Closeted novelist Libao is caught between his sexuality and his immigrant parents' expectation. One day when his childhood sweetheart, Shan, returns to a rapidly gentrifying Elmhurst, Queens on a real estate venture, everything Libao has long buried rises the surface. In response, Libao begins writing an auto-fiction that imagines the heterosexual life his parents always wanted for him. But as fantasy, memory, and desire begin to blur, the novel becomes less an escape than a confrontation with the life he has avoided living.