A bored young woman leaves Paris, her family and her career for a fresh start in development work. With Spanish roots, she assumes she’ll get a mission in South America, but with the luck of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ draw, she is sent to… Taiwan.

Eager for exoticism, overflowing with fantasies about the great Other, her initial encounters with her new world are thrilling: Mandarin characters are a friendly presence, familiar faces on her journey. Yet as she gets to know both the island and the arcana of diplomacy, she starts to feel the effects of a hitherto unsuspected loss: language.

Who is she now, if she doesn’t read anymore, doesn’t speak anymore, and doesn’t understand the words she lives among anymore? Used to moving comfortably between languages and finding both freedom and shelter among them, she has to reinvent herself.

Taiwan is an island surrounded by both the sea and China. In this confined territory whose fate is suspended, Xia – whose name isn’t really Xia – goes on a quest, even if it might mean she’ll disintegrate or forget herself, the better to recompose herself afterwards, like fragments of a new language.