One of the most common premises in recent Asian American fiction is the young American seeking truth and connection from absent parents. From Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” to Lisa Ko’s “The Leavers,” these books speak to the metaphysical and literal family separation inherent to the immigrant experience for many.

The latest addition to this category is Meng Jin’s debut novel “Little Gods,” which begins in arresting fashion when Su Lan, an ambitious physicist, gives birth in a Beijing hospital on June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Moments after her girl is born, the hospital transforms from a place that ushers in new life to one overflowing with death.

“Bodies are lining up in the halls. They come on cardboard stretched between two bicycles, on the flat beds of watermelon carts, in the arms of shouting strangers. A man in blue pants with a wound in the gut lies coiled on an unhinged door, hand curled around the knob. Mattresses are improvised, IVs inserted with bare hands. Nurses triage while wrapping wounds; an off-shift doctor runs through the gate. Trails of blood dry on the floor. In the morgue, volunteers step between bamboo mats, preparing a list of names.”

After that gripping prologue, the novel settles into a more methodical pace, piecing together Su Lan’s life story from several perspectives: Zhu Wen, Su Lan’s elderly neighbor; Liya, Su Lan’s 17-year-old American daughter; and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. The novel’s most enduring success is in its portrait of Su Lan in absentia, an emotionally unavailable person who exhibits charm and brilliance as easily as rage and cruelty. Her rural, impoverished upbringing drives her to study conceptions of time in the hopes she can “remember the future and forget the past,” mirroring what the Chinese government has repeatedly asked of its citizens since the Cultural Revolution.

The novel’s plot doesn’t fully surface until Liya does, over a third of the way into the book, when she impulsively flies to Shanghai in search of her father, armed with only a letter bearing Su Lan’s old address. Some readers might find Liya frustrating, because she gets most of the answers she seeks rather easily, only to complicate matters by not taking the most obvious and logical steps to complete her search. Others might find Liya relatably human as a conflicted young adult struggling to process the death of a parent. The beating heart of the novel might be its main subplot: the love triangle between Su Lan, Yongzong and his best friend. Zhu Wen, whose narration occupies much of the first half of the novel, turns out to be surprisingly inconsequential to Liya’s search.

“Little Gods” is an intelligent, somewhat restrained look at the effects that tectonic political shifts have on ordinary citizens, effects that reverberate across the decades, and for its young American protagonist, even across oceans.

“LITTLE GODS”

by Meng Jin

Custom House

(288 pages, $27.99)