The American expat-in-Asia novel has been done so many times it’s practically its own genre, but the inverse is almost unheard of—until now. Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season, is a witty, humorous and clever story of twenty-five-year-old Penelope Lin, an expat from Beijing who navigates adulthood alongside a diverse cast of friends.

The title of the book comes from one mention of a gingko tree, but it sets the tone of Penelope’s life in Philadelphia.

Ahead of me there was a massive gingko tree, curry-powder yellow, its shedded leaves making an aureole on the ground. When I stepped over the leaves, they were soft, nothing like treading on the crackly sloughed fronds of oak, maple, or ash. And that woodsy music, another of those maligned scents, like durian, like stinky tofu, like certain French cheeses, that was nothing nearly as bad as people made it out to be; that was, in its own way, enticing.

As the story begins, Penelope has graduated from Penn and works in a museum on campus, cataloguing and curating an exhibit of shoes, socks and other ephemera from women in the Qing dynasty who had bound feet. In her free time, she meets up with college friends Inno, a Nigerian student who stayed on for grad school, and Apple, a Taiwanese-American lawyer, as well as her housemates in their Chinatown apartment, the Mandarin-speaking Xinwei and her Cantonese-speaking partner Raymond. Penelope is trying to get over a difficult breakup with her ex-boyfriend, Paul, who moved back to France. Soon she befriends a Vietnamese-American research assistant named Hoang.

They meet in an administration office at Penn when Hoang knows he’s about to be fired from his laboratory job for releasing the lab’s mice into the wild. The two later learn they have things in common they’re not used to talking about: Hoang lost both of his parents in a car accident when he was younger, while long ago Penelope’s mother left her and her father, an eccentric artist in Beijing who spends more time taking psychedelics than he does on his art who is all but absent from her life.

And while it’s her friendship with Hoang that provides the main conflict in the story—is he interested in her or not?—it’s Penelope’s observations of her friends, both expat and American, that make the book stand out. She both admires and pokes fun at them, even if it’s just in her mind.

Penelope and Inno meet at a café and engage talk about Inno’s lifestyle changes and how he hopes to protect the environment.

The loss of omakase from his life had tested his altruistic faith more than any of the other sacrifices he had made. For several months now he had been shaving what he called “the unnecessaries” from his life, by which he meant expenses one could live without. At first, given his lavish spending, it made sense: he let go of his standing reservation for a table at the nightclub; he downgraded, and eventually canceled, his gym membership; he took the bus instead of the Acela first class to New York. He donated the money he saved to very specific charities, small organizations dedicated to solving one issue, like iodine deficiency or rickets.

Inno informs Penelope of his plans to leave his graduate program so he can become even more altruistic and grow potatoes in Peru. She feels sad about his departure; they had met in college when both were new to Philadelphia. And although she doesn’t quite share the same mindset as Inno and his desire to do good in the world, she also feels disconnected from Americans, including Asian-Americans.

When I first moved to Philadelphia, I felt out of place in Chinatown, initially dismissing it as poky and inauthentic, and then later, during my brief phase of trying to identify as Asian American, worrying that I didn’t fit in with any of its dominant groups—the teenagers who huddled together in the matcha café and held fervent discussions about manga and anime, the grumpy octogenarians who spoke Chinese dialects I could barely identify, the entire Vietnamese population. Finally I discovered a third, happy state, the one in which I currently resided and from which I hopefully would not stray, a mode of existence made peaceful by my abandonment of both motherland superiority and diasporic insecurity.

She finds community with union organizers at a hotel where Hoang finds a job as a bartender. And by the end of the story, her friends change as they mature and she finds more clarity in most of her relationships. And with the loose ends, she realizes she’s fine just waiting to see what happens.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.