When Qin Siyu woke again, he was bewildered for a moment.
He was actually still alive.
Luckily, he had managed to buy enough time. Every member of the medical staff and every wounded man had been evacuated. Reinforcements had finally arrived, and he had survived!
The people who rescued him later said that his white coat had been soaked in blood.
When they reached the roof of the second floor, they had seen Qin Siyu crawling toward them across the ground, his eyes raised. Behind him stood the most advanced heavy machine gun, the Browning M2, still mounted and aimed below. He was covered in blood, like an asura from hell.
After hearing this, Qin Siyu collapsed again and fell asleep.
When Qin Siyu opened his eyes the second time, he was more alert. Having forgotten that he had already woken once, he asked again whether everyone had escaped and received the same reassuring answer.
This time he was much clearer-headed. Looking over his body and feeling his head, he discovered bandages around his shoulder and head.
“The cartilage in your shoulder was penetrated,” a doctor told him. “But if it heals normally, it shouldn’t leave any lasting effects.”
Qin Siyu nodded. “All right.”
He was a surgeon himself. He knew that well enough.
But for some reason, ever since the grenade blast had thrown him over, his memory had become foggy. His knowledge remained, his skills were intact, but his memories seemed to be hidden behind a gauzy veil.
He could remember only what had happened since his arrival on Saipan. Only his recent memories remained.
A few days later, looking at photographs, he gradually remembered Lin Xiangmei, Qin Sanfu, and Lin Suyu: everyone in the pictures he had brought with him.
Lin Xiangmei had said, “A-Yu, A-Yu, are you really going to fight the Japanese—”
Qin Sanfu, whose New Year’s wish had always been to “make a fortune,” had wished for something entirely different that Spring Festival: “Please keep A-Yu safe and sound…”
Lin Suyu had said, “I’ve applied to join the war too. I want to fight the Japanese as well.”
But Qin Siyu kept feeling that there was someone else.
Someone who mattered to him more than anyone in his life.
Who was it?
He had asked his roommate whether these were the only photographs he’d brought and whether he had ever looked at any others in his spare time.
“Huh?” His roommate was confused. “Those family photos were all you brought. They’re the only ones you ever looked at.”
Qin Siyu: “…Really?”
Who was it?
He strained desperately to remember.
There was someone. There had to be.
The most important person in his life.
In truth, he had not remembered much about Qin Sanfu, Lin Xiangmei, or Lin Suyu either. But Qin Siyu could no longer concern himself with that. He devoted himself entirely to searching for the other person.
Over the next two weeks, he remained very quiet, thinking and thinking. Gradually, fragments began coming to him without warning.
Whenever he saw some bird fly past the window, a conversation sounded in his head: “What’s your favorite animal?” “A bird, too.”
The first voice was his. The second belonged to that person. It was low, sensual, with a distinctive accent.
When he took off his watch, the voice sounded again: “It seems you’re holding something of mine.” “There should be the first letter of my surname beneath the dial—”
During a lull in the fighting, the unit held a dance. As Qin Siyu watched the dance floor, the voice returned: “Don’t just move your legs when you dance. That uses up far too much energy—”
“My name means ‘Eastern town.’”
“Truly Beautiful. Does that suit him?”
“Merry Christmas.”
“A friend of mine once attended a performance by Mei Lanfang—”
“If I love someone, I will be there. Always.”
“It wanted to attack you. That means it deserved to die.”
“My wish is very difficult to fulfill.”
“Now, do you intend to kiss the person opposite you?”
“We’ve kissed again, as two men, my dear Sean.”
“We were only acting on impulse. We’re not homosexuals.”
“I love you.”
“Seany, Sean Chin, I promise you: from this moment, starting today, you and I will share life and death.”
“…for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us apart.”
…
So many. So very many.
Some of the sounds were even his own desperate cries: “Kingsy!” mixed with fighter engines and Christmas music. It was all so absurd.
More and more memories came back. Perhaps the hematoma in his brain had finally cleared; perhaps it was something else. One day, two weeks after waking from his injuries, a pair of blue eyes suddenly appeared in his mind.
Then the memories poured in, like an ocean flooding his brain.
He remembered everything.
His Kingsy.
His Kingsy.
The person he loved with his entire heart and soul.
