The Expat Book Reviews

The Expat by Hansen Shi Book Summary

A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel.

At 26, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Working at General Motors, he’s straining against the bamboo ceiling, quietly and doggedly at work on a piece of innovative self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. In life he’s dogged by resentment—of the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him, of a mother and a vanished father who let the very particular gravity of life in America crush them, and of a country that’s eager to perceive him as quiet, complacent and less-than.

But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She’s been admiring Michael’s work from afar, and represents a Beijing-based startup that’s eager to poach him, liberate his ideas from the stifling confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China.

For Michael—lonely, ill-used, and unappreciated—it’s no choice at all. But when Vivian vanishes shortly after his arrival in China and the true nature of his new position is made brutally clear, Michael finds himself out of his depth and enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie?

The Expat brilliantly explores the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, US-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection to ask the question: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?

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The Expat (Hansen Shi) Book Reviews 2024

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