The day before she disappears, Polly Guo picks up her son, Deming, from school in the Bronx. On their walk home, she informs him that they’ll be moving to Florida because she’s found a new job. This troubles him because he doesn’t want to leave his friend Michael, with whom he and Polly live, along with Vivian (Michael’s mother) and her brother Leon (Polly’s boyfriend). Still, Polly tells him he has no say in the matter. That night, he tries to fall asleep next to Michael, but he hears Polly and Leon arguing on their bed across the room. “Go fuck yourself,” he hears his mother hiss. The next morning, Polly tells him they’re not moving. That evening, she never returns from work.
Deming senses that Leon and Vivian are unsettled by Polly’s sudden absence, but Leon tells him she’s visiting friends, though this seems unlikely. Day after day, she doesn’t come home, and Deming starts to blame himself, thinking he must have driven her away by not wanting to move to Florida.
Ten years later, Daniel Wilkinson drinks at a loft party in Manhattan, preparing to perform on guitar with his high school friend, Roland Fuentes. When the duo—who call their band Psychic Hearts—finally gets onstage, Daniel forgets the songs and runs off during one of the first numbers. Rushing outside, he walks to Chinatown, where he used to live as a young boy, back before he moved to the Bronx and before his mother abandoned him: Daniel Wilkinson, Ko reveals, is Deming Guo. Stopping on the sidewalk, he takes out his phone and looks at an email from Michael, who has tracked him down after all these years to tell him that he has news about Polly. Daniel doesn’t respond, instead going back to Roland’s apartment and going to bed before meeting Peter and Kay—his adoptive parents—for breakfast the following morning.
As they eat, Peter and Kay ask Daniel about his life in the city, asking if he’s going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings. It has only been a few months since Daniel left SUNY Potsdam, where he was receiving failing grades and spending his time playing online poker. His addiction got so bad that he borrowed $10,000 from Angel Hennings, whose parents, Jim and Elaine, are close friends with the Wilkinsons. Although he promised to pay Angel back, he ended up losing her money, and now she refuses to talk to him. He’s devastated by this, since Angel is the only person who understands him, as she too is Chinese-American and has adoptive parents. At brunch, Peter and Kay tell Daniel that Jim Hennings is having a birthday party the following week and that Angel will be there. This makes him nervous, but he doesn’t say anything, since Peter and Kay don’t know that he lost Angel’s money. All they know is that he has a gambling addiction. Peter and Kay also tell him that they’ve convinced the dean of Carlough College—where they both teach—to consider letting him into summer school so that he can get his studies back on track. He doesn’t want to go back to school, but he agrees to fill out a statement of purpose and give it to them at Jim Hennings’s party.
Returning to the period before Polly’s disappearance, Ko explains how hard it is for Leon and Vivian to support both Michael and Deming. Several months after Polly vanishes, Leon moves to China. Shortly thereafter, Vivian places Deming in foster care. Before long, Peter and Kay take him to live with them in the suburb of Ridgeborough, New York, where he’s one of the few people of color. They’re nervous and timid, but they try to make him feel comfortable, though they change his name to Daniel Wilkinson and insist that he speak English. At school, he stands out because none of his peers are used to being around people who aren’t white like them. Thankfully, he meets Roland, a Mexican-American boy whose father died when he was young. The two boys grow close, and Deming feels more at ease with his new life, though he still thinks about his mother and feels as if he’s losing touch with his past. To distract himself, he listens to Peter’s record collection, developing a passion for music that he shares with Roland.
Around this time, Deming hears Peter and Kay talking in private about how hard it is to raise a Chinese boy in Ridgeborough, and he overhears them say that his mother went back to China, though he doesn’t think this is accurate. One day, they bring him to New York City to meet Jim and Elaine, along with their adopted daughter, Angel. At first, Deming doesn’t take to Angel, but he soon develops a fondness for her when she helps him sneak out at night, hail a cab, and visit his old apartment in the Bronx. When they arrive, though, they find strangers living there, so they return to Manhattan.
Ten years later—shortly after his failed show with Psychic Hearts—Daniel responds to Michael’s email. They meet in Manhattan, and Michael (who’s studying at Columbia and living with Vivian and her new husband in Brooklyn) tells him that he recently found documents in his mother’s house showing that she willingly signed Daniel over to the foster care system. Michael also invites Daniel to dinner, and though Daniel says no at first, he later agrees. When he sees Vivian, she’s extremely happy to reconnect with him, though he accuses her of ruining his life by putting him in foster care. In response, she says she had no choice. Apparently, Polly had a considerable amount of debt when she vanished, and Vivian had to pay it off. She says that Leon can tell him more about his mother’s whereabouts, and she gives him his phone number.
