Summary
A porcelain-fragile parable of exile unfurls beneath the nickel glare of 1920s Manhattan: Tsing Yu-Ch’ing, scholarly emissary of a crumbling dynasty, alights like a moth on the electric grids of Columbia lecture halls, his silken queue a calligraphic brushstroke against starched Western collars. He founds a Chinese-language broadsheet in a dank Mulberry cellar, ink-stained fingers conjuring revolutionary verses that flutter like wounded cranes across Lower East Side tenements. Into this fever dream drifts Kathleen Levinsky—blind since birth, her irises clouded opals—daughter of a Yiddish tenor and an Irish seamstress who stitched shrouds during the 1916 flu. Their first touch occurs in a rain-lashed Chinatown alley: his umbrella spokes a pagoda above her, her cane taps Morse code on his patent-leather shoes. When Dr. Hardwick—Harvard polo star, eugenicist poster boy—restores her sight via corneal graft, the world erupts into cruel chroma: Tsing’s cheekbones too sharp, skin the tint of oolong steeped too long. Meanwhile, the Hatchetman stalks the Bowery, cleaving lovers in a ritual as ancient as any ancestor cult. Tsing, wielding a calligraphy blade, intercepts the killer beneath the Manhattan Bridge, sacrificing his own face to save the girl who now cannot bear to look at him. He sails home, swallows cyanide in a Suzhou garden, certain that death will bleach his pigment to the pallor she desires. Left behind, Kathleen caresses Hardwick’s surgeon hands, her gaze already glazing with the same cataract of forgetting that once shrouded her eyes.
Synopsis
Tsing Yu-Ch'ing, a young Chinese, is sent to the U.S. from his native land to study Western civilization and carry on work for his government. After attending an American university, Tsing starts a Chinese newspaper in New York City, and falls in love with a pretty blind girl, Kathleen Levinsky, the daughter of a Jewish father and an Irish mother. Kathleen's life is barren of love and she gladly accepts his attentions. When Dr. Hardwick, a classmate from college, calls on Tsing and meets Kathleen, he offers to cure her blindness through surgery. The operation is a success, but the newly-sighted Kathleen is visibly upset by Tsing's appearance. After saving Kathleen from a killer known as the Hatchetman, Tsing returns to China and commits suicide, believing he will find eternal love with her in the afterlife. Back in the U.S., a mutual attraction develops between Kathleen and Dr. Hardwick.
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