The Shrine of The Shanghai Cat

We are never ready. The universe decides for us, and we go forward into whatever lies ahead.

His job in Hangzhou is gone, his visa is uncertain, and at night he walks the lanes of the French Concession feeling himself turn into a ghost. A black cat has begun to walk through his dreams. On the autumn equinox, with a monsoon coming in off the South China Sea, he finds two kittens in the rain beneath a roadside shrine older than the city around it. He carries them home, though he is ready for none of it. What follows is the plain work of keeping something alive: a cardboard box, a saucer of milk, a night without sleep. Then, in a teahouse, a woman named Lina reads the worn carvings of the shrine and says a word he does not yet understand: huli jing, the fox spirit. Book I of four, on Kindle.