When a young girl is hired to pick white lotuses for a reclusive master her singing attracts not only the jealous disapproval of the older workers but the heart of the master himself... A cyclo driver falls for a proud young prostitute who he chauffeurs around to her appointments in the gleaming new hotels... A young boy wanders the rainy streets of Saigon, looking for his stolen case full of trinkets which he sells to tourists... At the Apocalypse Now bar, the same boy encounters a G.I. who is searching for the daughter he left behind in the war. These stories merge to present a country making an uneasy transition from east to west, from communism to capitalism, from the past to the future.