Shanghai, 1927.
Lu Mansheng was a celebrated opera singer whose performance of Farewell My Concubine brought tears to the whole theater. Onstage, she was Consort Yu, ready to die for her King of Chu. Offstage, all she wanted was to find the enemy who had wiped out her family and win justice for them.
Gu Tingshen was the head of the French Concession’s chamber of commerce, always impeccably dressed and impeccably composed. Everyone said he was a businessman who cared about nothing but money. No one knew his other identity: “Lone Goose,” an undercover agent for the southern revolutionary government.
He approached her at first because of a mission. Her opera troupe was a hub where intelligence from every faction converged.
She fell for him one rainy night. He held an umbrella over her and said, “I’ve seen Boss Lu perform many times. But today was the first time I heard the resentment in your eyes.”
They thought they could offer each other a place to call home amid the chaos.
Until the day his own signature sent the senior fellow she considered family to the execution ground.
Wearing the dark green qipao he had given her, she stood before him, her eyes as cold as the Huangpu River on a winter night. “Gu Tingshen, are you my King of Chu, or my executioner?”
He had no answer.
Because he didn’t know the answer himself.
A year later, in Nanjing.
At the victory banquet, he was a hero of the revolutionary government.
Onstage, someone began to sing Farewell My Concubine.
His glass hit the floor. He sprang to his feet and rushed backstage like a madman.
There, he found a letter addressed to him and the jade hairpin he had given her.
The letter contained just one sentence:
“In our next life, don’t be a hero. Be my King of Chu instead, all right?”
