In a world where inter-cultural communication is translated through an immerser, which Agnes has had on too long, her husband Galen meets with the restaurant owner to plan their fifth anniversary dinner, but one of the employees, Quy, recognizes Agnes’s addiction and tries to help.

When a talented linguist makes contact with the Martian species and is invited into their inner circle, he uncovers a culturally rich civilization in danger of going extinct.

When a man visits an old village called Ain Tadouirt to visit an old friend and conduct research, he becomes captured by a tribe and forced to entertain. He must figure out how to escape a life of enslavement in a foreign land.

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 human teacher travels to another planet to teach aliens about Manifest Destiny, and the benefits of being colonized by humans — from textbooks created by his employers, a mining corporation. After he develops an understanding of alien lives, he decides to help the aliens to fight for themselves.

An archaeologist on a dig in Africa uncovers a shard that brings the dark magic of the Brotherhood of the Higher Ones to the present day.

A group of alien archaeologists explores the Olduvai Gorge in Africa to learn about humanity, an extinct race. However, as they begin investigating artifacts, they discover that everything they knew about humans is entirely wrong.

A Native college student recounts some of the people he dated once he left his reservation. After dating a string of White girls, he dates a Native graduate student, who changes the way he sees his place in the world as a Native person.

A young man leaves his traditional village behind to travel and work on distant planets. Throughout his interplanetary journeys, he must constantly reevaluate his understandings of truth, tradition, and love as he seeks a fulfilling life of his own, independent of what is expected from him.

In the future, a field ethnologist studies and gains access to a new culture by raising her two children there and learning through them. As the children mature, the culturally ascribed gender roles make life hard for the son.