In 1999, New York City college student Lily is scraping by with an unpaid internship when she meets the impossibly handsome, unfathomably wealthy Matthew. She abruptly cuts off their romance when their class differences overwhelm her, but fate intervenes. They marry and have a son, who appears to have none of Lily's Chinese American heritage, looking like blond-haired, blue-eyed Matthew. Narrating the novel's second part, teenage Nick doesn't know his father's identity or why he isn't in their lives, and, pushed by his best friend, endeavors to find out. The book's final and most staggering third is voiced by May, the scientist mother Lily has been estranged from since a shocking revelation following Nick's birth. And so readers learn what Lily may never: the story of May's life, beginning in a rural Chinese rice farm, surviving famine and worse, and achieving her goal of attending university in Beijing until Mao's Cultural Revolution forced her to make an impossible choice.
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