Ford, Jamie

Twelve-year-old William Eng, a Chinese American boy, has lived at a Seattle orphanage since his mother's death five years earlier, but after a field-trip to the movies he becomes convinced that the actress Willow Frost is really his mother, Liu Song, and he sets out with his friend Charlotte to find Willow and prove that his mother is still alive.

Henry Lee, a Chinese-American in Seattle, loses his wife to cancer and recalls his youth, when he and his Japanese-American friend, Keiko, spent time together during WWII--before Keiko and her family were interred at a camp--and deals with generational difficulties between himself and his father and college-age son.