The book opens with an illustration of Thi’s pregnant belly, seen from a first-person perspective. We join her at New York’s Methodist Hospital on November 28, 2005. She is in great pain due to labor, and her mother, whom she refers to using the Vietnamese “Má,” has disappeared into the hallway. However, Thi’s husband Travis steps in to comfort her. Thi tells us, “Má flew all the way from California to help me have her first grandchild. But now that she’s here, she can’t bear to be in the same room” (3).

As Thi struggles with her own exhaustion and the medical experts who want to coldly administer her birth, she is afraid that if she cedes control over her body, she’ll want to do a full reset: to a time before she was tasked with the responsibility of helming a family of her own. When surgical tools are brought into her room, she states: “I feel my stomach go black, the way it did once when I was a child and Bố had carelessly told Má in front of me about a rape…” (6). She haltingly agrees to an epidural and Pitocin to induce labor.