Rachel Chu is the book’s protagonist. She is a Chinese American economics professor at NYU who travels with her boyfriend, Nick Young, to his home country of Singapore. Rachel comes from a middle-class background and does not realize that Nick comes from an extremely wealthy family until she meets them during the Singapore trip. The book’s central conflict is the economic class difference between Rachel and Nick, especially regarding how his family sees her. The wealthy, old-money Young family, like the rest of the old-money Chinese families in Singapore, expects Nick to marry someone else from their social class. Born to a single mother who didn’t come from a wealthy background, Rachel does not have the lineage necessary to impress the Youngs.

Rachel believes that her father died before she was born, but the circumstances of her birth contribute to Nick’s family’s prejudice against her. Her mother, Kerry, was in an abusive marriage with an older man and fell in love with a kind neighbor around her age. She became pregnant with the neighbor’s child and fled China when that child, Rachel, was just a baby. Kerry kept this secret about Rachel’s birth until Nick’s mother, Eleanor, hired a private investigator and uncovered the truth.