Gregory Lee, professor of Chinese at the University of Lyon, returns to his native
Liverpool, where his grandfather arrived from China in 1911, to tell a personal history of the earliest Chinese settlement in Europe. Today a traditional Chinese arch welcomes people to Liverpool's Chinatown but this overshadows darker stories of fear, exploitation and invisibility. Lee exchanges stories with Joe Phillips (son of a Chinese sailor and a Liverpudlian woman), who has come to appreciate and explore his Chinese inheritance, after ignoring it for years.