"The Chois seem to be a model Korean-American family, living in the Los Angeles suburbs. Grace, the younger daughter, is a senior in college, applying to law school. Christina is a schoolteacher, beautiful and well-mannered. Relations between the immigrant parents and their Americanized daughters are strained, however, by intergenerational and cultural conflicts - and by the shadow of a terrible prophecy, made by a fortune-teller 20 years earlier to Chinhominey (the Korean word for paternal grandmother).

The fortune-teller told Chinhominey her son's marriage would result in unhappiness and tragedy, and that the younger daughter would die young, her fate linked to her grandmother's."--BOOK JACKET. "Chinhominey has not seen her son and his family in over 20 years, since they fled Korea in an effort to escape their predicted destiny. Now she arrives for a visit sensing she is ill and will die soon."--BOOK JACKET.

"Chinhominey sees how expectations have shaped the family's behavior, making the fortune-teller's prediction come close to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, in an act of self-sacrifice, she tries to exchange her fatalism for the gift of hope."--BOOK JACKET.