Palawan Story

Under the cover of darkness, Kim, a young girl reluctantly boards a boat unescorted. The derelict boat drifts for two weeks before reaching Palawan, a refugee camp in the Philippines. There, an American immigration officer mistakes Kim for an orphan with the same name and sends her to America. In the US, Kim tells her unsuspecting adoptive family the sad tales they want to hear. She succeeds in inventing details of an imaginary orphanage. But there is a missing page in her own past. The boat trip out of Vietnam is a total blank, and she fears the worst. Years later Kim returns to Palawan as a volunteer doctor. Still haunted by what may have happened on the boat, she begins to record the stories of the other refugees. Through them, she seeks to unblock her suppressed memories.