"Sam Saadoun, a closeted Jewish Arab university student from Los Angeles, travels to Beijing to pursue a gay Hollywood romance and other feelings of kinship that are unusual in hyper-capitalist spaces like the United States. But when he arrives in Beijing, Sam finds himself flung into a transformational existential crisis. Shadowy characters ask him to interrogate not just the ever-changing world city around him and its governing ideology of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, but a wild and disturbing murder mystery nestled in the bowels of his host university's most curious behemoth of a building"--Back cover.