A Chinese boy with only scant knowledge of his own family's history feels rootless and insubstantial amongst friends brimming with confidence about theirs. Unaware of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its accompanying Chinese Confession Program, he's too young to know the truth because it may endanger the family. He fills in the blanks with comical misunderstandings about his real family members and himself, mixing longing with fantasy.

 

As he grows, his curiosity remains unsated; he's hollowed out for what he longs to know, but doesn't. Years pass, and then he learns that his father has been a paper son from the start, entering the U.S. illegally as someone else. His mysterious and remote grandfather in Yucatan, whom he meets occasionally in Tijuana as a teenager, has been the invisible hand protecting his father. He doesn't know that his grandfather lives "illegally" as an undocumented immigrant himself in Mexico, arriving just after the nation adopted its own Chinese exclusion laws.

 

After his parents' and grandfather's deaths, the boy, now grown, travels to Yucatan to find his grandfather's burial place. What he finds shocks him and compels him to question everything his strict, Confucian father has taught him. His discoveries lead to clues resolving longstanding mysteries his father has bequeathed him.

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His experience shines a harsh ligh upon immigrtation injustice and hatred reserved for Chinese people alone, and the price it extracts from one family over two generations, even after repeal. Most of all, the story reveals, like a rock tumbler rolling for decades, the jewel of devotion that transcends the family's long and crushing separations, and transforms their suffering into beacons of hope.