As a young Vietnamese refugee, Hoangmai Pham suddenly lost her sense of safety and belonging when her family fled Saigon at the end of the war. Later her success in navigating life in America as a physician and health policy leader at the top of her profession paradoxically triggered a psychological unraveling during middle age. This unusual memoir depicts her struggle in confronting her hidden multiple personalities to heal, luring the reader into parallel slipstreams of discovery--one of family secrets and epic history before and during the Vietnam War, the other of traumas masked behind a child's vivid imagination.

Stories of ghostly ancestors, a fraught return to Vietnam as an adult, and her kaleidoscopic inner characters unfurl in a voice that is at once dreamlike and brutally incisive. Her final triumph crystallizes the immense price that immigrants pay for a chance at a better life, and their resilience in achieving every sense of integration.