In 1987, the most valuable thing on Hong Kong Island wasn’t gold or real estate. It was knowing how to read the books.
Shen Jianchuan was just an unremarkable bookkeeper at the Qing Shan Hall of Wo Shing Yi. While others wielded knives, he worked the abacus. While others collected protection money, he helped them balance every drop of blood money against the cash. Then an account for a shipment that didn’t add up landed him in the role of scapegoat. Only then did he realize that behind the triad’s crooked books lay more than dirty money: there were old ship cases, control of the docks, real estate money-laundering schemes, and a group of people who wanted to step ashore in the new era but couldn’t bear to let go of their old underworld ways.
Worse still, from that night on, every evening he could see just one page from seven days in the future: the page most crucial to the chain of interests tied to him.
That page wouldn’t give him answers. It would only tell him who would turn on him first, which funds would dry up first, and which contract would prove fatal.
And so a little bookkeeper who had only wanted to survive was forced to move from the docks to the factories, from old tenements to boardrooms, climbing from a triad’s back office all the way to the boardroom tables of a financial empire. But every step upward cost him cash flow, reputation, connections, and sometimes even his life.
On Hong Kong Island, if you can’t balance the books, you have to settle the score with the people who owe you.
Money has no soul, but Shen Jianchuan is its judge.
