Indochina, the late 1920s. The girl is fifteen-and-a-half. The holidays are over, so today she is returning to Saigon, to the boarding house where she lives while attending classes at the high school. A busload of Vietnamese has left Sadec where the girl's mother runs the village school. During the crossing of the Mekong River, the girl gets out of the bus to lean over the rails of the ferry. She is wearing a dress of raw silk, a pair of lamé shoes with high heels and, surprisingly, a man's felt hat the color of rosewood. Next to the bus on the ferry, there is a big black limousine, a Morris Léon-Bollée driven by a chauffeur. An elegant man in the back of the car gazes steadily at the girl....