On the night of the Chongqing bombings, newspaper translator Shen Zhiwei wakes in a collapsed air-raid shelter with an unidentified baby girl in her arms and a dying woman in a qipao beside her. Before she dies, the woman slips Shen half a bloodstained ledger and leaves her with just one sentence: “The green lamp at the Song residence, three coded telegrams, one person must die.”
Three years earlier, Shen Zhiwei’s father, Shen Huaiyu, was falsely accused of embezzlement and died at a Shanghai dock. Three years later, she discovers that her father may never have died at all, and that the old case is linked to wartime relief efforts, medicine shipments, orphan registries, the secret dealings of powerful families, and a staggering account stretching across Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong.
The baby girl, A-Zhao, is no ordinary orphan. She is “White Plum Twelve,” and the key to opening the twelfth dowry trunk. Thirty-seven children, thirty-seven dowry trunks. The trunks hold no gold or jewels, but the true accounts that could silence half the mountain city. Some people steal medicine in the name of saving the nation. Some use charity as a front for trafficking children. Some have the dead sign for medicine meant for the living. And in the fog, someone guards a green lamp, waiting for a daughter of the Shen family to return.
Shen Zhiwei had only wanted to clear her father’s name, but as she follows each bloodstained entry, she sees more and more names that have been erased: wounded soldiers who never received medicine at the front, children given numbers at the orphanage, and ordinary people who never lived to see dawn in the air-raid shelters. At last, she understands that her family’s injustice can be righted in time, but the account of the land itself cannot be allowed to grow worse.
So she picks up the child and the ledger, leaving the air-raid shelter for the gates of the Song residence, and fogbound Chongqing for the surging darkness of Hong Kong. She won’t marry into a powerful family or curry favor with the powerful. With a fountain pen, an abacus, and half a bloodstained ledger, she will hand over, one entry at a time, every old account hidden behind those high walls, to her country and its people.
