On Wednesday, after his last class ended at three in the afternoon, Qin Siyu made another trip home to see Lin Xiangmei.
The mourning hall hadn’t been completely dismantled. He helped Lin Xiangmei clear it away and clean the rooms, restoring the house to its usual appearance. In his own room stood a small altar table bearing Jin Fanglian’s ancestral spirit tablet. Incense and candles flanked it, with an incense burner in front. It would remain until the end of the seven seven-day mourning periods. Life had to go on. In most households, once the funeral procession was over, the rooms had to be put back in order.
Qin Siyu washed some apples and set them on a plate for Grandma.
Her remains were being kept at the native-place association.
This was customary. Everyone wanted to return to their roots. Jin Fanglian had died here, away from home, and by the old way of thinking that made her a wandering, lonely spirit. Only burial back in one’s homeland could bring the soul peace.
The native-place association would take care of it. Every few months it arranged for a group of Chinese people’s remains to be escorted home for burial. Nowadays it was often ashes. A few decades earlier, the association would provide a temporary burial site, exhume the bones after several months, seal them in boxes with tea leaves and other burial offerings, and send them on the long, difficult journey across the ocean to Guangzhou.
For many people it was their first return to China since leaving home, and they returned only as bones.
Grandma was one of them.
In death, she could finally return to China, the land she had yearned for and dreamed about all her life.
While taking down the mourning hall, Qin Siyu discovered that the funeral couplet he had written before setting it up had somehow torn in two. The three characters of his name, ‘Qin Siyu,’ had been ripped apart and fallen onto the floor.
His heart gave a little jump. He glanced at Grandma’s memorial tablet and had the sudden feeling that perhaps she knew something already, and was rejecting him.
He silently picked up the paper bearing his name, went to the outer room, and threw it away without saying anything. He didn’t put it with the other funeral materials to burn as offerings for Grandma.
Perhaps… Grandma truly didn’t want it?
That evening Qin Siyu went to the hospital again.
He had taken Sunday off. To make up the missed time, he had moved his shift to tonight.
As luck would have it, the hospital was exceptionally busy.
First two young men were brought in with their bodies horribly bloodied and battered, barely alive. Dr. Sterling frowned and directed the medical staff in their emergency treatment.
Both men’s skin had been torn open. One was unconscious, with a head injury and several facial lacerations. The corner of his mouth had been torn apart, and half his lip hung loose, a dreadful sight.
The other had fractured ribs and was continually coughing or spraying blood. His lung had undoubtedly sustained a severe injury too.
The first man’s breathing was unstable. Dr. Sterling examined his pupils, but neither eye responded to light, an extremely bad sign.
He intended to perform emergency burr-hole surgery on the skull, to relieve pressure and remove as much of the hematoma as possible. He instructed other staff to take X-rays of the second young man.
The police arrived as well. The doctors had to treat their patients while also reporting to the police. The emergency room descended into chaos.
The X-rays showed that the second man also needed surgery. His ribs were fractured and there was a serious problem with his lung.
Amid the turmoil, another patient arrived.
A woman had suddenly vomited a large quantity of blood and was suffering intense upper-abdominal pain. Her pulse was racing, her face was pale, and she had been in shock for some time.
A tall red-haired woman accompanied her, trembling from head to toe.
An X-ray showed free gas somewhere around the stomach, suggesting a possible perforation. She too needed immediate surgery to open the abdomen, remove gastric acid and food debris, irrigate the abdominal cavity, and repair the perforation.
“We don’t have enough people!” Dr. Sterling said. “Get the other surgeons over here!”
A nurse hurried away to telephone them.
Qin Siyu worked through the night and only had a brief chance to rest the following morning.
The white woman with the gastric perforation had undergone a successful operation, but the infection risk remained high. Once her abdomen was opened, the doctors had also established that the perforation was caused by cancer. Whatever happened, she didn’t have long to live.
Of the two young men, the one with broken ribs and a bruised lung was relatively better off. He regained consciousness that morning.
But the young man with the head injury and torn face might never open his eyes again.
Dr. Sterling said the bleeding had been massive, the brain tissue displaced to one side, and the herniation severe. He was very likely to die.
After the patients had all been moved to wards, several members of staff began talking quietly.
A nurse had actually seen the two men the previous night on her way to work.
“They were homosexuals,” she whispered. “Someone followed them. A whole mob attacked them. They suspected the two men were homosexuals, doing that sort of thing, because of the way they looked at each other. So they followed them in secret, and sure enough!”
Qin Siyu’s fingers trembled slightly.
“Do you know why the man in room 201 is doing better? He’s already awake,” the nurse continued. “Because while they were beating him, he screamed his lungs out—”
The nurse imitated the man’s voice, and her shrieks echoed down the quiet corridor like a ghost’s: “He pointed at the other man and screamed, ‘He’s the one who’s been forcing me! Help me! It’s all his fault! He’s been forcing me the whole time! He threatened me whenever I refused!’”
The others asked, “What about the other man?”