At this point, Polly narrates her own story, explaining that she now lives in Fuzhou with her new husband, Yong, whom she met at World Top English, where she works as a teacher. She now leads a nice but boring life, and though she likes her existence, she still feels restless, constantly wanting to travel to places like Hong Kong. Yong, for his part, always says they’ll go on vacation, but he never acts on these plans, too busy with his business to travel. One night, Polly receives a voicemail from Daniel, who gives her his number and tells her to call him.
Addressing her narration to Daniel himself, Polly explains that she grew up in a small village without her mother, who died when she was young. She stopped going to school in the eighth grade, at which point she met up with her neighbor—Haifeng—on a daily basis. This relationship became romantic, but Polly wasn’t invested in their romance. When she heard she could live in the city of Fuzhou if she worked in the factories, she left home, promising to send her wages to her father. Soon enough, Haifeng came to Fuzhou, too, and on the suggestion of her friends Xuan and Qi—who talk about sex quite frequently—she met him at a motel and had sex for the first time. The next month, she realized she was pregnant, but she kept this from Haifeng, knowing he’d want her to marry him. Not wanting to settle down, she decided to travel to the United States, borrowing $47,000 from a loan shark and undergoing a rough journey before finally arriving in New York City, where she learned at a free clinic that she was too far along in her pregnancy to have an abortion. As such, she gave birth to Deming while living in an apartment with a group of fellow Chinese immigrants, and though she often felt restless and stifled by her parental duties, she also came to love Deming quite fiercely. However, she couldn’t support him, so she sent him to live with her father in China.
Returning to the present, Ko explains that Daniel calls Leon, who gives him Polly’s number. The following day, he goes to Jim Hennings’s birthday party, where he sees Angel and her new boyfriend, Charles. Angel largely ignores him, though she explains to Kay and Peter that she was recently robbed of a lot of money. Soon, Angel and Charles go to find their dinner seats, and Daniel presents his adoptive parents with his statement of purpose. Later, he sees Charles as he’s leaving the restaurant, and Charles tells him that he doesn’t agree with Angel’s decision not to press charges, but Daniel runs off before they can finish the conversation. As he walks away, Peter calls him on his phone and yells at him because Daniel accidentally gave him a rough draft of the statement of purpose—a draft that he wrote as a joke to himself, outlining the reasons he doesn’t want to go to Carlough. Stepping into a bar, he orders a whiskey and uses his phone to bring up the address of an underground poker club. Deleting the address, he leaves the bar and goes to an ATM, where he withdraws $500. He then makes his way to the club and gambles for the entire night, losing all of his cash. Sitting on a bench the next morning feeling oddly “euphor[ic],” he calls Polly and leaves her a message
After a show several nights later, Daniel calls Polly again, and this time she answers. They have a short conversation, and though Daniel wanted to yell at her for disappearing, he enjoys making small talk with her. Two days later, they talk again, and she tells him that she tried to find him after leaving, though she doesn’t specify how she tried to do this, nor why she left in the first place.
Once again narrating the years leading up to her disappearance, Polly says that Deming returned to the city as a six-year-old after his grandfather died. This was around the time that Polly met Leon, so she and Deming moved in with him, Vivian, and Michael, living happily—if frugally—for six years while Polly worked at a nail salon. One day, though, immigration enforcement authorities came to the salon and rounded up the undocumented workers. Polly was allowed one telephone call, but she couldn’t remember Leon’s number. She was then taken to a prison-like camp in Texas, where she suffered inhumane conditions for fourteen months before getting deported. Arriving in China, she got a job as a teacher at World Top English and decided to put her past behind her, justifying this decision by telling herself she couldn’t track down Deming because he’d already been adopted.
Back in the present, Roland kicks Daniel out of Psychic Hearts because he’s not dependable. As such, Daniel moves back in with Peter and Kay and attends summer school. One night, he uses Peter’s computer to access an online poker account, racking up several hundred dollars before Peter catches him. This—combined with the fact that Kay has just heard about Angel’s $10,000—creates a seemingly unnavigable rift between Daniel and his adoptive parents, so he buys a ticket to Fuzhou and goes to find his mother. When he finally tracks her down in Beijing at a work conference, she’s happy to see him, and he forces her to explain why she disappeared. After this conversation, he stays with her and Yong for several months, working as an English teacher and sending money to Angel to chip away at what he owes her. However, he doesn’t feel like he fully fits in, and he misses New York City, so he decides to move back. When he leaves, Polly also decides to move on, abandoning Yong and moving to Hong Kong—a decision that makes her feel alive and exhilarated. Back in New York, Daniel rents an apartment with Michael, feeling as if the city is his “best home,” at least “for now.”
