The plot of the novel is based on the fate of a sixteen-year-old girl who lived in China three hundred years ago and loved an opera that contained her name in the title. Amazingly gifted, insightful and wise, despite her young age and rather secluded life, Peony expressed her thoughts on love in the form of notes to the opera. Fox Xi, author of The Snow Flower and the Treasured Fan, used the richness and magic of Chinese in her new novel the afterlife to explore the different manifestations of love - maternal, romantic, erotic, deep, and how they can transcend death. Peony wants what every woman wants - to be heard: “Hear us as we are, and everything will be fine.”