NAN AND SHEN, AFTER REMOVING their daughter from the country, had taken out their first mortgage to purchase an old two-story colonial in Clarksville, New Jersey. Ivy was appalled. Her life was not her own. She would never see Gideon again! She cried for a week upon her return. Grief soon turned to disgust. The house, which her parents kept praising in smug, insouciant tones, was awful. The furniture slid toward the back wall, the waterlogged window frames were misshapen, the panes grimy, the kitchen and bathroom tiles yellow and grainy with limestone residue. The previous occupants, a Polish couple who’d priced the house below market, had raised their own chickens in the backyard, and every time Meifeng insisted on opening the windows to “air out” the rooms, a blast of dried feces, fetid earth, and rain-logged feathers made eating unbearable. And this was the pinnacle of Nan and Shen’s dreams! This chicken coop! The only upside was that she and Austin got their own bedrooms for the first time. Meifeng slept in a converted dining room on the first floor.

Nan had chosen Clarksville for its large Chinese population. Her sister, Ping, had recently enrolled her two children in weekend Chinese school. Ping said she’d never seen Feifei and Tong so well-behaved, surrounded and influenced by the exemplary behavior of their Chinese classmates. She said Nan should never have sent Ivy to that religious school with entitled Americans. Nan felt Ping was right—Ivy needed to be with her own kind: Chinese students who valued schoolwork and family duties. “A mother knows her own daughter,” Nan told her husband. “Ivy’s easily influenced by others. If she’s going to become a doctor, she needs to befriend other Chinese kids who have the same goals. They can push her to study more.”

Everything about Clarksville fit Nan’s criteria. On Ivy’s first day of high school, it seemed the entire hallway was a sea of black hair. Back at Grove, she’d tried so hard to fit in with the majority but here in Clarksville, she wanted nothing to do with her Asian classmates and their obsession with grades and AP classes and extra-credit homework, walking around school always in the same cliques, backpacks overflowing with math and science textbooks and impeccably organized pencil cases. In the few times a friendly soul would invite her to sit with them at lunch, Ivy would notice their Tupperwares of cold rice, beef and celery, lo mein with shrimp, the occasional boiled egg or canned sweet congee—variations of her own daily lunches—and she’d wither a little on the inside, thinking that others would look upon their group and see them all as the same. She became reticent, her gaze would drift over to the lacrosse players and their girlfriends laughing in the hallway behind the music rooms; she feared they were laughing at her.

In the second week of school, Ivy befriended the only white girl in her chemistry class, named Sarah Wilson. Sarah’s brother, Brett, was on the junior varsity lacrosse team.

By Thanksgiving, Ivy and Brett were fooling around in the back of the music rooms, and Ivy discovered why it was the prime lunch spot in school: you could lock the doors from inside one of the rooms and turn off the lights so no one could see inside the little glass panel. And the walls were soundproof.

By Christmas, the thrill of being a lacrosse player’s girlfriend had lost its appeal; Ivy longed for a refined boyfriend, one who spoke French, who’d lived in Europe, who read poetry, or—better yet—who wrote poetry, or composed song lyrics at the very least, one who would reveal beauty in hidden places and show her a new way of being in the world.

In the spring, she became involved with a thin, sensitive boy from the drama club who had memorized entire soliloquies of Hamlet and who could, with just one index finger, activate nerve sensors she hadn’t known existed. Ivy discovered that fooling around in the dark, dusty wings of the auditorium, the coarse rope from the pulley rubbing against her back, leaving pink tracks down her skin like a burn, was even more scintillating than the soundproof cocoon of the music rooms. Afterward, they’d sneak out the side doors and share a cigarette underneath a brushed-blue sky. While he ranted about his long-term girlfriend—a college freshman in Texas—she’d trace wings on his knee through the ripped hole of his jeans.

Sarah Wilson asked for a new lab partner. Ivy quickly realized it’d been Sarah who’d written their reports, drawn the diagrams, read aloud line-by-line instructions from the confusing manual during class. Ivy finished the year with a C+ in Chemistry. Her grade in Algebra was even worse.

Nan was beside herself. Even Meifeng didn’t take her granddaughter’s side, saying hypocritically, “Your mother’s in charge of your education.” There were scoldings, threats, countless trips to the library for additional workbooks. Ivy complied for the most part. She, too, felt despondent over her mediocre grades. She wanted to be the effortlessly intelligent type, like Sunrin, but instead, she found herself at the bottom of the Asian barrel, like Jojo. Nan always told her to work harder but Ivy felt she was working hard, or at least she cared about working hard, even if the dread of a certain quiz or exam made it hard to focus sometimes. She made the mistake of saying this to Nan one afternoon and her mother’s nostrils flared out, her voice rising through the slanted house: “You don’t know what hard work is! You American kids have no responsibility. You’re lazy! You think you can just live in this house forever.”

“I hate this house,” said Austin between bites of fried pork steak. “It smells like poop.”

“You silly boy,” Nan snapped. “You don’t have the capability to live on your own. Your grades are worse than your sister’s. If you don’t get into college, you’ll end up on the streets once Mama and Baba are dead.” This was always the inevitable end waiting for the Lin children should they fail: homelessness, starvation.

On the first morning of summer break, Nan barged into Ivy’s room at half past seven. “Your cousin Feifei has been helping your aunt Ping pay the bills since she was eleven.” She dropped a towering stack of mail on the nightstand. “Look through these letters. Your grandmother was right. I need to let you handle more around the house. You can manage our money from now on.”

Ivy was used to these kinds of bizarre stealth attacks by now, but she still opened the envelopes with an elaborate slowness, fuming. Bank statements, phone bills, gas and electric, car insurance bills. There were many dollar signs and numbers.

“And don’t forget these.” Nan pointed to the colorful coupon books on the bottom of the stack. “Look for a filter for our refrigerator. You’ll also start grocery shopping with me. Then you’ll learn how much it costs to feed this family. This here”—she pulled out a thick square envelope—“is your father’s paycheck. It comes twice a month. You can keep track of everything in this.” She handed Ivy a checkbook, bound in a transparent case, with a little plastic calculator attached to the lining. “Go on,” said Nan.

But Ivy did not touch the calculator. How dinky it looked, like a cheap toy even Austin wouldn’t want, and how sad the peeling numbers looked on the rubber buttons, the 6 turning into a 0, the 4 missing entirely.

“It’s not easy to shoulder responsibility,” Nan conceded. “Mathematics is important in all areas of life, not just for school.” She gave Ivy a sidelong, insinuating glance before dropping her gaze.