Identity

The novel is a bildungsroman in which Ivy comes of age and attempts to discover herself; however, she is incapable of understanding herself, so she is never able to truly discover herself. Instead, Ivy ultimately resigns herself to committing to pretend to be the person she wants to be while completely neglecting the person she feels herself to be on the inside. This is expressed through the murder of Rous and her marriage to Gideon.

Ivy has a flawed sense of perception: she looks around her and sees tropes rather than fully formed humans, and she wants her identity to be equally simple and categorizable. When she is a small toddler, she is abandoned by her parents and left with Meifeng in China. A few later, she is abandoned by Meifeng and sent to live with her parents in the United States. This double-abandonment causes her...