THE ASSAY
by Vivian Qiu · Vast Fiction
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About the book
Shanghai, 1919. Xu Jinhai is twenty-four, made comprador of a Bund trading house that morning, and arrested at his own betrothal supper on eight lines a colleague wrote as a joke and left on the table. The office that issued the warrant is dissolved twice and scattered once, and no successor will read a file he cannot open. Thirteen years later a man comes out of a river fort in a dead man's mat, and in the autumn of 1936 a Straits Chinese financier nobody can place takes rooms on the Bund and begins to collect. Each of the four men who buried him is offered one genuine chance before it closes. What the ledger cannot settle is whether a debt collected this exactly is justice.