Carrying a photograph of the man she is to marry but has yet to meet, young Hana Omiya arrives in San Francisco, California, in 1917, one of several hundred Japanese "picture brides" whose arranged marriages brought them to America in the early 1900s. When Hana meets Taro, he is not the handsome, prosperous shopkeeper she was led to expect. Yet this disappointment is only the first of many Hana must face: rejection by a hostile white society; thwarted love for another man; demeaning employment as a domestic servant; and the greatest loss of all, alienation from her daughter, Mary, who, like so many children of Japanese immigrant parents, feels ashamed of her cultural heritage and forsakes it in an attempt to assimilate herself into American schooling and society.
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