Every encounter, every moment, came rushing back, each trying to enter his mind first.
He sat up in bed, covered his face, and began to sob.
Thank goodness he’d remembered. His relief and joy moved him to tears.
He had experienced a love like that. For the rest of his life, he would be grateful for it.
Kingsy had already forgotten him. If this time Qin Siyu had failed to remember, the final ending of their story would have been two people who once loved each other so deeply forgetting one another forever.
Thank goodness he remembered.
At least one person still remembered their romance of nearly ten years.
The medical unit’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harrison, happened to visit him then. The sight startled him. “You remembered? There really was someone else?”
Qin Siyu covered his face and nodded. “My former lover.”
The man hesitated briefly. “Before you went up to the roof, you said you’d ‘never marry.’ Was it because of her?”
Qin Siyu nodded once. Harrison asked no more.
Qin Siyu’s eyes reddened again.
Thank goodness. He had remembered everything.
Although he had survived, Lieutenant Colonel Harrison told Qin Siyu, “For your protection, it would be best if you assumed a different identity.”
Qin Siyu listened quietly.
“We’re all grateful to you…” Harrison spoke tactfully, but as an officer with command responsibilities his tone carried considerable resolve. “But you’re a doctor, and you killed people. And… you used an M2 heavy machine gun. It couldn’t have been accidental. You killed perhaps more than a hundred.”
Qin Siyu did not think that was many. In fact, he thought it was too few.
“You killed too many. There were seventy Japanese bodies just outside the hospital, and those are only the confirmed ones,” the lieutenant colonel said. “The Geneva Convention absolutely forbids medical personnel from killing people, and also forbids others from killing medical personnel. But the Japanese hadn’t entered the hospital yet. You opened fire on them first with a Browning heavy machine gun. You fired the first shot. If I report what actually happened, I can’t predict the outcome. You might be sent back to America, even court-martialed… I know you don’t want to go back. We’re about to win, and you deserve to stay to the end. I’ve discussed it with senior officers. We agree it may be better to record Sean Chin as killed in action, then let you continue serving under a new identity. We can reconsider after the war.”
Elio’s Notes: Harrison’s statements about the Geneva Conventions are presented as his character’s understanding, not as a definitive legal account. Humanitarian law permits protected medical personnel to use light individual weapons in defense of themselves or the wounded in their care; operating a crew-served heavy machine gun raises different protection issues. The novel’s decision to create a false military identity is also fictional. Source: ICRC, Medical Personnel and the Law of Armed Conflict.
Qin Siyu nodded.
The lieutenant colonel already had a plan. “You could use a similar name. Shane Chin, for example. After the war, if there’s no danger of prosecution, I can help explain what happened, establish your real identity, and merge your records. Others can help too. If the risk remains, you can use the new name to claim your pay, compensation, benefits, perhaps even a decoration. You shouldn’t be deprived of those. Of course, we’ll have to think through how to create the new identity. For now, I’m checking the first step before moving to the rest.”
Qin Siyu didn’t particularly care. “All right.”
“You can’t stay with this unit, either,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Everyone knows you. We can’t have a dead man coming back to life. Sean, is there another theater of war where you’d like to serve?”
After a moment’s thought, Qin Siyu asked, “Could I go to China?”
Very few Americans were stationed in China, but there were some. Japan was massing forces for something called “Operation Ichi-Go.” Qin Siyu wanted to go to China.
The lieutenant colonel considered it briefly. “That could work. It’ll also make creating a new identity easier. The Fourteenth Air Force needs people, and ninety-five percent of its members are Chinese Americans.”
Elio’s Notes: The novel attributes a 95% Chinese American composition to the entire Fourteenth Air Force. The U.S. Army Center of Military History instead documents a predominantly Chinese American 14th Air Service Group, a support formation, rather than ninety-five percent of the whole air force. The author’s dialogue is retained as written. Source: U.S. Army Center of Military History.
“Thank you.” Qin Siyu smiled. “They’d all be my countrymen, then.”
With the permission and assistance of senior officers, the arrangements went fairly smoothly.
An American couple living in Shanghai acknowledged Qin Siyu as their son, saying he’d been born in China in 1915 and now wished to enlist. And so he acquired a name, a military record, and everything else all over again. This time he was called “Kingsley Chin.”
