As the People's Liberation Army ravages China, a resentful young woman charged with a strange mission leaves home to work in the city. Once there, she discovers terrifying connections between her rich new employer and the village she left behind.

A shopkeeper sells lottery tickets that grant the wishes of its winners, no matter how wild their desire, but one ticket winner makes him question his assumptions about human happiness.

A tiny Chinese village is slated to be inundated by a flood, and the government offers resettlement checks and industrialized homes to citizens who relocate so that a dam can be built in the village’s place. A seed keeper and schoolteacher are among the last to stay behind.

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.

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.

Young woman recounts her childhood growing up in China in the 1970s and meeting the old maid that the village has ostracized, this encounter forever changes her.

On a futuristic street haunted by denizens of the past, the ghosts discover a baby among them. As he grows, the child begins to understand his complicated existence.

A Chinese-American sweatshop worker in New York City falls in love with a prostitute and urges her to quit sex work. The couple must figure out how to escape their former lives and financial debts.

In modern day Lanzhou, China, the author meets up with a zeppelin long-haul pilot who has agreed to take the author on his transpacific haul.

In a dystopian future dominated by technology, a man is ejected from his orgynism—a mass of sedated human bodies connected for their own sexual pleasure. Without that blissful oblivion, the man is left to wander what is left of his city.