At the center of the engaging "un-love" story is Li An, a smart and strong-willed Malaysian woman of Chinese descent. The conflicts that surround Li An in the politically charged atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur in 1969 intersect with her own internal contradictions. Although she supports her nation's struggle to build its own identity after decades of British colonial rule, she cannot renounce her love for the English poetry she teaches. And although she aspires to be a new kind of Asian woman--independent and unsentimental--she finds herself married to the safe and dependable Henry, and attracted to an American Peace Corps volunteer, Chester. Both external and internal tensions build toward a dramatic night that will forever alter Li An's life--and the lives of many around her.

Unexpectedly, this ambitious three-part novel leaps across time and place to New York in the early 1980s, where Chester, now an anthropology professor, is coming to terms with his a secret he has nursed for twelve years: his brief affair with Li An had unplanned consequences, and he has a child he has never acknowledged or seen. He finally travels back, only to a much-changed Li An--a successful businesswoman with no time for poetry or love--raising her daughter amid a very nontraditional family of women.

As Lim's characters try to find a way to their pasts and each other, they are caught up in the larger tensions of East and West, women and men, freedom and responsibility. With insight and wit, Lim shows us that what we expect may not always be what we get, but all roads lead us, ultimately, to our deepest selves.