Plot

Eliane adopts Camille, whose Vietnamese parents were friends. In 1930, a French navy officer is interested in Eliane (owns 60km2 plantation) and later in Camille. There's an uprising in Vietnam against French colonial power.

This story is set in 1930, at the time when French colonial rule in Indochina is ending. A widowed French woman, who owns and operates one of the ten largest rubber plantations in Indochina, adopts and raises a Vietnamese princess, who was orphaned at five-years-old. She and her daughter both fall in love with a young French navy officer, which will change both their lives significantly.

July, 1954. Éliane Devries is recounting a story of importance to a young Eurasian man, the story that primarily took place approximately twenty years ago. Then, she, a native francophone, owned and operated a rubber plantation in French Indochina - the place of her birth - she living primarily in the plantation's house with her widowed father Émile Devries and her teenaged daughter Camille Devries. Éliane adopted Camille, of Asian descent, when Camille was five after her own parents, Éliane's dearest friends, died. Éliane raised Camille with western as opposed to Asian traditions, the two who could not have loved each other more if they were blood-related. Regardless, Éliane and Madame Minh Tam entered into an agreement for Camille eventually to be married to Madame Tam's son, Tanh Tam, the two who were fond of but perhaps not in love with each other in the true sense. One of Éliane's associates was Guy Asselin, the head of security for the French ruling government in Indochina, he who wanted to marry her, but she, in turn, who was not in love with him. Because of their mutual attraction, Éliane ended up entering into an unlikely and somewhat clandestine relationship with Jean-Baptiste Le Guen, a young French naval officer based in Indochina. Shortly thereafter, Camille met Jean-Baptiste under dangerous circumstances and fell in love with him herself, largely due to that circumstance. In discovering Camille's feelings for Jean-Baptiste, Éliane took action to prevent Camille from getting hurt from a broken heart. Camille, in turn, decided to search for her own true happiness, which consequentially led her on a path to the cultural and geopolitical changes of the time.—Huggo