“They were accusing each other!” the nurse said. “The other one shouted, ‘Bullshit! You were shaking your backside at me day and night, trying to seduce me! You got me drunk, had sex with me, and then threatened me!’ Of course both of them were lying. They live near my house. Once, on my way to a night shift, I saw them all lovey-dovey, clinging to each other. Then once something happened, each wanted everyone to beat the other!”
The people around her looked disgusted. “How ugly!” How revolting!
One even said, “That’s just how homosexuals are, isn’t it? They’re homosexual because they’re selfish and only care about pleasure. No surprise something like this happened.”
Qin Siyu was silent.
These were normally compassionate medical workers, angels in white who hoped to save as many patients as they could. Yet now they showed almost no sympathy.
Someone asked, “If they accused each other, why did they keep beating the one in 201?”
“The one in 201 started it,” the nurse explained. “And I think the other, the one on the bottom, was easier to beat to death. So he hurried to say all sorts of things. He said that the man in 201 was a teacher who corrupted his students…”
An older nurse, who had worked there for years, wasn’t surprised in the slightest. “It always happens that way. I’ve seen it plenty of times.”
Qin Siyu steadied his voice. “Do you… see this kind of thing often?”
“Of course.” The older nurse shrugged. “It happens much more often than ordinary people know. The police and reporters never give the real reason someone was beaten to death. They just say ‘street brawl,’ ‘gang revenge,’ and the like. The families prefer it that way too, because it’s a little more respectable. Anyway, some of the people injured or killed in those ‘street brawls’ may have been homosexuals. At the end of it all, a sentence like ‘They argued on the street and got into a fight’ settles the matter.”
Settles the matter.
Qin Siyu’s vision suddenly swam. He forced himself to stay calm.
He saw the two men again in his mind.
Their faces distorted, their eyes vacant, noses broken, lips hanging loose. And after they died in the hospital, were they simply buried with a certificate saying they had been killed in a street brawl?
Their lives would be over, and that would be the final verdict.
“Well…” At last someone voiced a little regret. “Only thirty-seven. So young.”
Thirty-seven.
Qin Siyu thought: Kingsy is nineteen this year.
About half that man’s age.
And if something happened to Kingsy, his classmates would no longer talk about how dazzling he was. All his pride and brilliance would be forgotten. People would remember him only by saying, “How strange. Kingsley Aston was killed in a street brawl!”
Then he would vanish from the campus.
After that, the man Cliff called the most admired business legend in American history would simply come to an abrupt end. Everything would be wiped away, and no one would ever know.
He blinked.
For an instant Qin Siyu thought, If we’re destined never to be together, why did we meet each other on the worst day of each of our lives?
He had resolved to steal something, and Kingsy had just endured the harshest punishment of his life and gone to pray to God.
Why?
Was it only to torment them?
When he went outside, the daylight was dim.
The rainy season was approaching. Distant thunder sounded near the horizon, like a wordless warning.
Qin Siyu was still trembling all over.
He had never seen this with his own eyes before. The shock was impossible to describe.
After working the entire night, he went back to Berkeley and climbed onto his narrow bed for some sleep.
At first he couldn’t sleep. He picked up a medical journal and flipped through it, hoping to distract himself.
Instead, he found the magazine devoting considerable space to a new treatment: electric-shock aversion.
Elio’s Notes: Electric-shock aversion programs targeting homosexuality are best documented from the mid-twentieth century, especially the 1960s, not as established treatments in 1933. This is also distinct from electroconvulsive therapy, which was first used in 1938. The novel’s chronology is preserved. Sources: British Medical Journal oral-history study and The Origins of Electroconvulsive Therapy.
It claimed that for “sexual perverts,” besides hypnosis and hormone treatments, doctors could attempt “electric-shock aversion.”
The idea was to associate the stimulus of homosexuality with intense pain, binding them together into a conditioned response until the patient developed revulsion.
Patients were to be shown images while given severe electric shocks, the two experiences repeatedly paired. The procedure could also be combined with verbal suggestion, psychotherapy, emetics, and other drugs, with treatment continuing until the patient acquired an association between seeing and feeling disgust.
The article claimed that many patients’ families praised and thanked the doctors for the treatment.
Qin Siyu went on to read the section on “other treatments” carefully.
For example, hormone injections.
Some people would be given male hormones, others female hormones. After the injections—
Kingsley Aston…
Someone as proud as him would go mad, wouldn’t he?
All for Qin Siyu’s sake? Was it worth it?
What in the world should he do? Nothing was irreversible yet.
Should he let himself be pushed onward, or—
Unable to make sense of any of it, Qin Siyu closed the magazine and tossed it onto the floor. His mind felt foggy and heavy.
He had never experienced a time when he had absolutely no idea what to do.
Still dazed, he finally fell asleep. Before long, he began to dream.
In the dream, he and Kingsy were both bound to railings beside the road.
A huge crowd surrounded them, brandishing clubs and screaming, “Homosexuals! Disgusting homosexuals!”
