When Ping leaves Hong Kong, she expects to find a paradise in her new home of New Zealand - only to be met with a very different reality to the one she imagined. Working laborious hours frying fish in a cigarette-infused shop, Ping must contend with meddling relatives, a dissolute husband and four children estranged from their cultural heritage. Spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s, Grace Yee engages with the complex realities of Chinese migration to New Zealand from the perspective of women and girls, whose lives were shaped by othering, discrimination and fetishisation at the hands of Western society.