From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, A Feather on the Breath of God, is a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

With a new introduction by Susan Choi, the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercises

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.