Over the next little while, Aston and Qin Siyu made further revisions to their paper and submitted it.
Reading through the finished work, Qin Siyu felt a twinge of envy.
Aston’s English was beautiful. Even in an academic paper, it showed the results of more than a decade of elite education.
Knowing he couldn’t write quite like that, Qin Siyu didn’t dwell on it. He felt envious for a moment… and then let the feeling pass.
He only hoped the paper would actually be published, discuss medical problems, offer useful recommendations, and genuinely help his application to medical school.
Getting into a prestigious medical school was extraordinarily difficult.
Many medical schools had adopted numerus clausus policies and racial quotas, admitting mainly white American men. Some were said to impose specific limits: fewer than five Jewish students, one Chinese student, and no Black students at all.
California was much the same. The Medical Practice Act of 1876 and the Medical Licensing Act of 1901 required anyone who wanted to practice medicine in California to graduate from designated schools, yet those schools refused to admit Chinese applicants. Things had improved slightly after the 1920s, when an occasional Chinese student might be admitted. Margaret Chung, for instance, had graduated from the University of Southern California. Some years those schools admitted one Chinese student; other years, none.
As for what would happen after graduation, Qin Siyu couldn’t afford to think that far ahead. Perhaps a path would open up by then. Hadn’t Margaret Chung become a resident at a public hospital in the East, held a regular position at a semi-public “railroad hospital” in Los Angeles, and eventually returned to open her own clinic? But it must have been terribly, terribly hard.
Apart from his academic work, attending classes, taking tests, helping Professor Watson with experiments, and writing the paper with Aston, Qin Siyu was also trying to gain hospital experience.
He applied for volunteer and observation programs at several major hospitals: spending time talking with and helping dying elderly patients who had no family, assisting doctors in remote rural areas, observing patient consultations and surgeries, helping out in laboratories, and so forth.
But not a single application received a response. Qin Siyu knew perfectly well that mainstream hospitals looked down on him.
Would he have no choice but to go to Chinatown’s Tung Wah Hospital, the only Western-style hospital in San Francisco’s Chinatown? Its predecessor had been established in 1899 with funds raised jointly by fifteen Chinese organizations, including the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. A further fund-raising drive and expansion in 1925 had turned it into the present Tung Wah Hospital.
Elio’s Notes: The original Tung Wah Dispensary opened in 1899. Its successor, officially known in English as Chinese Hospital, opened in 1925. The novel uses the Chinese name 东华医院 for both. Source: Chinese Hospital’s own history.
But would experience at that hospital carry enough weight for his application?
* * *
Lunar New Year fell on January 26 in 1933. It was the Year of the Rooster.
On New Year’s Eve, the Chinese students at Berkeley held a celebration on campus. Some were Chinese Americans; others had only recently come to the United States to study.
The newer international students brought fresh energy to the Chinese American students. They were constantly rehearsing plays and staging performances, eager to introduce China to other people.
Qin Siyu liked them very much. They worked tremendously hard, driven by a keen sense of national humiliation and responsibility. Most came from Tsinghua University. After all, its predecessor, Tsinghua School, had been founded in 1911 to prepare students for study in the United States using returned Boxer Indemnity funds. Only five years earlier, the Nationalist government had taken it over and renamed it National Tsinghua University.
For this year’s Lunar New Year celebration, the new students had come together to rehearse a play titled A New Mulan.
In 1914, Tsinghua pioneered the admission of women, enrolling a fixed quota of ten every two years. It was a tiny number, but at least it was a beginning. Female international students were now frequently seen, and Qin Siyu had several women friends among them.
Elio’s Notes: Tsinghua began selecting women for funded study in the United States in 1914. Those students did not attend classes on Tsinghua’s campus; women began studying there in 1928. Source: Tsinghua University Archives.
This year the women wanted to stage Mulan, and the men enthusiastically joined in.
A play naturally needed music. Since it was set in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the students had begun looking throughout Berkeley for anyone who could play traditional Chinese instruments as soon as they finished writing their script in late November.
As it happened, Qin Siyu could play the pipa. When he heard that his friends were looking for musicians, he offered to help.
Cantonese opera in Chinatown was enjoying its heyday.
