Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin lives with her affluent family in 1937 Shanghai. Pearl is intelligent and level-headed, but she isn’t the favorite of Baba and Mama Chin. Instead, they dote on 18-year-old May. The family’s fortunes have taken a downturn lately, but the girls don’t pay much attention. They go out for the evening to pose at an artist’s studio, appearing on what are known as beautiful-girl calendars to advertise products ranging from face soap to cod liver oil. On this particular night, they go to the studio of an artist named Z.G. Pearl is secretly in love with him and dreams that they will marry one day.

After their modeling session is over, the girls and Z.G. go out to a nightclub in the French Concession of the city. Foreigners and Chinese mingle freely in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Shanghai, the Paris of Asia. For the most part, the well-to-do residents ignore the filth and squalor in the old Chinese section. When the girls arrive back home at five o’clock in the morning, their father abruptly announces that he has arranged marriages for both of them.