In Peach Village, where Binu was born, it is forbidden to cry and young women are trained from an early age how to avoid having tears appear on their faces. Some learn how to cry in through their ears, with the ears themselves providing an impressive reservoir within which to store their tears. Others are considered lucky because they can cry from their lips, resulting in them having beautiful gleaming lips. But Binu never learned any of these means, as her mother died when she was still young. Although she had started to learn how to cry with her hair, she had no control over her tears and wept copiously.

As a result she was alienated from the rest of the village and nobody but the orphan Qiliang would have her in marriage. Yet they are happy together, so when he is torn from her side and taken away to work on the Great Wall on the other side of the Great Swallow Mountain she is devastated. If the people of Peach Village thought that Binu had cried before, they hadn't seen anything yet. It's when she has a vision of her beloved working without a shirt that she makes the fateful decision to set off to find him. She can't bear the thought of him facing winter without a proper coat and resolves that she will travel across the country to make certain he is warm.

Of course everyone thinks she is crazy. She sells everything they own in order to buy a coat and travel. 'You don't even know if he's alive' the other women of the village tell her. 'All of us have lost husbands, sons, or brothers and you don't see us selling everything we own to go off and make sure they have winter coats, do you?' But Binu won't be dissuaded, for without Qiliang she has no life, so what is the point of a life without him?

The world is determined to make her quest as difficult as possible. When she goes to buy a horse or a donkey to ride to her destination she discovers that all the animals have been commandeered by the army for the war being fought. The only companion, man or beast, she can find for the journey is a blind frog who is the reincarnation of a blind woman who drowned searching for her son. So she sets out to travel the great distance nearly alone and almost immediately is beset with troubles.