San Francisco had several theaters. Seven or eight years earlier, the Grand Stage Theater and the Great China Theater had opened in succession, each seating more than seven hundred people. Both did bustling business.
When Qin Siyu was a child, going to university had seemed such an impossible dream that nobody imagined he or Lin Suyu would ever attend. Their parents and uncle had once hoped the children might make a living performing Cantonese opera.
Grandmother Jin Fanglian loved Cantonese opera and knew people in the business. Qin Siyu first learned the yueqin and later the pipa. It was because of that experience that he’d been able to do odd jobs at the opera theater and meet Professor Brown.
Suyu, meanwhile, learned the gaohu. Its register was already high, and she played it with such fierce, overpowering energy that she frightened her teacher.
After several rehearsals of Mulan, everyone was delighted with Qin Siyu’s performance.
Qin Siyu found the experience interesting too.
The female students proposed a novel interpretation: Mulan was Xianbei, and after the Xianbei underwent Sinicization she fought the Rouran for Northern Wei. Xianbei men and women alike were skilled riders and archers. Her supposed failure to reveal her identity came about, they argued, because the Xianbei had female soldiers and the poet simply did not say so outright. Even the lines spoken twelve years later, when the khan asked what she wished for and Mulan declined an official post, requesting a swift horse to take her home, were a romanticized account. In reality, their reading held, twelve years of Sinicization had left women unable to hold court office.
Thus, their new adaptation did not end happily for everyone. Mulan had gone to war and pursued her ambitions for more reasons than filial devotion. Nor did she simply return home after fighting in her father’s place, happily resume her identity, dress herself up, and tend to her family in peace. Instead, she carried a deep sense of grievance.
Behind her final monologue, the pipa rang out, forceful and bitter, then plaintive, winding, and wounded.
Qin Siyu practiced for a long time.
At the last rehearsal, perhaps because the emotions were fully realized at last, many of the women burst into tears. They felt the play would inspire women to accomplish great things of their own.
* * *
The formal celebration would take place in the afternoon.
That morning, Qin Siyu and Lin Suyu went back to Chinatown to enjoy the festivities.
New Year was so lively!
In recent years, major holidays had become even more bustling, part of the community’s effort to present a positive image of Chinese people.
There were float parades and Chinatown beauty contests—
Firecrackers were going off everywhere, with crowds of Western onlookers pressing together to watch.
A martial arts school was performing a lion dance. Drums and cymbals rang out, and one of the lions blinked its great eyes at Qin Siyu. He curled his lips in a smile, patted it on the head, and stroked its fur twice.
The theaters were staging numerous performances, and guests streamed through their doors in lively crowds.
Families everywhere were cleaning their homes and buying New Year goods, hanging spring couplets and New Year pictures on either side of their doors.
Most of the residents were Cantonese, so they also brought out their household shrines and honored their ancestors. Qin Siyu’s family set out several ancestral tablets, and his parents murmured prayers: “Keep us safe and sound, and let us make a fortune.”
Some Westerners were invited into Chinese households to celebrate, and their hosts brought out cakes and pastries to entertain them.
Red lanterns hung in the windows. By evening they would glow crimson.
Several people were discussing the beauty contest.
Lin Suyu told Qin Siyu, “When I said the other day that I wanted to enter the contest in a few years, Grandpa actually said I was ugly!”
Suyu had always been beautiful, so Qin Siyu was startled. “Ugly? What nonsense.”
“I don’t care anyway,” Suyu went on. “You know, Miss Chinatown doesn’t actually have to be beautiful! The money from ticket sales is donated to community organizations, like Tung Wah Hospital and the Chinese-language schools. Whoever sells the most tickets and brings the whole community together gets to be the famous ‘Miss Chinatown’!”
“Right.” Qin Siyu smiled. “Now I know, future famous Miss Chinatown.”
After spending the entire morning wandering around, Qin Siyu finally changed his clothes, picked up his pipa, and hurried to the venue when the celebration was about to begin.
* * *
Aston hadn’t seen Qin Siyu in quite some time. The next time he did, Qin was just about to reach the performance venue.
