In early 2011, two years before the novel begins, the world is rocked by a second financial crisis that makes the shock of 2008 resemble a mere wobble, and during which the dollar loses a third of its value in a single day. Somehow sidestepping the economic Armageddon that hits the West, the People’s Republic of China instead immediately enters what its communist government officially names a “Golden Age” of prosperity and contentment. No one in a placid Beijing of 2013 seems to have anything negative to say about the country; all unhappy memories have been erased, as urbanites busy themselves with self-gratification. Our guide to this paradise on earth is Chen, a Taiwanese-Hong Kong writer who has over the past few years made China his new home. He spends his time socializing, going to literary events and parties, browsing in bookshops, or sipping Lychee Black Dragon Latte in Beijing’s Starbucks (which, following the collapse of the dollar, has had to sell out to a Taiwanese snacks consortium). “I felt so spiritually and materially satisfied,” he summarizes, “and my life was so incomparably blessed, that I began to experience an overwhelming feeling of good fortune such as I never had before.” China’s awkward squad-the minority of critics who have poked and jibed at the regime since public opposition became possible again after Mao’s death-has been intimidated, isolated, or mainstreamed into silence, leaving an intellectual establishment dominated by complacent national treasures, trendy young things, or fascistic Party ideologues. The novel’s atmosphere of overwhelming self-congratulation is resisted only by a handful of individuals determined to remember less happy times and to ask why everyone else has forgotten them. We meet an old flame of Chen’s, Little Xi, a drop-out lawyer-turned-democratic-protestor of the 1980s; Fang Caodi, a hippie globetrotter who is looking for China’s “lost month”-the four hellish weeks of martial law imposed after the economic collapse of 2011 in which countless civilians died, and which is now mysteriously wiped from public memory; and Zhang Dou, a former victim of government-condoned slave labor.