Based on a true story. At the age of seven, the Chinese girl Yinna arrives in Brandenburg in 1937 from Japanese-occupied Shanghai and lives as a foster child with the widowed Mrs. von Steinitz. Her father, a friend of the von Steinitz family, wants to bring the little girl to safety before the war. However, the war soon intervenes a second time in Ina's life, as she is called in Germany. The novel tells of the adjustment difficulties and the everyday life of a young foreigner in a Nazi German small town between 1937 and 1944, while also flashing back to her childhood in Shanghai and to turn-of-the-century Beijing. Throughout her tumultuous life journey, Ina begins to understand that terms like "friend," "enemy," and "homeland" can mean something entirely different in personal life than in the realm of politics.