Afong Moy was the first Chinese woman to immigrate to the United States, in 1834. With her bound feet, she was a curiosity, and she spent a decade and a half being exhibited, on and off, for the amusement of audiences around the country. Then she disappeared from the historical record.

In this warmly provocative novel, Ford — author of the excellent “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” and “Songs of Willow Frost” — imagines both the real Afong and her hypothetical descendents, including Zoe, a teenager in a progressive British school just before World War I, pining for her beautiful teacher; Fay, a nurse in World War II, enamored of a dashing pilot; Greta, a coder for a dating app in the Seattle of 2014, encountering her parents’ desire to arrange a marriage for her; and Dorothy, a poet in the typhoon-battered Seattle of 2045, living with her uninterested lover on the edge of madness.

The thread that binds them is epigenetics: changes to the genes that result from trauma. It’s a real phenomenon that today’s scientists are just beginning to understand.

Ford takes it into a future where Dorothy Moy is seeking treatment for her increasingly difficult walk through life, which endangers ability to parent her young daughter, Annabel. As Seattle trembles before yet another tsunami, she enters a new kind of therapy to try to deal with the genetic trauma that has caused her life to intertwine with those of the women who came before her.

With all of the ideas spinning around here, Ford never loses sight of the human lives and emotions at stake. It’s a bravura writing performance, aided by a stellar cast whose reading never fails to make Ford’s words count.