Maggie Carson, artist and recovering alcoholic with a history of mistakes and losses, travels to China to bury a curse laid upon her family long ago on that distant soil. Stories from her grandparents’ missionary years in China in the early twentieth century and her father’s childhood there under Japanese occupation weave through Maggie’s journey. As she experiences the student takeover of Harvard in 1969, post-60s Berkeley, and eventually back in Cambridge, she tries to free herself from the shadows of her family’s violent and guilt-ridden past. In the end, she comes full circle to the desert of grandfather and father and finds a home in that exotic land and in herself.