000,000,[1] HKD$2,536,132.00[2] and was nominated for Best Narrative Feature in the 20th Golden Horse Awards.
[3] The female lead Bai Mei (白梅, played by Lu Hsiao-Fen 陸小芬) was an adopted girl in a poor family at Jiufen (九份).
Because of her social status, Bai Mei was shunned by the younger brothers and sisters she helped raise with her blood money.
Disappointed and heart-broken, Bai Mei was determined to cut off from the foster home and have a baby of her own on the train back to Nanfangao, believing that she could become a "normal person" by becoming a mother.
She let a kind and honest fisherman (played by Ma Ju Feng馬如風) to impregnate her and then said goodbye to the brothel and her life as a prostitute the next day.
In one of his interviews,[6] Wang Toon mentioned that it is the intimate relationship between people and the ocean that made him choose Hualien and Jinshan as the shooting locations for this film.