Several white men pointed angrily at him. “A Chinese man doing something this filthy! Seducing a white man into homosexuality!”
Some girls looked at the handsome white man’s face and simply couldn’t understand it. “Why? Why would he be with another man?”
More and more people joined them, snickering and staring as if they were visiting a zoo. Several neighbors from their respectable middle-class community cursed them: “Don’t bring that sickness into the Sunset District! Get out!”
Others whispered, “That white fellow looks rich… Shall we turn out his pockets?”
Qin Siyu struggled with all his might to break free of the ropes. Ahead, someone kicked over a garbage can at the mouth of an alley, picked up a rotten piece of fruit, and hurled it at his head. The peach burst on impact and slid down, leaving his black hair wet and sticky.
It was as though the peach were a signal. Countless pieces of garbage immediately rained down on them.
A drunk came over carrying a glass bottle and looked Qin Siyu up and down. At that moment, unlike the men Qin Siyu had seen in the hospital, Aston stared at the crowd and spoke in that distinctive accent of his, enunciating every word: “I was the one who forced him. I beg you to let him go.”
So the glass bottle was smashed against Aston’s head. Blood rolled down his temple and cheek, staining his golden hair red in the moonlight, lurid and terrifying.
They struggled for breath in the cold night. Someone grabbed Aston by his golden hair. Seeing his face, they grew furiously jealous and began using shards of glass to slash it. Each passerby came forward with another bottle to break over his head, then cut his face again. His skin was crisscrossed with bloody gashes. In places, white bone showed through.
His handsome face was torn apart, and the crowd rejoiced.
Even James, the one whose face Aston had once stepped on, came running over to avenge the humiliation. He screeched, “Hahahaha! I knew it! So that’s what you two are! You filthy bastards, hiding something so shameful!”
Lin Xiangmei ran to the scene too. She knelt on the ground and begged the crowd, “My son will get better. He’ll get better!”
She was accused of having failed to raise her son properly, of letting him seduce men, even white men. Someone struck her with a club and knocked her to the ground, where she began to convulse.
Gradually Aston’s head sank. He vomited blood in great pools, splashing onto the ground like clusters of cranberries.
His breathing grew faint. Yet Qin Siyu felt that he could still hear him calling, “Seany.”
At last Aston stopped moving.
He was dead.
Qin Siyu jerked awake, drenched in sweat.
His arms and legs were weak, but his heart raced wildly. He lay limp on the bed, unable to move. He wanted to get up, but couldn’t.
He stared at the white ceiling. The longer he stared, the more he thought it was stained with blood, drops falling onto his face. His facial muscles twitched, and the little mole beneath his eye seemed about to burn.
Was that mole really foretelling something, or perhaps trying to warn him?
Qin Siyu struggled to steady his breathing. A long time passed before strength returned to his body. He stumbled into the bathroom and washed his face with cold water. Was happiness always destined to end?
He was due to meet Aston at noon. Numbly he packed his schoolbag, numbly walked out the door, and just as numbly reached the dining hall.
His grandmother had died only recently. He hadn’t been visiting the “secret base” with Aston lately, choosing instead to go home and keep Lin Xiangmei company.
During this period he and Aston had actually seen each other more often at school.
“Sean?” Aston could tell something was wrong at a glance. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” Qin Siyu rubbed his face. “The hospital was so busy last night. I worked straight through and I’m exhausted.”
“Get some rest,” Aston said. “Don’t push yourself too hard.”
Qin Siyu didn’t want to talk about the hospital. He changed the subject, spotting several books on the table. “What’s this one?”
Aston glanced at him and smiled. He opened the book with a few fingers. “A flora.”
“A flora?”
“Yes. And this other one is an illustrated guide to tropical plants. You mentioned last time that your grandmother missed the kapok flowers back home, but you had never seen them yourself. I looked in the library over the last couple of days, and I actually found photographs.”
Qin Siyu’s fingers stopped moving. “Kingsy…”
“What’s more,” Aston went on, looking rather pleased, “I found one printed in color.”
The books had bookmarks tucked inside. Aston opened them one after another. “This one has finely detailed color illustrations. This one has black-and-white photographs. And this one shows specimen details, enlargements of the petals and stamens. Seas of blooming kapok really are beautiful. Your hometown is lovely in spring and summer.”
Qin Siyu lowered his eyes to the brilliantly vivid flowers on the pages.
His eyes grew wet. He couldn’t tell whether it was because of his grandmother or the person sitting opposite him.
Aston said gently, “Biologists have developed something new in the past couple of years, an electron microscope. I’m sure you know more about it than I do. Look at this one: it even photographs the texture and structure of the petals.”
Qin Siyu parted his lips.
For an instant, he wanted to say, Let’s run away together.
They could escape to some corner of the world.
They would hide there, working and living together, embracing and kissing and making love freely, never emerging again for the rest of their lives.
But where?
The world was so vast, and yet it seemed there was not one corner of it with room for the two of them.