Rather than hope for a new life, it is Ona's tragic suicide that introduces us to Ng's Bone. The novel takes place for the most part in San Francisco's Chinatown, where we observe Leila, Ona's sister, deconstructs detail after detail in an attempt to find the reason for her sister's death. In so doing, Leila finds that she must try and reconcile her Chinese heritage with her American identity, without, in the modern Chinese-American community, going too far in either direction.

Unlike Love Medicine, which is ultimately a linear story that takes many loops into the past between beginning and end, Bone's structure is more circular beginning and ending very close to the same point in time. At the beginning of the novel, as a modern Chinese-American woman, we learn that she is not the deferential stereotype of a Chinese daughter, who lashed out at her father in a store....
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