Imbued with a magical quality, this elegant fable transports readers to early 20th-century China, a country brimming with ghosts, with weddings between the living and the dead, and with superstitions and ancestral rites. Living in the midst of this is the tale’s protagonist, a young girl living in dread of the marriage her parents are attempting to arrange for her. She has eyes only for Xiaomei, the daughter of a blind bird vendor. She and Xiaomei initiate an at-first halting, timid friendship, but in their meetings in the park where the elderly gather with their birds, they discover the importance of what should be spoken and what should be left unsaid, and of beauty and loyalty, which have the power to lift them out of their circumstances.