Getting to Lamma

One bicycle accident changes everything when Madeleine Fox, New Yorker seeking to discover what's on the other side of the world, literally runs into brash Shanghai dissident David Li. Reading the tale of Madeleine's adventures is like following an escapee from a Woody Allen movie as she looks for love and meaning amidst the moral ambiguities of post-Tiananmen China and Hong Kong.

Compelled to make sense of a father who still dreams of being Kerouac and a Southern belle mother who never stopped believing in Mao, fleeing from a cocaine abusing ex-husband, Madeleine has picked herself up from her shrink's couch and decided to follow the married foreign correspondent who has cajoled her for years to "come run away with me." She finds out from day one that acting on a fantasy is like stepping through the looking glass into an alien haze. Alone in a threadbare hotel room she plots revenge against men who cheat, and gradually learns to be a plucky woman. On the way to Lamma, Madeleine participates in a defection, uncovers a business conspiracy, and ponders how to save the world from both communism and capitalism run amuck.

What is Lamma? It is a South China Sea island full on plantain trees and ex-patriates who have just returned from remote corners of the world. It's a place to invest in affordable real estate. Farmers plant rice there and lawyers handling joint venture contracts stream to the 7 a.m. ferry, freelance photographers stagger from the party last night, on their way to catch another flight out. Not many get to Lamma and stay there; it's a life of glorious impermanence.

Getting to Lamma is a cock-eyed love letter to the Asian "gold rush" of the 1990s from a heroine who grows to crave the clamor of construction, the whiff of danger, and the uncertainties about tomorrow.