This semi-autobiographical novel is the story of a desperate small-time businessman whose travels through China on the eve of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre take him into a netherworld of corrupt local officials, Hong Kong's criminal "Triads, " and renegade CIA operatives. Throughout, he is forced to confront his own inner demons from Vietnam, and the larger meaning of his Jewish heritage. The Jingwei Bird realistically portrays the political and economic tensions in China in the late 1980s at the dawn of its re-emergence as a world power.