In California of 1906, where it is a crime for them to even touch, Hope Newfield and Liang Po-yu fall desperately in love. Defying every taboo, this independent American woman and the aristocratic young man from Hankow, China, decide to marry. But over the following years, as they move from San Francisco to China and start to raise a family, their love is tested by prejudice, by revolution, by conflicting loyalties, and their own drastically different traditions.