"[1] Because the book jumps around on the timeline of the narrator's life it is difficult to give a perfectly linear plot summary.
The book opens with a nameless narrator, who is the alter ego of Gao Xingjian, who is talking about an old photo taken with family members.
He jumps forward in time and is now making love to a woman, who is named Margarethe, in a hotel room in Hong Kong.
They discuss how they first met through a mutual friend, named Peter, and how at the time of their meeting, the narrator had had a young Chinese woman in his apartment.
Margarethe asks who the girl was and he tells her that she was a nameless, young, Chinese army nurse he had been sleeping with at the time.
After this story, Gao and Margarethe discuss his missed opportunity to paint in Germany because the Chinese government would not sanction his leaving the country due to his status as a writer.
Following this conversation, Gao has a dream of being back in his childhood home and interacting with relatives that have long since passed.
The story jumps back to present-day Hong Kong where he meets and dines with a Mr. Zhou who is an admirer of his plays and who had a proposition for him to work in Australia which he declines.
Jumping back to time, Gao describes Mao's followers as ready to go against any persons that promoted reactionary thinking or anti-communist principles.
Back in present-day Hong Kong, Gao talks again with Margarethe and they discuss politics and the pain of memory.
He then jumps back in time again and thinks about working with his friend Liu and then remembers all the intimate details of his affair with Lin.
Margarethe, during one of their many nights and days together, tells of how she was repeatedly raped for a long period of time while modeling for an artist.
He eventually marries the woman, but the marriage quickly deteriorates because of his writing and the caution he lacks when speaking around his new bride and in the end she leaves.
Margarethe - A young German-Jewish woman who loves to live in the moment and would prefer to forget many of her painful memories.
Throughout the novel, Gao discusses the freedom of the human spirit and how writing and his sexual encounters help to feel free and uninhibited.
In the novel, Gao gives little attention to the background and cause of the events taking place around him in China because of the Cultural Revolution.
While promoting his policies, Mao also caused the deaths of many peasants, academics, any suspected spies, and any persons thought to sympathize with capitalist ways of thinking.
The Red Guards were a young adult group that would work to destroy any and all past remnants of Chinese culture.