In the misty mornings of Ho Chi Minh City, young girls wake up to pick lotuses from a flower pond, their rich folk songs touching the heart of a poet who lives in an old temple overlooking the pond. Amidst the urban culture undergoing westernization, a cyclo driver falls for a troubled prostitute and schemes to raise money to spend time with her, while a child trinket seller loses his traveling case. A young woman begins harvesting lotuses for a writer suffering from leprosy, and a retired American Marine arrives on a search for his daughter, whom he abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War.