Hsueh, a Franco-Chinese photographer aboard the same boat, has become captivated by Leng’s beauty and unconcealed misery. Now she is missing. But Hsueh is plagued by a mystery closer to home: he suspects his White Russian lover, Therese, is unfaithful. Why else would she have disappeared so often on their recent vacation? When he’s arrested for mysterious reasons in the French Concession and forced to become a police collaborator, he realizes that in the seamy, devious world of Shanghai, no one is who they appear to be.