There are no secrets in this small town. Everyone knows that the Coach´s wife, Flora, ran off and left him. But no one talks to him about it. He still teaches baseball by day and has his wonton noodles with shrimp balls every night at the noodle stand. Silent and solitary, no one knows him well enough to know that he keeps his room the same way it was when Flora was around, with her brightly colored clothes still hanging all over the place.
Xiao-Zhun is a sheepish girl, the kind who would apologize and disappear if you bumped into her on the street. Her world is like the elevator she operates in a department store—static, polite, low-key. Even when she catches her boyfriend cheating on her, she stays sweet and smiles like she was trained to do at work. But tonight, she decides to find a better home for her pet blowfish. She takes it across town, to the trashed home of the Coach. They make passionate love in the surreal blue light of his aquarium. Later she wears the colorful clothes of his wife and decides she wants a new life—in fact, she could even pretend to be his wife. Her baby voice sounds so much like Flora´s that the Coach allows her to stay. They live as husband and wife, but the more they approach normalcy, the stranger they really become. Finally one day, the Coach wants to learn this girl´s real name…
