Ji Lianna passionately tends to her flower garden and avoids looking back at her life with remorse. Xiao'e does not know the first thing about plants and cannot stop thinking about her past. Eighty-year-old Ji Lianna is a child of the Jewish diaspora, and young Xiao'e is not sure whether she is human at all. The two women could not be more different. Yet, in a numbingly cold Harbin flat in an old Russian villa, an unlikely friendship blossoms between them. Soon their dark histories come back to haunt them as they realize they have more in common than just a shared address.