The Expat
By Hansen Shi
Pegasus Crime, July 2, 2024
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—for the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him, for a mother and a vanished father who let the gravity of life in America crush them, and of a country that’s eager to perceive him as quiet, complacent, 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: In the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray? And how far will we go?
Selected Praise
“Hansen Shi’s debut uses a taut, piercingly of-the-moment spy story as a staging area for a beautifully layered, bitingly funny exploration of identity, the legacies of trauma and alienation, and the way that nations and the clashes between them can consume and co-opt every corner of a life. The Expat is pure espionage pleasure, but also an enthralling dispatch from a world scarred by seething, barely submerged conflicts, both ideological and personal. A triumphant first novel.”
– Paul Yoon, author of Run Me To Earth and The Hive and the Honey
About the Author
Hansen Shi is a writer and technology investor. He studied literature at Harvard College where he was on the Fiction Board of the Harvard Advocate. He currently works as a venture capitalist in New York City.