Feeling like a stranger in the place where you were raised is deeply unsettling. Though you feel as if you've left some core part yourself in the walls and bars and grocery stores of your hometown, you come to discover that your hometown very much moved along without you. You're no longer there, really—because of course you're not. You have now become something different, a person from many places, not merely from one. Lucy Tan explores the complexities of that ex-pat feeling and many others in her debut novel (now in paperback!) about a family who immigrated to America from Shanghai and has now immigrated back to China. In doing so, according to a nice review in Kirkus, "Tan brings us a microcosm of the conflicts among China’s larger populations: residents versus expatriates, wealthy versus poor, urban and commercial versus rural and agrarian." by Rich Smith