The Tide Is Growing Here

The last person in Shanghai who dared to transfer all his property to a dead person was Deng Yuanchu. When he was twelve years old, he came to Shanghai by boat with two silver dollars in his pocket. The river was covered with heavy fog. No one told him that he would die in a windowless room fifty-two years later, and no one told him what would happen in the intervening half century. He married seven women, opened eighteen stores, accumulated tens of thousands of dollars, and then signed everything to a man in a coffin one night. This is the biggest bet of his life. It's also the last one. A hundred years of Shanghai, a river of grievances. When the tide recedes, who is freer, the survivors or the dead?