A mathematician and author, Luke Williams, is travelling up to London on a train when he meets a old lady, Lavinia Fullerton, who is also going to London, to Scotland Yard. Lavinia tells Luke that in her small village several people have died. The local police are certain that it was all accidental and are taking no action but Lavinia isn't convinced. In London Luke watches, horrified, as Lavinia is run over in a hit and run and he becomes convinced that she was telling the truth. He travels down to the village and with the aid of a local girl, who is also convinced that the deaths were murder, sets out to solve the mystery.
In this powerful documentary, Mama Yang, an 84-year-old woman living in New York, finds herself in correspondence with 45 high security prison inmates she views as her own children. Most are Chinese American immigrants, and see in Mama Yang a mother figure they never knew before they stepped through prison walls.
For Mama Yang though, the story is about more than Christian charity. She had already lived a full life in Taiwan when her husband died at age sixty and her son lost their house in a financial blunder. She moved to the US to start anew and lives with a Taiwanese American granddaughter that remains distant. In a film marked by family separations, Mama Yang writes letters – whether to the incarcerated or to her own granddaughter – to heal lifetimes of wounds.