A young New Yorker teaches English to a Chinese dissident in this "heartbreaking and uplifting" novel of love, loss, and language ( Publishers Weekly).

Aysha is a twenty-two-year-old plagued by guilt and anxiety ever since her parents' divorce. But after suffering severe symptoms, she's now focused on recovering and on teaching her English as a Second Language students. Then a young man named Da Ge joins her ESL class. A dissident with a painful past, he has fled China after the Tianenmen Square massacre, and Aysha finds herself falling irresistibly in love, in spite of the language barrier-and often, the emotional barrier-between them. When he asks her to marry him for the sake of a visa, she cannot say no. It is a relationship that will bring both great joy and great sorrow-and will take Aysha to places she never imagined.

A winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, this is an insightful and emotional novel by the author of Big Girl Small and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing.

"Her writing gleams with beautifully realized descriptions of people, places, and encounters." - Time Out