“It was who she was in the eyes of Henry and Ted that she cherished the most: sure-handed and efficient at her job, quiet yet at times chatty, uncomplicated. That she had memorized passages from “Winnie-the Pooh,” that she had read its Latin translation before reading the English text, she did not share with them, because that would make her an eccentric in their eyes.”

Zichen works in an animal-care center with Henry and Ted, two amiable midwestern men who do not meddle or press much into her past and she prefers it that way. Abandoned at a young age to be raised in her grandmother’s hair salon, Zichen has spent most of her life seeing herself through other people’s eyes and she regards herselves as a series of failures and misfires; divorced, loser, foreigner…

She is planning a trip to England – which is not per her usual annual sojourn to China to visit her “parents”, so of course her co-workers are a little bit curious the nature of her travel. But she is careful not to unravel the already complete ‘her’ that they know and like and depend upon. The trip to England is to visit the land of the one woman who befriended her in America – a woman with dementia who set out to tutor her in English, teaching her Latin instead. Though the woman passed away a little over a year after they met, it was in her home that Zichen felt the gentle bloom of friendship – something she had never before experienced in her life.

She imagines Neville Hill and the Hydrangea House B & B and the conversations she won’t have with the innkeepers – the stories she can’t share because she must be left out – hers is a life of flight.

On an annual employee night out to the bar, Zichen loosens the strings that corset her past and feels a certain happiness in the telling of some twisted truths and eccentricities in her life, not so strange to a stranger as she may have thought.

Li has carved Zichen with such precision that the reader can almost hear her voice and picture the way she would move about a room. Henry and Ted are two sturdy bookends to Zichen’s fragile frame – she has found a calm kind of safety in a strange land (Iowa) in a strange lab – she feels useful. There is hope that with a few more annual beer-outings she can reach through the looking glass and find herself unrejected in spite of herself.