He thought of Christmas 1941 and what the two of them had discussed then: if they managed to escape, Kingsley would take his surname, Qin, and become “Kingsley Chin.” But they had failed to get away, and that name had never existed in the world for even a single day.
But now it could exist.
At first he was assigned to support operations in Yunnan.
He had left China at the age of two. Twenty-seven years had passed. At last he set foot on Chinese soil again, though in a way he could never have imagined.
Throughout the flight he kept his eyes lowered toward the view outside. After the plane landed, he stepped out, crouched gently, and touched the earth. Taking a little soil between his fingertips, he raised it to his lips and kissed it.
After twenty-seven years, he had come home.
In 1944, as part of an advisory group, he accompanied the Chinese Expeditionary Force across the Nu River into Burma to launch a counteroffensive against Japan.
The Battle of Mount Song was desperately bloody. Every inch of ground had been soaked with blood, every inch of earth scorched. The fighting ran from June to September, and the Japanese forces were wiped out.
Even after being annihilated, the Japanese invented a word to glorify their fate: “gyokusai,” or “shattering like jade.”
The battle’s significance was profound, and its cost tragic. Chinese casualties were enormous. When victory finally came, so many people burst into tears.
After the turning point at Mount Song, the Burma Road was finally recovered and reopened by January.
Then Qin Siyu was transferred to the Fourteenth Air Force.
By this point, the Fourteenth Air Force’s objectives had changed. Rather than primarily protecting transportation, it now focused on supporting Chinese troops in Hunan, Hubei, and elsewhere: reconnaissance, bombing, and attacks on Japanese supply lines, railways, roads, waterways, airfields, strongholds, assembly areas, and more.
There were even more ethnic Chinese personnel in the Fourteenth Air Force. Qin Siyu liked it here far more than the Pacific, where he had never felt so comfortable.
Once, after they had picked up wounded men from the front, the pilot was unexpectedly hit!
More than antiaircraft guns, what everyone feared was soldiers on the ground spraying the sky with machine-gun fire. That was exactly what happened: bullets pierced their plane’s cockpit and wounded the pilot.
Qin Siyu was a physician. Judging by the bleeding, he knew the pilot was about to go into shock.
“…” In the emergency, Qin Siyu took over.
He had never been taught to fly, but he’d watched it done every day, and had picked up something.
Bullets were still flying below. Qin Siyu pulled the aircraft up, radioed for instructions, and finally managed to land under the guidance of the ground crew at the airfield.
Another time, in the summer of 1945, Japanese forces shot down a plane carrying Qin Siyu. They landed in enemy-controlled territory.
But New Fourth Army soldiers operating behind enemy lines in central China risked their lives, crossing the blockade to rescue them.
Qin Siyu stayed with them for a while.
Qin Siyu was so mild-tempered that the soldiers loved teasing him. Their favorite question was, “Dr. Chin, how do you say ‘sulfa’ in English?”
Sulfa drugs were among the most important antibacterial medicines of the war, although Americans were now turning to penicillin.
Good-naturedly, Qin Siyu answered, “Sulfanilamide.”
The word was ridiculously long and sounded so strange that they dissolved into laughter. They summoned others to listen and asked him, “Dr. Chin, could you say ‘sulfa’ once more?”
“Sulfanilamide,” Qin Siyu repeated.
Everyone laughed again. Qin Siyu laughed with them.
For the first time in a very long while, he felt a little happy.
He was on Chinese soil, and Japan was about to lose. It had been three and a half years since the winter night when he and Kingsy parted. For the first time in all that time, he felt a little happiness.
He even discovered an X-ray machine at the base hospital that he himself had purchased!
He’d bought it in 1938.
What a delightful surprise.
But… he’d obtained it from a certain company with Kingsy’s help.
Qin Siyu realized that his life could never be separated from Kingsy’s. Traces of him were everywhere.
They also asked Qin Siyu to teach the medical staff some techniques, reasoning that American medicine must have developed new methods. Qin Siyu liked these people and wracked his brains, managing to come up with several things he thought might be useful.
After he returned to the Fourteenth Air Force, Chennault even wrote a letter to Zhu De thanking them.
Qin Siyu remained in China as victory drew closer, little by little, staying until August 1945.