-- Can't say anything for a moment, only a deep sigh.
This novel is about what happened in the 1980s between a group of gay men of mixed Chinese and Western descent who immigrated to the United States.
The author uses half of the novel's energy to describe the happy life of this group of people. At the head of the group, an elderly couple born in Shanghai and a family friend have been together for 40 years, and have opened a restaurant that is a place for everyone to live, both physically and mentally.
The hero is a financial quality man, his lover is a handsome and sunny college students. The love between them is no different from heterosexuality. Remember those little details, they like to sit on the balcony, drinking milk tea and tasting pastries from the pastry store downstairs.
Novels don't run smoothly, and twists and turns are inevitable. The twists in this novel leave the audience breathless.
The hero gave his lover a Lycra camera, but he didn't expect his lover to meet the robbers, and was thrown into the subway tracks during the struggle, and was ushered into the train crushed into a pile of mush.......
The hero collapsed into amnesia and ran away from his home country, and he was gone for five years.
Five years later, he returns to his old hotel, trying to find his friends, and everything is different. The restaurant has turned into a down-and-dirty bar, and his chef friend has died ......
He rushes to his elderly companion's house, and luckily everyone is there, but one of them has had a stroke and is having a hard time.
The plague of the eighties in the United States (AIDS) takes the lives of young people. The hero flees the city for love and the plague havoc.
The older partner ultimately decides to go to Shanghai to find his roots and, upon returning to the United States, chooses to take his own life, embracing the world ......
The novel ends with a scene in which everyone says goodbye to the older partner, who is lying in bed and has left. People have no tears, or refuse to let them slide.
For all of them, it was for the best, as one of the older mates also had the plague and had only three months to live.
There are two points in this novel that hurt me:
One is the sudden death of the college student. Hurt as a teenager by his parents' divorce and family turmoil, he meets the hero and is loved and cared for completely, even perfectly, as if reborn.
The second is the death of an older partner. Death is the end for everyone, we cannot choose whether to die or not, yet we can choose when and how we die when we are healthy.
I don't feel they are running away from anything, rather I feel complete that they are leaving with courage and self-respect.
Even though it's only fiction and in the faraway United States, the announcer's voice just went a little bit into the heart, allowing me to witness the whole thing and weep with everyone's sadness and joy.
I saw the message area, someone said, "an AIDS talk so emotional". Then I heard another teacher's lesson on "Is it my fault I'm sick?" I've heard another teacher's lesson on "Is it my fault I'm sick?
The former demeaned AIDS and the people who suffer from it, arguing that bad lifestyles such as gay sex and promiscuity are the cause of the pandemic. The latter clears away the "stigma" of the disease. Diseases are just diseases. Most of society disapproves of homosexuality, so they find a disease that scares people enough to establish a causal link between it and homosexuality. That's it.
I don't want to comment too much on the above because I know very little.
I'll conclude by recording how I felt the first time I listened to the song 'Tea for Two' - it was very out of place with the novel, too joyful and dynamic.
It's impossible to imagine how the author could have connected the song to this story.
But they just encountered each other and melted together. That's the marvelous thing about life, isn't it?