This book documents an instance of one of the most momentous social phenomena of the late twentieth century: the mass migration of the world's population from agricultural ex-colonies and ex-protectorates to the industrial world. Cathy A. Small provides the poignant perspective of one extended family and one village in the Kingdom of Tonga, an independent island nation in the South Pacific that has lost one third of its population to migration since the mid-1960s.

Moving between Tonga and California, Small chronicles the experiences over a generation of the people who left the village of 'Olunga (a fictitious name to preserve anonymity) and the people who stayed. She follows successive branches of one family, who settled in California from the 1960s to the 1990s, sketching a striking picture of Tongan culture in the United States.

She then returns to 'Olunga with Tongan emigrants and their U.S.-born children and shows what has happened to village life and to kin relationships thirty years after migration began. Throughout the narrative, small examines her own experience as an anthropologist, asking how the migration of Tongans has affected what she sees and the way she writes.