An American missionary boy is kidnapped in the desert of China, retribution for a murder accidentally committed by his father. Years later and half a world away, it would seem that Maggie Carson, the granddaughter of the murderer, would be free of the far-off incident that has haunted her family for two generations even after they retreated home from the Middle Kingdom. But, the grandfather lives in the father, and the father in the son, and all three generations of brave and broken Carson family men carry on in Maggie. A child of the 1960s, she joins a protest at Harvard where her father is dean, then goes missing in Berkeley in the 70s, and only returns home when she learns that her brother is MIA at the Fall of Saigon. Back in Cambridge, she tries to construct a safe, careful existence until her dedication to her cathartic artwork, a newfound love, and the serendipitous adoption of a Chinese girl demand that she return to the haunted territory of her childhood where Maggie finally defeats the ghosts of her family’s past. She and her new family travel to the desolate desert of her grandfather and father and the curse is overcome. The past is literally buried in the sands, and Maggie blooms to life in the parched, yet now hopeful, adopted country her ancestors once tried to tame.