Lily Chen, a Chinese American college freshman, travels to Taipei for an intensive summer Mandarin program, joining the many diaspora students before her who have gone looking for a culture they inherited but never fully understood. She hopes the language will be a bridge, to Taiwan, to her family, to a self that feels more whole. Then, during the summer, her grandfather dies, leaving behind questions about her family's history that can now never be answered. What follows is a journey of self-discovery stitched together from memories, half-told stories, and silences, and from a series of attempts at connection that are by turns hilarious and devastating. Moving away from the fantasy that made her name, Kuang offers a contemporary, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel about grief, language, and the limits of belonging, asking what happens when the diaspora dream of homecoming never quite arrives, and whether learning a language can really close the distance between people. Funnier, smaller in scale, and more personal than her earlier books, it is her second work of literary fiction after Yellowface.