Content Warning: This section of the guide describes the source text’s depiction of sexism, racism, wartime violence, miscarriage, and infant loss.

The novel opens with the elderly Patricia “Tricia” Kelly writing a letter to a woman named Rainey, the daughter of her late friend Charlene. Tricia recounts her first meeting with Rainey, at a cocktail party in Saigon in 1963. Tricia is then 23 and has recently moved to Saigon with her husband, Peter, a civilian advisor for the CIA on year-long assignment in Vietnam. She and Peter live in a villa within a gated community for American dependents.

Speaking to Rainey in the narrative present, Tricia says, “[Y]ou have no idea what it was like. For us…the women…the wives” (3). She describes the intricate system of social etiquette that governs the lives of the dependent wives in Saigon. Tricia finds these unspoken rules counter-intuitive and exhausting but follows them anyway because she believes this is the best way to support Peter. At the party, the couples are waited on by Vietnamese servants wearing white ao dais, a traditional Vietnamese form of dress. Tricia envies the comparative simplicity of their lives.