Patricia Gotuaco recounts the colorful landscape of her early childhood and adulthood which spanned several countries before she and her husband settled down in the United States in the 1980's. Her details take us back in time to a different era, invoking a fondness for times and places familiar to us today as seen from the eyes of a young girl navigating through life as an older sibling, an American girl growing up as the daughter of a Chinese ambassador father and a California mother, and ultimately as a mother and grandmother herself with children and grandchildren living all across the Pacific Rim.