For Grace, the ardent yet puzzled heroine of Andrea Barrett's third novel, this trip has been planned as a three week stay; she's to play dutiful wife to Walter, her prominent scientist husband, at the 1986 Beijing International Conference on the Effects of Acid Rain. Walter is twelve years older than Grace, and as sour as the rain he studies; he and Grace are at a particularly troubled point in their marriage. Their rightly circumscribed visit, however, becomes a journey infinitely less tidy and more complex as Grace falls forever out of love with her husband and very much in love with the country and its culture.
In the chaos of the Beijing streets and in the home of the new friends Dr. Yu and her son Zoofan, Grace finds the web of life she's been too lost to perceive. "Time you spend in the past and future is time you spend alone, : Dr. Yu tells her "But between them there is a middle kingdom, both feet planted here."