In 1948, two Korean soldiers from a Chinese People’s Liberation Army division flee Changchun during the Kuomintang–Communist civil war. Some 150,000 civilians died in this little-known siege, mostly by starvation due to the military blockade. The Jeju uprising of 1948 gradually seeps into the soldiers’ time and space. Notable for its extreme violence and casualties but long suppressed in official histories, it was a harbinger of the Korean War. Meanwhile, a famished scholar in Changchun returns in his mind to the May Fourth Movement of 1919.