Set in Shanghai in the late 1930s, the story of the relationship between a disillusioned former US diplomat and a refugee White Russian countess reduced to a sordid life in the city's bars. Todd Jackson (mid-40s), once an American diplomat filled with idealism, has lost his sight several years earlier, and is now languishing in Shanghai's grand hotels and elite gentlemen's clubs, a burnt-out case, He has become bitterly disillusioned by realpolitik and the seemingly unavoidable nature of war and conflict. He is, moreover, deeply bereaved by the deaths of his wife and children--victims of violent events in the political turmoil of 1930s China that also robbed him of his sight.