In 1965, 10-year-old Sandra Laing lives with her parents, Abraham and Sannie, who are white Afrikaners. They are shopkeepers in a remote area of the Eastern Transvaal and, despite Sandra's mixed-race appearance, have lovingly brought her up as their own.
Sandra is sent to a boarding school in the neighbouring town of Piet Retief, where her brother Leon is also studying, but parents of other students and teachers complain that she does not belong there. She is examined by State officials, reclassified as coloured, and expelled from the school following a severe beating by one of the teachers. Sandra's parents are shocked, but Abraham fights through the courts to have the classification reversed. The story becomes an international scandal and media pressure forces the law to change so that Sandra is classified as officially white.
At age 17, Sandra realizes she is never going to be accepted by the community. She falls in love with Petrus, a young black man and the local vegetable seller, and begins an illicit love affair. After Abraham threatens to shoot Petrus and disown Sandra, Sannie is torn between her husband's rage and her daughter's predicament. Sandra elopes with Petrus to Swaziland but Abraham alerts the police and has them arrested and put in prison for the illegal border crossing. Sandra is released by the local magistrate to return home with her parents, but she decides to return to Petrus, as she is pregnant with his child. Her father disowns her.
Now Sandra must live her life as a coloured woman in South Africa for the first time, restricted to housing with no running water and no sanitation, and struggling on little income. Although she feels more at home in this community, she desperately misses her parents and yearns for a reunion. She and her mother make attempts to communicate but are consistently thwarted by Sandra's father. Late in his life, when he is too sick to act on his own, he reconsiders and asks his wife to take him to visit Sandra. Sandra's mother, angry that his new-found guilt had surfaced only after he had for 10 years stubbornly ignored her own emotional torment and longing for a reunion, refuses his request and says that neither of them deserves Sandra's forgiveness.
Eventually, Sandra's marriage to Petrus deteriorates and he becomes physically abusive. She leaves him, taking their two children with her. Sandra looks for her parents but finds they had since moved from her childhood home. Not knowing where they are, Sandra continues with her life, raising her children by herself.
When the country's apartheid government comes to an end, there is renewed interest in her story by the media. Sandra's mother sees Sandra interviewed on television and writes to her to tell her of her father's death two years earlier. The letter provides no return address nor any other clue as to Sannie's whereabouts, but receiving it prompts Sandra to renew her search. Eventually, she finds her mother living in a nursing home and the two are happily reunited.
An epilogue tells that Sandra's mother died in 2001, and her two brothers continue to refuse to see her or her family.
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