Michael Tang and his sister, Emily, have both struggled to forge a sense of identity in their parents' adopted homeland. Emily, an immigration lawyer in New York City, baffles their mother, Ling, by refusing to have children. At twenty-six, Michael is unable to commit to a relationship or a career--or come out to his family. And now their father, after a lifetime of sacrifice, has passed away. When Michael finds a letter to his father from a long-ago friend, he impulsively travels to China in the hopes of learning more about a man he never really knew. In this rapidly modernizing country he begins to understand his father's decisions, including one that reverberates into the present day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Ling and Emily question their own choices, trying to forge a path that bends toward new loves and fresh beginnings. Wendy Lee's powerfully honest novel captures the complexity of the immigrant...

"I suppose I did it because I wanted something to show for the thirty years—longer than I had lived in my homeland—that I had been here in America. Something that was properly appreciated, even if someone else got all the credit." Liu Qingwu doesn't set out to commit a crime. He only wants to sell a painting—something more substantial than the Impressionist knockoffs he flogs to tourists outside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the lucrative commission he receives from a Chelsea art dealer is more complicated than he initially realizes. Liu has been hired to create not an homage to Andrew Cantrell's modernist masterpiece, Elegy, but a forgery that will sell for millions. The painting will change the lives of everyone associated with it—Liu, a Chinese immigrant still reeling from his wife's recent departure; Caroline, a gallery owner intent on saving her aunt's legacy; Molly, her perceptive assistant; and...