An uplifting story about family told through the history of fashion. As the eldest in her family, Lillian Shum quit school at the age of 12 to pick potatoes to support her mother and siblings after her father died. Despite being born in Victoria, Lillian, along with other Chinese Canadians, had to register with the Department of Immigration and Colonization during the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. 100 years later, those immigration documents were made public and digitized for academics, researchers and families. This short doc sheds light on the dark time when the Canadian government was engaged in birthright citizenship. Yet, it's an uplifting story of one woman's dressmaking business in Victoria and the sense of purpose she found behind a Singer sewing machine.