On May 13, 1969, Ah Eng and her mother go to see the Chinese opera The Injustice to Dou E, a 13th-century story of a wrongly convicted woman who calls down dreadful weather events on her executioners. That night, sectarian riots between Malays and ethnic Chinese erupt, killing 196 people while the girl and her mother hide behind the stage all night, emerging to find the rest of their family is dead. In a second chapter set 50 years later, Ah Eng returns to the district to try to find traces of this traumatic history. Everything has changed – even graves are being ripped up – but some unexpected encounters reveal how deeply past events have seared and scarred the present.