Lowe, the Chinese immigrant, is in his fifties - the owner of a small shop in an impoverished plantation village, and the guardian of a secret that is gradually revealed.

Writing to a long-estranged daughter, Lowe tells her what happened during their years apart - a tale of exile from China, of estrangement from family, of shipboard adventures, of an unwanted pregnancy, of the arrangement that was made to avoid a possible scandal, of the three decades of living as man and wife with a light-skinned black woman named Sylvie. It is a story of the destruction of a world: the burning of Lowe's shop.

It describes Lowe's dream of building a Pagoda - a school where Chinese workers might learn about their history and become a part of Jamaican life.