After graduating from Harvard, a tall Japanese American man struggles to find his path despite growing up as a perfect, high-achieving student and athlete.

As a Chinese-American widower and professor of philosophy contemplates the life he has provided his two daughters, he recalls a traumatic memory from his youth as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant, riding through the dangerous streets of New York City.

In the 1990s, after he ends ends up in a welfare hotel during a convention and is injured by a group of teenagers, an Asian American businessman thinks about his recent divorce and rethinks his current career.

A white American man and a Chinese-American woman visit the woman's family in China. After the woman's cousin compares the woman's Chinese to a toddler's, she stops speaking English and decides she wants to stay in China for awhile before returning, to reconnect with her family and her place of birth. Upon returning to the United States alone, the man, initially disinterested and unmotivated, begins to learn Chinese.

A Japanese businessman reflects on his experience with Chinese people and longs to visit China.

A Filipino-American woman reflects on her high school experience in the 1960s and the impact that a charismatic white boy had on her and her friends.

After losing her mother, a young Chinese American girl in New York City struggles to keep the rest of family together and grapples with the loneliness of being the less-loved daughter.

When a Chinese American female triathlete dates a Burmese man, she does so because she wants sex. But when the man starts to make her feel happy, she pulls away, caring more about her own sexual satisfaction than the man's emotions or her own.

In Long Beach, California, a religious Chinese immigrant finds a job caring for a teenage boy suffering from leukemia. By watching M*A*S*H and reading the Bible, they find solace in one another during the last months of his life.

A Vietnamese-Australian writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop receives a visit from his estranged father. With his final story due in a few days, he looks to his father’s life for inspiration.