Summary
On a New-England campus where jazz-age chandeliers drip like liquefied diamonds, Li Ting Lang—laconic, magnetic, silk-scarved—sketches calligraphic futures across lecture notes. His gaze snares Marion Halstead, flaxen heiress whose laughter shatters crystal. Their courtship detonates social landmines: fraternity boys brandish racism like sabers, while drawing-room matrons hiss about occidental propriety. Marion, in a blaze of champagne audacity, declares Li her fiancé, yet every handshake grows colder, every ballroom door narrower, until she becomes gilded exile in her own city. Sensing the hush that will calcify around her, Li dissolves the engagement with a paper-cut smile and vanishes—drugged, abducted, freighted homeward on a steamer that smells of camphor and gunpowder. Rumor swallows him: suicide in the Charles River. Across the Pacific, dynastic cannons roar; Li, reborn strategist, commands tattered armies through monsoon nights, his silhouette inked against jade lightning. Years later, Marion—now Mrs. Someone-Else—honeymoons in a treaty-port city where lanterns bob like severed moons. She glimpses Li on a rain-slick balcony, epaulettes glinting. Pursued by assassins who would frame him for her murder, Marion seeks refuge in his courtyard of plum trees and ancestral ghosts. Li fights blade-for-blade until college comrades—once thought scattered to Wall Street and Prohibition speakeasies—storm the compound, guns blazing. Reunion crackles with old fight songs and brandy; dawn finds Marion sailing away beside a husband she half-remembers, while Li stands amid spent cartridges, alone again, flag snapping crimson above the Huangpu.
Synopsis
College student Li Ting Lang is a favorite of his friends until his attentions toward socialite Marion Halstead bring forth protests on all sides. In defiance, Marion announces her engagement to Li Ting Lang. Gradually, she becomes socially isolated and Li, realizing that she will be friendless, releases her from her commitment. Soon after, an emissary to America arrives with instructions to compel Li to return to his native land and administers a drug to Li, who awakens aboard a ship bound for China, while back in America, his friends believe that he has committed suicide. Li arrives in the middle of a revolution and becomes a great military leader. Years later, while visiting the Orient on her honeymoon, Marion sees Li and recognizes him. Venturing to his house, she is followed by one of his enemies who plans to kill the girl and throw the guilt on Li, thereby ruining him. When the plotters arrive, Li defends Marion single handed until a rescue party of his old college chums comes to his aid. After a warm reunion among old friends, Marion departs with her husband, and Li is sadly left alone once again.
