The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Chou, Elaine Hsieh. Disorientation. Penguin Random House LLC, 2022.

Elaine Hsieh Chou's novel Disorientation is set on the Barnes University campus in the fictional town of Wittlebury, Massachusetts. The narrative follows the story of 29-year-old doctoral candidate Ingrid Yang, and traces Ingrid's attempts to complete her dissertation on acclaimed Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou. Written from the third person limited point of view and told in the past tense, the novel adheres to a predominantly linear structure.

In the final year of her doctoral program at Barnes University, Ingrid was unsure she would be able to complete her dissertation. The more she researched beloved poet Xiao-Wen Chou, the less invested she felt in writing about him.

Whenever Ingrid got distracted or discouraged, she took walks, sat at the local Old Midwife café, talked to her fiancé, Stephen Greene, or visited her only friend on campus, Eunice Kim. Despite all of her internal frustration with her dissertation, Ingrid tried to focus on her future. She told herself that as soon as she finished her program, she would secure a tenure track position at Barnes and marry the love of her life. Getting tenure and marrying Stephen meant Ingrid would finally have everything she wanted: a safe, secure, and predictable existence.

One day while working in the university's Chou archive, Ingrid discovered a curious note in unfamiliar handwriting on her papers. The anonymous note-writer suggested that Ingrid did not know everything she needed to know about Chou. Desperate for a new approach to her dissertation, she convinced Eunice to help her investigate the individual, a man they discovered was named John Smith.

After weeks of plotting, Ingrid and Eunice decided the best way to learn more about John Smith and his connection to Chou, was to break into his home. Ingrid was shocked when she stood in John's bathroom one night, and watched the man she thought was Chou peel off his makeup and reveal John's white face beneath.

Ingrid's discovery that Chou was not in fact a Chinese man, but a white man wearing yellowface, upset her sense of truth, reality, and morality. As the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Ingrid had learned from a young age that her identity was a reason to be ashamed. She actively worked to dissociate from her cultural origins as a way to fit in and avoid persecution. Discovering the truth about Chou, therefore, compromised Ingrid's attempts to deny the systemic racism that defined her reality.

In an attempt to finally embrace the truth, Ingrid outed John Smith online and in the campus newspaper. The revelation caused a scandal on campus, which ultimately dismantled Ingrid's once-stable reality. Over the course of her final months at Barnes, Ingrid found herself questioning everything she once considered to be true about her world, her relationship, her friends, and herself.

On the day of her defense, Ingrid decided to finally take ownership of her thoughts and opinions, and to claim her own voice. Ultimately, she failed the defense, but set herself free. She left Barnes and moved in with her parents, with whom she rekindled her relationship. The future was unknown to Ingrid, but she no longer feared it.