When We Were Orphans

the long version

After his parents are kidnapped in Shanghai, nine-year-old Christopher Banks returns to England from China, leaving the only home he has ever known. As he grows up, he attends Cambridge University and eventually fulfills his dream of becoming a detective. He is consumed by his parents’ disappearance and strives to return to Shanghai, changed by the widespread use of opium and the invasion of the Japanese during World War II, in order to discover what happened to them.