John Derbyshire was born in England, has traveled widely, and now lives in New York. How this prepared him to write a novel this good I do not know, but this is an exceptional first novel.

The story centers on Chai. Having come to see his fellow Red Cuard compatriots as just a gang of hooligans, Chai decides to leave China. He braves the deep waters to swim across the bay to Hong Kong, a city that intrigues him no less in its presence than it did in his dreams.

Chai survives his first few months there and eventually finds work as a messenger for a bank. He takes advantage of the bank's training programs and earns college degrees and moves up to the level of vice president. Many years later he finds himself living in New York happily married to a young wife, Ding, and the father of a lovely baby girl, Hetty. He recognizes the good fortune of his life and is content.

While in Hong Kong Chai had one ardorous affair with the young Selina. Even after learning that she is promised to another and merely wairing for her visa to join her intended in America, Chai cannot stay away from her. Through the wildest of chances, Selina reappears in Chai's life, a ghost haunting him from the past.

Chai enjoys small obsessions in his life, mostly harmless. After spending years researching the smallest details and reading everything available on the great Samuel Johnson, Chai finds himself obsessed with a new "old dead man"-- President Calvin Coolidge. In Derbyshire's able hands Coolidge comes to signify all that Chai sees as right with his adopted country of America.

Even as Chai seeks to rekindle his romance with Selina, Ding is working in the background to thwart him. Derbyshire makes sure that the reader can see what is happening here, even as poor Chai remains clueless through the end. The result is a masterful tale, beautifully told.