Song Jin-hua, a fifteen-year-old prostitute, sits at home and gnaws watermelon seeds. From time to time she looks at a small bronze crucifix hanging on the wall of her wretched little room, and hope appears in her eyes. Jin Hua is a Catholic. She became a prostitute to feed herself and the old father. Jin-hua is sure that “Mr. Christ” understands what is in her heart, and her craft will not prevent her from going to heaven, “otherwise Mr. Christ would be like a policeman from a police station in Yaojiakao.” When she talks about this to the Japanese tourist with whom she spent the night, he smiles and gives her jade earrings as a keepsake.

A month later, Jin-hua develops syphilis, and no medicine helps her. Once her friend says that there is a belief that the disease should be quickly given to someone else - then in two or three days the person will recover. But Jin-hua does not want to infect anyone with a bad disease and does not accept guests, and if anyone comes in, she only sits and smokes with him, so guests gradually stop going to her and it becomes more difficult for her to make ends meet. And then one day a tipsy foreigner comes to her - a tanned bearded man of about thirty-five. He does not understand Chinese, but he listens to Jin-hua with such cheerful goodwill that the girl becomes joyful in her soul. The guest seems to her more beautiful than all the foreigners whom she has so far seen, not to mention her fellow countrymen from Nanjing. However, she does not leave the feeling that she had already seen this man somewhere. While Jin-hua is trying to remember where she could see him, the stranger raises two fingers up - this means that he offers her two dollars a night. Jin Hua shakes his head. The stranger decides that she is not satisfied with the price, and raises three fingers. So he gradually comes to ten dollars - a huge amount for a poor prostitute, but Jin-hua still refuses him and even stomps his foot angrily, causing the crucifix to break off the hook and fall at her feet. Raising the crucifix, Jin-hua looks at the face of Christ, and it seems to her a living likeness of the face of her guest sitting at the table.

Stunned by his discovery, Jin-hua forgets everything in the world and surrenders to a foreigner. When she falls asleep, she dreams of a city of heaven; she sits at a table laden with dishes, and a foreigner sits behind her on a sandalwood chair, and a halo shines around his head. Jin-hua invites him to share a meal with her. The foreigner replies that he, Jesus Christ, does not like Chinese cuisine. He says that if Jin-hua eats a treat, then her illness will pass in a night. When Jin-hua wakes up, there is no one next to her. She thinks that a foreigner with the face of Christ also dreamed about her, but in the end she decides: "No, it was not a dream." She becomes sad because the person whom she fell in love left without saying a word to her goodbye, without paying the promised ten dollars. And suddenly she feels that, thanks to the miracle that happened in her body, the terrible ulcers disappeared without a trace. “So it was Christ,” she decides and, kneeling before the crucifixion, prays fervently.

In the spring of next year, a Japanese tourist, who had once come to Jin-hua, visits her again. Jin-hua tells him how Christ, having descended to Nanjing one night, appeared to her and healed him of her illness. The tourist recalls how a certain mestizo named George Merry, a wicked, unworthy man, boasted that he spent the night with a prostitute in Nanjing, and when she fell asleep, he fled slowly. He also heard that then this man went crazy because of syphilis. He suspects that Jin-hua has infected George Merry, but does not want to disappoint a devout woman. “And have you never been sick since?” - asks the Japanese tourist. “No, not even once,” Jin-hua firmly answers with a clear face, continuing to gnaw on the watermelon seeds.