Set in post-1949 Taiwan, this novel is an intimate revelation of a family's journey to catastrophe. The father of the all-too-ordinary Fan family suddenly flees from home; his son, Fan Yeh, sets off to search for him but is repeatedly unsuccessful, returning alone to the anxiously waiting mother. As it tracks Fan Yeh's fruitless search, Wang Wen-hsing's innovative narrative unfolds the history of this family, depicting relationships both tender and brutal and divulging secrets of poverty and abuse, love and hate. Working through the complex metaphor of the family, Wang Wen-hsing examines that dissolution of a traditional ethical system and cultural identity which is the harrowing and inevitable path to modernism.