Description: Liu Xing is a Chinese science student pursuing a PhD in the US in the early 1990s. Driven by ambition yet unable to navigate academic politics, Liu Xing is inexorably pushed to the margins of American life until he loses his way. Liu Xing arrives at a big Western university with plans to study the origins of the universe. In the beginning, everything is looking up. He finds other Chinese students to share a cheap apartment with him, and flirts with an attractive American girl who works in a local tea shop. When the head of the department, Jacob Reiser, welcomes Liu Xing into his select cosmology group, it seems that only hard work stands between him and a bright future in American science. At an orientation for foreigners sponsored by a local church, Joanna Silver, a wealthy patron of the university, notices the earnest student, and an unspoken bond forms between them. Liu Xing becomes Reiser's protege, accompanying him to a prestigious conference where he makes an impressive debut. He is drawn to the study of dark matter, an unseen substance that shapes the universe, but it soon becomes clear that his developing theories threaten the Reiser model. Excited by the possibility of a breakthrough, Liu Xing is deaf to warnings that he must first pay his dues. Soon he is eclipsed within the department by Laurence, a more dutiful Chinese student, and is forced to go behind Reiser's back to publish his discoveries. When his article draws ire instead of accolades, Liu Xing turns to Joanna, who naively encourages him on his collision course. Liu Xing clings to the idea of American science as a free market of ideas, and of American society as wide open to immigrants. But in the end, his dissertation is rejected, and the girl in the tea shop brushes him off. His roommates find jobs, leaving him behind. Too proud to accept help from Joanna and unwilling to return home to his parents, Liu Xing becomes a ghostlike presence at the university. Left alone with his shattered dreams, he explodes in a final act of violence. (First Independent Pictures)