It is 1999, and Yang has graduated high school. While Dawb is at Hamline University, Yang goes to Carleton, a small college yet ranked among the best in the nation. For the first time in Yang’s life, she is living away from her family. At first, she feels isolated, but she learns to embrace her solitude and the chance to explore the world in ways she never has before. She goes home to visit any chance she gets, and the highlight of her time is listening to her grandma’s stories. Yang often holds her grandma’s feet in her lap, cuts her grandma’s toenails, and admires her grandma’s stories which are like “music, like the words of a timeless classic, a love ballad played again and again” (217).

Yang’s grandma tells the story of how her beautiful older sister was killed by a jealous witch, how she was orphaned at the age of thirteen and forced to take care of her two younger siblings who were both still nursing, and how she came to marry her husband who was thirty-two years older than her (she was twenty and he was fifty-two).