Note: The Dragon represents many things, and the novel is about leaving it

Synopsis: Farewell the Dragon takes place between August and October 1987, primarily in the university section of Beijing, in the northwest corner of the city. The main character doesn't really want to leave China but circumstances are making it increasingly inevitable. Nathan Schuett, a former liberal American Democratic party political operator in his mid-thirties, has put himself into a fix by quitting his teaching job before securing the next one as a software businessman. Worse he has allowed his romantic life to become too complicated. But when he finds the nearly naked bodies of two university colleagues, both shot, things really begin to spin out of control. A West German woman and Hungarian man who may or may not have been romantically linked lay dead in her apartment, where Nate looks briefly for clues to a crime that no one seems to want to solve. Nate is an English teacher, but also an aspiring business man. He was a seemingly reasonable and obliquely patriotic, if mildly left-wing American, surrounded mostly by students and officials on sabbatical from the Soviet Empire. By all accounts, Nate was a model teacher at the Beijing Foreign Language school. He can get by in the Chinese language but is no scholar. After finding the bodies, he tells his story to a couple of Beijing cops investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two foreigners. On the surface, it appears like a murder-suicide, or possibly a double suicide. But for some reason, Nate knows it is more complicated than that. Gradually Nate discovers the case is entwined with an international quest for a small stone tablet, (a stele) that might contain the key to ancient China's long-lost link with the West.