Huang Chunming wrote in the introduction to the English translation, "In the sixties and seventies, when the modern world began making inroads into the out-of-the-way town of Lanyang, where I was born, the conflicts between the new and the old created a rich source of powerful and dramatic material.
This story provides a glimpse into the nuanced interactions between a grandfather from a Taiwan mountain village and his teenage grandson, who is coming of age and gaining experience of the larger world.
The story provides an example of quintessential Huang Chunming narrative: unadorned observation of the fundamental human condition ("They seemed to shed a heavy emotional burden simultaneously -- he having seen his wife walk through the door, she having seen her husband drink some tea") juxtaposed with wry examples of the incongruity and provocativeness of modernizing Taiwan (the protagonist's occupation is "sandwich-man" or "ad man" - shouldering billboards for a movie theater and dressed in the costume of a nineteenth-century European military officer").
The group that the man falls in with—the arhat vagrants—is a classic collection of down-on-their-luck locals: Scabby Head, Turtle, Know-It-All, Fire Baby, Blockhead, One-Eye, Gold Clock.
The apples the family eats in the hospital symbolize the instantaneous change in circumstances: a heretofore unaffordable luxury in the Taiwanese context will now be a commonplace as their lives are touched by the American presence.
The story includes elements that can be read as metaphors for the social situation in Taiwan: a pressure cooker that explodes and a cap that disguises disfiguring marks on an innocent little girl's head.
In a tour-de-force of imaginative dialog writing, Huang Chunming describes how the Taiwanese man avails himself of artiful use of language to simultaneously humble the group of visiting Japanese businessmen and to upbraid a misguided Chinese literature student.