Having escaped the Russian Revolution (1917) in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskaya is working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Shanghai bar to support her family of White émigrés, including her daughter Katya, her mother-in-law Olga, her sister-in-law Grushenka, and an aunt and uncle by marriage, Princess Vera and Prince Peter. Despite the fact employment is scarce and her meagre income is the family's only source of revenue, Sofia's once-aristocratic relatives scorn her for her choice of profession and insist she keep it a secret from her child.