Wang Cailing (Jiang Wenli), an older music teacher in a small city in the north, is ugly, but she is born with a voice for singing opera, which makes her quite noble. Unwilling to live a mediocre and secular life like the people around her, she is determined to settle down in Beijing. Zhou Yu, a worker in a steel factory, is fascinated by Wang, who sings on the radio, and pursues her in the name of apprenticeship, but indirectly makes Wang fall in love with her cousin Huang Sibao (Li Guangjie), who wants to go to Beijing to study at the Academy of Fine Arts but fails in the exams. However, Huang only regards Wang as a soulmate in his depressed spiritual world. Later, Huang went to Shenzhen because he thought that this pure relationship was tainted by Wang, and Zhou's pursuit of Wang again came to nothing. When Wang thought that she could no longer find like-minded people around her, Teacher Hu (Jiao Gang), who has been obsessed with ballet since childhood and is regarded as an alien by others, came into her life, but Hu broke off his relationship with secular life with tragedy, which further hit Wang, who was chasing her dreams. When she was sad, she found from her parents that the secular life that she had always been unwilling to shake hands with also had a beautiful side. At this time, Gao Beibei (Zhang Yao), who claimed that she had cancer and was dying, found Wang and wanted Wang to help her go to Beijing to participate in the Youth Singer Competition. Wang hesitated for a while and decided to help her realize her dream, but Gao's story turned out to be fabricated. When Wang came to the crossroads of life, he became friends with his neighbor (Dong Xuan), whom he had never looked at straight in the eye before. After ending his short friendship with her, Wang made peace with secular life in his own way.