Qin Siyu was climbing the steps with his pipa in his arms, while Aston had finished some business inside the building and was coming out, with an overcoat draped over his forearm, about to descend the steps.
Qin Siyu noticed him first.
To be precise, Qin Siyu hadn’t exactly spotted Aston first. Wherever Aston went, everyone around him invariably turned to look. He attracted attention like a magnetic field, and nobody could overlook him.
Qin Siyu had been enjoying himself all morning and was in high spirits, so he called out teasingly, “Yo, Master~”
On the day Aston had bought condoms, Qin Siyu had heard his friend address him as “Master.” He assumed that must be what Aston’s household staff called him.
“…” Ignoring that title, Aston stood a few steps above Qin Siyu and looked him over. His eyes finally came to rest on the pipa. “What’s that…?”
Qin Siyu was wearing his best clothes. Holding the instrument, he tilted his neck up to look at Aston, his black hair smooth and glossy beneath Aston’s attentive gaze.
“A pipa.” Qin Siyu climbed another two steps and swept his fingers lightly across its strings without quite playing. “It’s Chinese New Year’s Eve. The Chinese students are putting on a show, and I’m providing some of the music.”
He wore the most “expensive-looking” shirt Aston had ever seen on him, almost like silk, soft and smooth.
“I didn’t know you could play that.” As though something had just occurred to him, Aston asked, “Are you good? An acquaintance of mine once attended one of Mei Lanfang’s opera performances. He liked it tremendously and never forgot it, but he’s never heard anything like it since. He even bought the sheet music, but couldn’t manage to reproduce it. If you can play this instrument—”
In truth, this person wasn’t much of a friend, merely a business acquaintance.
Qin Siyu understood.
Play a few pieces for him, then.
Mei Lanfang’s performances in America two years earlier had indeed been a sensation. Even in the Great Depression, tickets were almost impossible to obtain, every show sold out, prices were driven several times higher, and he was called back for curtain calls again and again. Beginning in New York’s old Broadway theater district, he toured many American cities over the course of half a year, introducing Americans to aspects of Chinese culture and storytelling.
The tour had been meticulously planned to introduce Peking opera. Qi Rushan, a key figure in the advisory team, had prepared four explanatory booklets in advance, covering Chinese theater, Mei Lanfang himself, musical scores, and descriptions of the plays. The music booklet transcribed Chinese gongche-style notation into Western staff notation, and the play guide explained the stories in detail.
Elio’s Notes: The original Chinese prints 公尺谱 here, but contemporary music records identify the system as 工尺谱, or gongche notation. Liu Tianhua transcribed Mei Lanfang’s operatic music into Western staff notation for the 1930 US tour. Sources: BFSU research and original-score catalogue.
Aston had helped him several times the previous year, so Qin Siyu naturally agreed to this request.
Still delighted by the day’s festivities, Qin Siyu merely curved his lips without answering. Instead, he swept his fingers over the pipa, plucking out two notes.
Aston understood them. Qin Siyu had looked right at him, cocked his head with an easy smile, and played one note for “O” and another for “K.”
O, K~
“…” Aston fell silent for a moment.
Qin Siyu plucked another sound, this time an “Emmm???”
A note that rose at the end.
Aston discovered that he always seemed a little helpless in Qin Siyu’s presence. He raised his eyes, looked at him, and said, “Fine. When can you be ready?”
“I’m not sure.” This time Qin Siyu answered with words instead of music. “Mr. Mei’s performances mainly use the jinghu. As for pipa passages… I’ll have to look. I’ll definitely have to choose the best bits. I’m not sure which piece or passage I can play, and I might need to consult my teachers a few times and adapt it. I’ll let you know once I’m ready.”
Aston did not press him. He merely nodded. “All right. Call me then.”
Qin Siyu carried his pipa into the building.
Just then a gust of wind outlined his slender, taut waist. Qin Siyu hugged the pipa closer. Apparently remembering that he’d forgotten to say goodbye to Aston, he started to turn his head to call out to him, but the Lunar New Year performance in the first-floor auditorium was about to begin. He had only turned slightly, revealing half his profile, before he hurriedly faced forward again and disappeared, without giving Aston the chance to hear another word.