Ohio

Ohio is the Wong family’s home, but in Ever’s account it is more than a point of departure: it is where immigrant history shapes family rituals, where racial difference can become a public wound, and where her parents’ sacrifices give weight to the choice between medicine and dance. Her time away in Taiwan makes these dimensions newly tangible, turning Ohio into both the familiar place she has left and the measure against which she understands belonging.

Home and Family History

Ever’s parents had spoken of visiting Fujian, the southeastern Chinese province where they were born and met in college. They left after Ever’s father finished medical school, but the family had never had the money to make the trip; Ever’s maternal grandparents died before she was born, and her paternal grandparents died four years later. The family’s connection to its earlier home therefore reaches Ever through stories, inherited obligations, and absence as much as through direct contact.

When her parents send her to a program in Taiwan, Ever initially sees the destination as remote from her Ohio life. Her parents’ explanation that she should learn her culture sets the trip against the family’s migration from Fujian to Singapore and then to the United States. Taiwan is not the family’s place of origin, but the journey places Ever inside a wider network of Chinese-speaking histories and kinship that she has encountered only faintly at home.

Distance and Belonging

At the Cleveland airport, Ever’s father tells her, “Safe travels.” The phrase is a family ritual associated with stories of relatives who left and did not return: a great-uncle who went to Germany and a niece lost at sea. The custom is usually directed toward her father when the family drops him off. Ever pulls her arm away and goes through security, even as the family’s history makes the possibility of loss intrude on her departure.

In Taiwan, the contrast with Ohio becomes vivid at a mall. Ever recalls that heads sometimes turned when she walked through a mall at home with her family; among the Chinese Americans around her in Taiwan, her Asian Americanness instead seems to disappear. That invisibility brings unexpected relief, but it does not resolve her uncertainty about cultural belonging. When Sophie calls her a “Twinkie,” Ever feels defeated rather than angry: even among Chinese Americans, she worries that she is not Chinese American enough, and the moment intensifies her longing for Pearl.

Migration, Race, and Class

Ever’s family history becomes especially present when she is asked about her parents at a gathering with Rick’s relatives. She explains that they migrated from Fujian to Singapore and then to the United States. Aunty Claire praises immigrant parents as brave and smart, describing their children’s success as a result of genes and upbringing. Ever hesitates over whether modesty would honor her parents or diminish what they have done, and feels the conversation nearing a sacrifice she has heard about throughout her life.

The comparison makes Ohio feel isolating. Ever imagines that, had her parents stayed in Asia, they might have been surrounded by family and more readily blended into their community. In Ohio, the family lives as four, and Ever has heard the occasional racist command to “go back to China!” She also knows that her father would still have been a doctor if he had stayed in Asia. The thought is not simply an account of lost status: it reveals how migration has reorganized the family’s opportunities and burdens, while leaving Ever to negotiate the cost of her parents’ choices.

The Weight of Sacrifice

Later, beside Rick, Ever connects her father’s history directly to her own uncertainty about a future in dance. Her father was fifty-five and had grown up without shoes until age nine; his mother stretched noodles with scraps of meat because the family could not afford more. When he first came to America, he admired its paved roads after knowing only dirt roads. As a child, Ever watched him eat meat she had spit out because he could not bear to waste its protein.

Those memories sit beside more recent pressures: immigration officers troubling her parents in the United States, dried-out dragon fruit, and her mother selling a necklace to send her to Taiwan to learn their culture. Ever fears that each disappointment is another way of rejecting what her parents endured. She recalls that her father dreamed of her becoming surgeon general while pushing his orderly cart at the Cleveland Clinic, where he injured himself after walking onto a spill he did not see. His aspiration makes the medical path a symbol of hope and perseverance, but Ever admits she may not be able to reach it and wonders whether becoming a dancer would feel like betraying her family.

Narrative Significance

Ohio is present in the novel through distance and recollection rather than as a fully described landscape. It anchors the family’s everyday life, the airport farewell, Ever’s experiences of racialization, and her father’s work, while Taiwan gives her a vantage point from which those familiar facts look different. The contrast does not offer a simple opposition between an alienated home and a welcoming elsewhere: Ever experiences relief at being less visibly different, yet also encounters a new test of cultural authenticity.

Through Ohio, the novel links migration to intimate choices. Family history is not background decoration; it enters Ever’s sense of obligation whenever she considers what her parents sacrificed and what future they hoped she would secure. The state thus marks both the life she has temporarily left and the emotional ground to which her decisions remain tied.