Yale student Lily Chen travels to Taipei for a summer that she hopes will bring her closer to her family, her heritage and herself. Learning Chinese seems like a way to bridge the distance between the culture she inherited and the life she knows, but demanding classes, an impossible roommate and an awkward hot-springs outing soon leave her struggling to belong. When her grandfather dies, the questions she wanted to ask him become newly urgent. Amid grief and social missteps, Lily must reconsider her search for perfect understanding and work out what connection, identity and home can mean for her. Her summer becomes a funny and painful reckoning with family, language and loss.