Chicago frames Margaret Campbell’s return to the United States as both a homecoming and a reckoning. It is where she buries her father, retreats to the familiar rooms of her childhood in Oak Park, and delays confronting the Lincoln Park apartment that belongs to another version of her life. Even at home, however, news from Shanghai draws her back toward the work and relationships she has left behind.

Burial and Family History

Margaret returns to Chicago after her father’s death and attends his burial at Mount Carmel Cemetery, west of the city. At the graveside, the first snow of winter catches on an icy wind as she drops frosted earth onto the coffin. The cemetery’s physical closeness to the city’s past becomes part of her reflection: nearby lie the graves of famous gangsters, while her father’s family plot holds the less distinguished Scots and Irish ancestors with whom he had kept better company in life.

The burial also exposes Margaret’s uneasy relation to death. Familiar with the stages of bodily decomposition through her work, she finds the ritual of placing a body in the ground absurd and thinks cremation would be cleaner and more final. She knows what will happen to the buried body, but resists imagining her father undergoing that process. Chicago is therefore not simply the place where she returns to mourn; it is where professional knowledge intrudes upon a private loss.

A Homecoming in Retreat

Margaret has been back in Chicago for nearly three days before she ventures to neither her own apartment in Lincoln Park nor the life associated with it. Instead, she stays in her old bedroom in the redbrick house where she grew up in Oak Park. Its familiar surroundings offer comfort and recall a time when life seemed full of promise, but Margaret recognizes that she is using them to hide from decisions about her future.

Her avoidance of Lincoln Park carries a more specific weight. She has been away for more than eighteen months, leaving neighbours to collect her mail and water her plants, and she fears what she will find when she returns. The apartment is bound to memories of the man she lived with for seven years and married. Chicago thus contains two competing forms of home: the childhood house that shelters her from difficult choices, and the unattended apartment that confronts her with a past she does not yet wish to revisit.

News from Shanghai

The distance between Chicago and Shanghai does not sever Margaret’s professional connection to China. From her mother’s house, she watches television coverage of a mass grave discovered at a Shanghai construction site. Images of the bodies and reports of the authorities’ media blackout hold her attention; statements from the bank involved and an interview with its chief executive, who had encountered the bodies, make the story vivid even as accurate information about the number recovered remains unavailable.

At first, Margaret makes no connection between the discovery and Li Yan. The case reaches her instead through professional curiosity, followed by regret that she is not involved. She misses the work, China, and Li Yan, while the news from Shanghai makes her separation from that life newly tangible. Her recent encounter with David Webber has also helped her recognize that the past offers no refuge. In Chicago, the story’s personal and professional threads meet: the city gives Margaret a place to grieve and shelter, but news from abroad presses her toward movement rather than withdrawal.