"On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth alone in a Beijing hospital. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time. Seventeen years later, when Su Lan dies unexpectedly, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, travels to China to bring her mother's ashes home. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, her memories of Su Lan are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yong-zong, the father Liya has never known. In this way, a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya's own sense of displacement"--Dust jacket flap.
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