As combat rages across the lush highlands of Vietnam and Laos, a child is born. Ia Moua enters life at the bottom of her world’s social order, both because she is part of Laos’s Hmong minority and because she is female. But when brutal communist rule upends her life and strips Ia of all she loves, this young girl resolves to chart her own defiant path. Ia builds a new life for herself and, before long, for her children, first in the refugee camps of Thailand and then in the industrial heartland of California’s San Joaquin Valley. At the root of her success is a simple act: growing rice as her ancestors did, even as she and her crop must adapt to Fresno’s punishing, desert-like landscape. As she gains power and independence, however, Ia must confront all that she left behind—and find a place in her heart for those who left her.