Deng Xiaoping said that when you open the windows, the flies come in. In the Spring of 1989, China opened its windows wider then ever before to the fresh breezes of freedom. From Deng's point of view, the flies had come in and needed to be swatted.

One fly had stopped beating its wings today. Hu Yaobang had died, and the government would not announce it for three more days. Then the rumor would brew that he had been swatted. The rumor would be enough to stir up the hurricane of events, the eye of which would sweep across Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and the winds of which would extend out thousands of miles to batter all of China. Eight hundred miles southwest of Beijing, the city of Xi'an where Professor Dan Norton was teaching American literature and Western history would be especially hard hit.

Dan Norton had almost finished his year as an exchange professor at Shaanxi Teachers University. In mid-April he had no way to know that in two weeks time he would be under threat of Chinese prison, accused by the police of harboring a fugitive and engaging in espionage. Would he do what the police wanted him to do to get himself out of trouble? He would apparently have to choose, just as the Chinese students had to choose, between cooperating with corruption, fleeing, or standing up for his values at grave risk.

It was the dark labyrinth of his tortured soul that had led him to China to seek redemption. But that is not the heart of the story, only the fictional occasion for its telling. The heart of the story is the actual struggle of the Chinese people against the corruption of their government, which mirrors the history of many such struggles throughout human history. They are stories of fear and hope, cowardice and courage, naivete and wisdom, selfishness and generosity. Battles for justice are fought and lost time and again; but after many failures, there are often victories, if sometimes not for decades or centuries.