Zhang’s first-person narrator and protagonist, a chef, is never named. She is an old woman in the framing narrative of the Prologue and the end of Chapter 12, while the rest of the novel describes her life when she turns 30.

The narrator repeatedly describes herself as a “hungry ghost” (3, 188), a term that comes from Chinese Buddhism. This negative self-image is the result of the narrator’s childhood. Her unnamed mother was born in China and immigrated to California, where she married a Korean American man who walked out on her and their daughter. The narrator attended the University of California, Los Angeles but dropped out to become a chef. Her mother disapproved of this choice because she disliked the pretention of haute cuisine and believed in eating to survive and enjoying cheaper pleasures, like peanut butter on jian bing. The narrator’s mother died before the start of the novel. Their unresolved and troubled relationship causes her to become “hungry for a connection [she] s[ees] in Aida’s cheekbones, her tidy nose” (26), identifying all the more strongly with the only other Asian woman on the mountain.

The romantic and sexual relationship between the narrator and Aida is complicated in several ways.