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Composed of short autobiographical-but-fictional vignettes tracing a life from a Vietnamese childhood during the war to a Malaysian refugee camp to Quebec, there's a crystalline quality to each piece of Thúy's story, as if she's holding it at arm's length and inspecting it like a jeweler, and under such a distant eye a moment of generosity can seem not much different than one of cruelty; a small pleasure sits next to a vision of horror, poverty alongside wealth, often within the same life. It's a book of memory as well as of becoming, but one memory is of a waiter she met when she returned to Vietnam as an adult, who, by treating her as a foreigner, no longer Vietnamese, reminded her she can't possess all her identities at once.