In a nutshell: A wealthy young woman in Republican-era China refuses to be a kept canary and insists on becoming an ambitious woman.
At eighteen, my stepmother forced me to marry a fifty-five-year-old opium dealer as his second wife.
I turned around and exposed, in front of everyone, how she had used my betrothal gifts to cover her family’s debts.
“Either call off the wedding, or the whole Wang family goes down.”
They all thought a concubine-born daughter would be easy to handle.
They had no idea I spoke three foreign languages fluently, had secretly invested in a clothing shop, and doubled its profits in three months.
They also didn’t know that the jade earrings my mother left me concealed the deed to a prime property in the French Concession.
Then I met Zhou Zecheng at the horse races:
the man who had returned from Cambridge and held the lifeline of Shanghai’s economy in his hands.
I put on a plain qipao and pretended to be the woman he could never forget.
He thought I was trying to attach myself to him, never realizing I was using him as a weapon.
Later, all of Shanghai saw:
• My “Fanghua” domestic brand drove the Japanese investors to their knees and begging for mercy.
• My Yunshang Pavilion became an underground intelligence relay station.
• My once-abusive stepsister knelt in the pouring rain, begging me to spare the Shen family.
And Zhou Zecheng kissed me amid a hail of bullets:
“If I’d known you were this wild, I should’ve taken you home and made you mine the moment we met at the races!”
