Cleveland, Ohio, is Ever Wong’s home, but it is also a measure of the distance between her American upbringing and the family history her parents want her to understand. The city anchors memories of family ritual, medical ambition, and cultural disconnection; after Ever leaves for Taiwan, those memories become part of the conflict over whether she can choose dance without rejecting her parents’ sacrifices.

Home and Family History

Ever’s parents were born in Fujian Province and met in college there before leaving after Ever’s Father completed medical school. The family has long discussed visiting Fujian, but they have never had the money to go. With Ever’s grandparents gone and no close family ties drawing her there, her parents instead arrange for her to attend a program in Taiwan so she can learn about her culture. Ever initially knows little about Taiwan beyond its proximity to Fujian and the fact that her uncle was born there; the proposed trip feels remote from her everyday life in Cleveland.

Cleveland also holds the family’s inherited practices and anxieties. At the airport, Ever’s Father tells her “Safe travels,” a ritual rooted in family stories of relatives who left and did not return. Ever pulls away and proceeds through security, but the ritual makes visible the immigrant history she has learned to resist even as it shapes her family’s sense of danger and separation.

Medicine, Memory, and Migration

The city is closely associated with the medical future Ever’s parents expect her to pursue. Before leaving, she has shadowed at the Cleveland Clinic, where witnessing a doctor treat an injured patient nearly makes her faint. Her strong reaction to blood gives concrete form to the mismatch between her parents’ hopes for a medical career and her own inclinations.

In Taiwan, Ever explains this conflict to Rick Woo by recalling her father’s life. He grew up without shoes until age nine, ate noodles with scraps of meat, and admired American roads when he first arrived because he had known only dirt roads. Ever remembers him eating meat she had rejected rather than letting protein go to waste. These memories make Cleveland more than a place she has left: it is where the family’s experience of scarcity and migration has become the expectations she feels bound to honor.

Ever connects her parents’ sacrifices to her mother selling a necklace to send her to Taiwan, and to the family’s difficult experiences in the United States. She understands that her father’s hope that she will become a doctor sustains him through his work as an orderly at the Cleveland Clinic. When she imagines choosing dance instead, the decision feels to her like a betrayal of the people who made her opportunities possible. The city’s medical institution thus stands both for her father’s labor and for the career path Ever doubts she can follow.

Community and Cultural Distance

Cleveland also appears in Ever’s account of how little Chinese language and culture she knew before traveling. At home, the family speaks English, while her parents sometimes use Mandarin privately. Ever has picked up a few phrases through church services translated line by line, but her familiarity with Chinese food and a handful of expressions is not enough to prepare her for the Mandarin announcements and mixed-language signs she encounters on arrival in Taiwan. Her home city is therefore the starting point for a cultural distance that becomes newly apparent abroad.

The novel’s view of Cleveland is not limited to Ever’s family. During a conversation in Taiwan about a friend’s life, Ever recalls that the friend’s father injured himself after stepping onto a spill at the Cleveland Clinic while pushing an orderly cart. The detail links the city’s medical workplace to the physical costs of service work, and sharpens Ever’s awareness that the ambitions attached to medicine are bound up with her family’s history of labor and sacrifice.

Narrative Significance

Cleveland functions as the novel’s emotional and social point of departure. It holds the family’s stories of migration, the customs through which they try to protect one another, and the work that underwrites their hopes for Ever. Once she is in Taiwan, she repeatedly interprets new experiences through that home context: her parents’ decision to send her, her father’s expectations, and her own uncertainty about whether dance can belong in a life shaped by those expectations.

The city’s importance lies less in a detailed portrait of its streets than in what Ever carries away from it. Her memories turn the distance between Cleveland and Taiwan into a question of responsibility and belonging: learning about her parents’ origins does not erase her American upbringing, and understanding their sacrifices does not settle what she should do with her future.