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"Keru and Nate first meet in college, brought together by a joke at a Halloween party (would a 'great white' costume mean dressing like a shark or a privileged Ivy League student?) and marrying a few years later. Misfits in their own families, they find in each other a feeling of home. Keru is the only child of strict, well-educated Chinese immigrant parents who hold her to impossible standards even as an adult ('To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,' says her father). Nate is from a rural, white, working class family that has never trusted his intellectual ambitions or--now--the citizenship status of his 'foreign' wife. Nevertheless, some years into their marriage, Keru and Nate find themselves incorporating their families into two carefully planned vacations"--