Loose takes place around the turn of this century, partly in Australia and partly in China and its provinces, where Ouyang Yu's brother Ouyang Ming, a famed Falun Gong practitioner who was tortured to death, enters the story.
The novel combines fiction with non-fiction, poetry with literary criticism, diary with life writing, with multiple stories weaving in between, told from different points of view by different characters. The story evolves during the heady days of the end of the millennium when the new sexual revolution Chinese-style erupted, when political repression went side by side with burgeoning artistic freedom, and poetic experimentation took a sharp postmodernist turn as poets swung away from Western resources to a rich past and richer present.