Build a movie plot around this: Where did Mai, Lai, and Mai's mother-in-law start their new life? Southern California.
The film traces the story of a family's struggle for survival in the aftermath of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 to North Vietnam's communist regime. After her South Vietnamese Army husband Long, is imprisoned in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp, Mai, her son Lai, and her mother-in-law escape Vietnam by boat in the hopes of starting a new life in Southern California. Believing his family is dead, Long gives up in the face of brutal conditions, while Mai struggles to keep her family from crumbling under the pressures of life in a new country. When Long learns his family is alive in America, he is reinvigorated and decides he must join them at any cost.