A poor girl competes in a singing contest to save her seriously ill mother – Little did she know that the judge was her own father!

Her mother was battling cancer one day at a time, and every passing week brought them closer to a cliff they could not afford to reach. In the middle of that fear, the girl did something reckless and brave. She entered a singing competition, hoping the prize money would be enough to save her mother’s life.

No one could have predicted that the chief judge would turn out to be the very man who had abandoned them before she was even born. And when she sang, the room went still while he sat there breaking apart in silence.

At the start of April, the dry heat pressed down on Saigon like a weight. In a cramped alley in a laborers’ district, eleven-year-old Emma lived with her mother, Grace, in a sweltering room barely large enough for a bed, a rattling fan, and a plastic table by the window. Emma came home from school one afternoon and found her mother lying weakly on the bed, turned toward the wall, the scarf on her head slightly shifted, exposing the bald patches left by chemotherapy.

“Mom, I’m home.”