A young couple, whose love blooms from their mutual appreciation of Chingiz Aitmatov's "Tales of the Mountains and the Steppes", struggles with their personal romanticism and faith in each other as the novel becomes subjected to a new era's changing ideas about art.

Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

In French ruled Vietnam in 1922, the French and Vietnamese officers plot to sniff out arch-rebel De Canh.

Kim is 15; his father and step-mother have two buffalo, their lifeline as subsistence rice farmers. During the rainy season, there's no grass and the buffalo are starving. Kim volunteers to take the beasts inland to find food. On this coming-of-age journey, Kim sees men mistreat women, men fight with men, and French taxes rob the poor. He works for Lap, a buffalo herder whose past is entangled with Kim's parents, and he makes friends who will lead him to his place in the world.

A poetic glimpse of life in Vietnam War

A woman manages to escape from the Khmer Rouge labour camp. Saved from drowning in river by a group of Vietnamese soldiers, she decided to join them.

Hai Cũ, a notorious outlaw robbing from the rich to give to the poor, writes to Hồ Chí Minh hoping to secure pardon for his subordinates and is then sent to work as a foreman for a military company. The company's officer turns out to be the student who has accidentally helped him to escape the police many years ago.

After the war a young woman from Saigon goes to the countryside at the call of the government to teach love of country to the local people. There she finds that she doesn't really believe in what she teaches, that she's not really interested in the butterflies and birds of the poems she recites and is terribly bored in the countryside.

A story about young men who had to go war to protest their country. Each of them has his own story.