As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Lili is forced to leave Beijing when her parents, musical professors, are relocated to a peasant village to be reeducated. Raped by one of the Communist party leaders in the village, she fleas back to Beijing. Homeless and unable to continue school, she becomes a gang member, the gang leader's trumpet. No more than a petty criminal, a street hooligan, she is jailed for sexual misconduct. Her parents are appalled by the fact that she is unmarried and unable to get work -- and doesn't care. Through a friend of her gang days, Lili gets a job at a local restaurant playing the Erhu and works for a tour group playing traditional music through Mongolia. While travelling, she meets an American journalist named Roy who becomes infatuated with her.

Lily's suspicion about a "foreign devil" gradually dissipates as she accompanies Roy in his journeys which he undertakes to understand life in China. Bemused by how Roy's need to understand is often overwhelmed by his expectations of what he wants to find, Lili nonetheless begins to see that not only is her own experience of deprivation and indifference shared by others, but that deprivation and disgust can be borne in different ways. And, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's death, the decades of smouldering anger and resentment borne by ordinary people suddenly ignite and Lili finds that the only means she has of understanding what is happening in her country is through some of the ideas that Roy has been telling herabout.

"Lili" is a remarkable story of one woman's attempt to examine the culture that has shaped her and encouraged her self-loathing, and how the only way to overcome that loathing is to relinquish the indifference that she thought would protect her.