Reporter Curt Devlin loves sob sister Ellen Garfield but believes women are bum newspapermen. When she learns the identity of a murdered arsonist, he calls it luck. When she goes after the murderer he gets enough evidence to have Maitland Coulter arrested. She finds a bunch of not guilty ballots and publishes the wrong story; he eavesdrops on the jury and gets the correct verdict. After being fired she gets a confession from the real killer and gets Coulter released.
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.