Student Ba Duy sinks deep into heartbreak and a nihilistic street life when his sweetheart, Diem Huong, suddenly leaves him to marry an American diplomat.

Orphaned at a young age and later abandoned by her godfather, Vân grows up in the care of kind-hearted nuns at a convent on the outskirts of Saigon. With the help of Mother Superior, the young woman leaves the convent upon adulthood and finds work as a governess for the estate of a wealthy industrialist where she again encounters a series of miseries and torments that have once plagued her childhood.

A doctor is distraught to find out the newly-admitted patient in his shift is the daughter of his childhood sweetheart.