Summary

In Chapter 4, in May, the narrator started “crying upwards of five times a day” (47). She attributed it to her new life. She had run out of her weed, coke, and MDMA. She did not want her employer to discover her reliance on substances and nicotine, fearing she would not “get the permanent position” (47). When Aida noticed the narrator’s state, she had a doctor see her. He urged her to gain weight.

The narrator felt like “a disappointment to [her] mother,” who “was born to poverty in rural China” and managed to study medicine in Beijing and win a visa to America where she met “a handsome Korean American entrepreneur” (49). In America, she could give the narrator “every opportunity” (50). The narrator squandered these opportunities “by dropping out” of school to pursue cooking (50). They had stopped talking thereafter.

Aida took the narrator for a...