The novel begins with the narrator speaking directly to the reader, describing the city of Toronto: “Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving” (1). The narrator describes the harshness of winter, then the stench of spring as “Garbage, buried under snowbanks for months, gradually reappears like old habits” (1) while people “on their last nerves” are “suddenly eager for human touch” (2).

The narrator then places the scene as eight in the morning on a Wednesday in early spring and describes a group of young friends on a subway train whom we will later understand to be the novel’s main characters: an Asian woman, Tuyen; a young Black man, Oku; and another woman who “might be Italian, southern” (3), who is Carla. The narrator also describes their conversation about another woman whom the young man is in love with; this woman is Jackie.

The narrator describes the way the free, playful, youthfulness of the three friends might affect everyone else on the train: “Now that conversation has entered everyone’s heads, and will follow them to work; they’ll be trying to figure out the rest of the story all day […] someone will think, Why isn’t my life like that?” (3).