Eighth year grad student Ingrid Yang is having a tough time finishing her dissertation on enjambment in the poems of a legendary Chinese-American former faculty member at her Massachusetts university. She doesn't actually care about Xiao-Wen Chou and is only writing about him because she was pressured to do so by her advisor, the chair of the East Asian studies department. Ingrid is the only child of immigrants and is engaged to a white man who calls her "dear" all the time and fusses over her health. 

She and her best friend Eunice (Yoon) met when they were assigned office mates, two of the few East Asians in the East Asian studies department. Or maybe Yoon is in another department? I forget, but it is Ingrid who is being groomed to become the department's next tenure-track Chou scholar and upping the department's racial and ethnic diversity by becoming its only Asian member. (n.b., I'm not sure that's how faculty hiring goes. Typically institutions are discouraged from hiring their own Ph.D.s) Ingrid is a non-maker of waves and a pleaser, so she's going along with the plan...until she finds a snarky note in a box in the Chou archives. 

As an archives-adjacent special collections librarian, I wasn't crazy about the description of the archive. First of all, a standalone archive of one poet seems improbable, and the stereotypical shade on its main desk-sitter, Margaret is irritating. 

Is Margaret's whole job staffing the reading room? Do any archivists work at the facility? Or maybe the collection is finished because Chou is dead? It's annoying. 

The story of Ingrid's awakening also seems improbable. She's incredibly ignorant of race and racism at the beginning, but I do like the story of her relationship with her parents.