Lily Chen is an unpaid intern, pursuing the American Dream, when she falls for a young financier _ and the life of luxury his vast fortune promises. Everything she wants seems to finally be within reach. But deep down, she knows that her ambitious scientist mother, Mei, imagined so much more for her when she fled the unspoken horrors of Mao's cultural revolution. Twenty years later, Lily is a single parent, estranged from her own family and increasingly isolated from her teenage son, Nick.
Desperate to break free from their life on a remote island in Washington State, Nick strives to live better than the generation before him, unable to understand his mother's choices. But when he looks into the past and is unexpectedly confronted by the ghosts of his grandmother's young life in 196os China, he risks unsettling a legacy of family secrets — passed on from mother, to daughter, to son.