Falling in love with a sailor is like reaching for the moon. No one can have it, Tino Camacho tells his daughter. Vivian knows it to be true. She is the granddaughter of a doomed love affair with a sailor, the daughter of that sailor's love child. But Vivian also falls for a navy man, an officer, a man well above her station. Vivian and her father are Chamorros, natives of Guam, the tiny Pacific island taken by the United States as a spoil of the Spanish-American War. The Chamorros are wards of the United States governed by the navy.