Summary

The novel opens with the narrator, Marie Jiang (also known as Jiang Li-ling), recalling her father Jiang Kai. He left his wife, Marie’s mother, in 1989, and shortly after committed suicide in Hong Kong, leaving eleven-year-old Marie and her mother together in Vancouver. In the present tense, the narrator explains that she is currently a math professor in Vancouver, where she grew up. As she remembers her father, Marie recalls his love of classical music and laments her inability to speak his native language, Mandarin. She also looks through his papers and finds a notebook with calligraphy written in it. This notebook is Chapter 17 from a story called the Book of Records.

Her father died in the same year as the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations, although he died in Hong Kong because he was exiled from China. After the demonstrations and Marie...