Shocked to discover that his murdered restaurateur father was actually a member of a vast crime syndicate with ties to communist China, Victor Li is confronted by decades-old grudges, escalating rivalries and an ambitious new plot.

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become...

The entire nation is glued to the television as people follow the dangerous efforts to rescue Ursula Maki, a two-year-old, part-Chinese, part-Finnish child who has fallen down an abandoned mineshaft in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, in a novel that chronicles a chain of ancestors, across two thousand years, whose lives culminate in one little girl.