She always loved the Little House on the Prairie books and sees a huge disconnect between the family life she read about and the one she experiences as a Vietnamese-American, with a mother who shares very little with her and a grandfather who possibly has whipped up heavily edited stories of her long-dead father and their past. Far easier to escape into that world, after all, than face some harsh realities. When Lee discovers the possibility that an older woman who visited her family’s cafe in Vietnam in the 1970s was actually Rose Wilder Lane, a well-known writer at the time and sole child of Laura Ingalls Wilder, she feels compelled to find out all she can about it. Her older brother has even less patience for the family climate and has left home for greener pastures, with little contact. She knows she will have to face her Vietnamese mother’s scorn for her study and the expectation that she help out in the family’s Asian restaurant.
Lee Lien, freshly finished with her doctorate, finds herself having to return home to her mom and grandfather in the suburbs of Chicago when she is unable to find a job in her field of American literature.
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