Cleveland is Ever Wong’s Ohio home and the setting against which her family’s migration history, economic sacrifices, and hopes for her future take shape. Though much of the summer unfolds in Taiwan, Cleveland remains present through the memories Ever carries there and the decisions her family makes after she returns.

Family Roots and Distance

Ever’s parents were born in Fujian Province, where they met in college, and left for the United States after Ever’s father completed medical school. They had talked about taking the family to visit, but could not afford the trip; neither parent had living parents there to draw the family back. The distance between Cleveland and their place of origin is therefore not simply geographic: it is shaped by limited money, family loss, and an inheritance Ever knows largely through her parents’ stories.

Home Before Taiwan

At home in Cleveland, Ever and her family speak English. Her parents sometimes use Mandarin when they want to keep something private, while Ever’s exposure to Chinese is limited to basics learned at church and familiar food names. When she reaches Taiwan, the Chinese characters and Mandarin announcements around her make that narrow preparation newly conspicuous. The contrast gives the journey a personal stakes: the program her parents arrange is meant to connect her with a culture that has remained distant in her everyday life.

Cleveland also holds the family’s small rituals of protection. At the airport, Ever’s father tells her, “Safe travels.” The words come from family lore about relatives who went abroad and never returned, and the ritual has usually been directed toward him when the family dropped him off. Ever pulls away from his arm before security, resisting the fear behind the custom even as the thought of losing her father follows her overseas.

Work, Sacrifice, and Obligation

Ever understands her father’s hopes through his work at the Cleveland Clinic. He pushes an orderly cart and dreams of the public achievements his daughter might reach; he injured himself after walking onto a spill at the Clinic without seeing it. In Taiwan, Ever connects this ambition to a longer history of deprivation: her father grew up without shoes until he was nine, and as a child ate noodles with scraps of meat because his family could afford little. After immigrating, he admired American roads because he had known only dirt roads. Ever remembers that when she rejected meat as a child, he ate it rather than let protein go to waste.

Those memories make her choice between medicine and dance feel like a question of responsibility, not just career. Her mother sold a necklace to send her to Taiwan to learn about her culture, while the family has also faced immigration officers and financial strain. Ever fears that declining medicine would insult the sacrifices behind her parents’ hopes. Cleveland, as the place where those sacrifices were lived and where her father continues his hospital work, gives that fear its concrete home.

Return and a Changed Future

At the National Theater in Taipei, Ever spots her father across the street in his Cleveland Indians cap. His slouched posture and folded paper map make him recognizable in the crowd, but also seem to place him in the wrong performance: a figure from Cleveland appearing in the story of her summer abroad. The moment brings home and Taiwan into the same frame, reversing the earlier journey in which Ever had felt surrounded by unfamiliar language and strangers.

On August 24, Rick visits on his way to Yale, and Ever’s father announces over dinner that he will retire from the Cleveland Clinic and pursue his consulting business full-time. He is still using crutches and working light duty, and acknowledges the financial risk: the consulting work could bring in less than the hospital job. He has been considering the change for ten years and has secured another contract in Taitung through Dr. Lee. His announcement follows Ever’s own turn away from the expected medical path toward dance. Rather than insisting that she alone must remain within a prescribed role, he recognizes that she is happy and suggests that none of them can hide who they are. Cleveland thus marks both the source of the family’s expectations and the home from which its members begin to make different choices.