Li Ting Lang

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.