Heaven & Earth plot
"An amazing true story of survival."
Le Ly lives in a Vietnamese village that alternates between the visits of the Viet Cong and American and South Vietnamese advisers. The South Vietnamese torture her and the Viet Cong propagandists rape her. One day, Le Ly flees to Saigon with her mother. There she becomes pregnant by a rich man, who then abandons her, so that in order to survive she has to beg and ends up in prostitution. As a streetwalker she meets the American Steve Butler who wishes to have her by his side not as a prostitute but as a woman. He is good-natured, understanding, persistent, but in her desperate situation, the meaning of his statement 'I want an Asian woman' does not reach her.