"The trouble with beginnings is that there's no such thing," muses the narrator of Rachel Khong's debut novel Goodbye, Vitamin. "What's a beginning but an arbitrary point of entry? You begin when you're born, I guess, but it's not like you know anything about that."
It's only when they're about to get married that Lily finds out that Matthew is the scion of a blue-blooded family; he uses a different surname to deflect attention. After they conceive a child via IVF, she discovers a secret connection between Matthew's parents and her own, which splits the family apart.
As an adolescent "in the southern basin of the Yangtze River," the "outspoken" May drank in scientific knowledge and distinguished herself as a young scholar. In school, May strikes up a romance with a fellow student named Ping; together, they "study the lotus and its repair mechanisms" and dream of running away together to the U.S.
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