Ever since she can remember, Amy Lim has been told that her mother is going to leave her. Her mom is younger than her father and came to the United States from Cambodia to marry him. Their Cambodian friends are sure she must have done it just to get to America.
At nine years old, Amy feels positive the naysayers are wrong. Her mom loves her father and loves Amy. Why won’t everybody leave them alone? Then one afternoon, Amy’s mother doesn’t show up at school to take her home. And Amy is plunged into an adult world she never wanted to know.
In Florida’s tight-knit Cambodian community, word travels fast—and soon, pity becomes suffocating. Moving to San Diego with her devastated dad, Amy is taken from everything and everybody she ever loved. And when her father begins drinking and behaving erratically, she faces a big problem: in a culture that places so much importance on respect for parents, what do you do when one of your parents starts to fall apart?
Grace’s grandmother has died, and she and her mother must travel back to the Cambodian community to give her a proper Cambodian funeral. But Grace wants to use the trip to solve a few mysteries, like who her father was, why her mother and grandmother moved from St. Petersburg, Florida to Pennsylvania, where they’re the only Cambodians Grace has ever seen, and what Cambodian culture is really about. Embraced by her mother’s old friends, Grace feels both at home and lost, fascinated by the traditions she’s never known, but strangely judged by some members of the community. Can she make sense of, and honor, the life of the grandmother she barely knew? And will revelations about the past bring Grace closer to her mother, or push them even further apart?