Settling Accounts: As If an Old Friend Had Come

After a drinking party, a forty-seven-year-old man mistakes someone for another person in a hallway.

His name is Guo Xing. He once owned three factories, a building, and had 1,100 workers. Now he has 6.3 million in installment debt, an old suit he irons every three days, and a studio apartment with only six eggs left in the fridge.

The girl he mistook for someone else is nineteen and studying journalism. For nine years, she has been preparing to nail a man to the life he took.

She has a meticulously revised outline, now on its ninth draft, and thirty-one questions. The first is, "Do you still remember her?"

What she never expected was that when all the evidence was laid on the table, she would discover she had hated the wrong thing. It wasn't the person she had mistaken, but the weight of the blame.

And Guo Xing will spend two years and eight months, a six-million price difference, a settlement in enforcement proceedings, and 109 phone calls to win back something even he can't explain.

This is a book about keeping accounts.

About a man who only knows how to count money, spending the rest of his life trying to calculate what cannot be counted:

A question left unasked, an empty pair of parentheses, an account with no amount, no date, and no opposing entry, one that can only remain open forever.