Our Violent Ends

“[Juliette] wondered if her tone still fooled anyone. In New York, she had been so good at lying, so good at playing pretend as an utterly different person. These last months had been wearing her down until there was nothing left of her but…her.”

Juliette feels more of her true self revealed in Shanghai than she did in New York. In some ways, this is ironic; at this point in the novel, she is lying to virtually everyone closest to her, intentionally making herself appear crueler than she is to keep her loved ones safe. This feeling about her true self indicates the extent to which Juliette’s return to Shanghai is a homecoming. Her true self is more the gangster princess than the American-educated socialite, and she feels the image of the violent, wily criminal leader fits her better than the airy Western persona she was forced to adopt when away from home.

“[Roma] looked unfamiliar—properly foreign, like a boy who had pulled on a costume and hadn’t expected how well it would fit.”

In contrast to Juliette’s increased sense of being herself without a mask is Roma’s unfamiliar aspect once he embraces the violence that he once struggled so hard to reject. Describing him as “foreign” in this way counteracts the novel’s treatment of the Russians and White Flowers as separate from the European colonizers; the Russians may not be Chinese, but they are not, per the text, quite “foreign” either. Given that “foreigners” and “colonizers” are used nearly interchangeably in the novel, this angry version of Roma is thus characterized as a colonization of himself, a violent, wrong intrusion.

“No longer is the madness a contagious matter. The madness strikes at will now, at the whims and mercy of whoever controls the monster.”

Chloe Gong complicates her use of “madness” as a symbol. In These Violent Delights, the infection of “madness” that caused Shanghai residents to tear out their own throats was characterized by chaos. It appeared randomly, with the symptoms (the “madness”) glimpsed far more frequently than the source (the monster). Gong subverts the traditional horror expectations regarding “madness” by making the “madness” controlled and more predictable. In doing so, she offers that controlled violence may be just as dangerous as random, uncontrolled violence—perhaps even more so.

“At the heart of the matter, [Tyler] and Paul were not so different, were they? Boys who tried to do the best for the people they cared about, not concerned for the collateral damage they might wreak in the process.”

In highlighting the intent behind the actions of two of the duology’s primary antagonists, Gong suggests that good intentions do not make violence excusable. Paul and Tyler are both characterized as being particularly violent not despite their good intentions but because of them. Tyler’s single-minded loyalty toward the Scarlet Gang drives him to greater and greater cruelties because he can justify his actions to himself as necessary to protect his own people.

“So many years spent trying to balance being the heir and being good, and with one snap of [Roma’s] fingers, the goodness gave way for violence.”

Gong describes the dangerous ease of wrongdoing as compared to the consistent struggle for goodness, particularly in an environment that rewards violence. Roma’s decision to stop resisting the blood feud earns him status in the White Flowers and respect from his father. The novel’s overall arc suggests there is a bloody cost to giving in to one’s worst impulses, one that Roma comes to regret when he returns to his quest for a peaceful, safe life with Juliette.

“‘I am begging you to stop watching the Wild West films coming in from America,’ [Lord Cai said…] ‘They’re rotting your brain.’”

Lord Cai’s comment here illustrates the conflict between East and West within Juliette and her household. Though Lord Cai laments the tendency toward the dramatic that American films are provoking in Juliette, he was the one who sent her to America, twice, against her will. His desires for his daughter (and his relationship with her) are in conflict. He wants Juliette to have the benefit of an American education without undue “Western influence.”

“‘Father,’ Juliette shot back, ‘I crave violence.’”

Juliette’s flippancy belies the complexity of her statement. Though she does tend easily toward temper and violence, she also routinely speaks out against senseless violence throughout the novel. What Juliette is arguing for here, rather, is action within the realm of what she can control. Violence is one of the few avenues through which she can exert power.

“‘The foreigners see this country as an unborn child to keep in line’ [Rosalind] said. ‘No matter how they threaten us with their tanks, they will not harm us. They want us split internally like embryos in the womb, twins and triplets eating each other until there is no one left, and they want nothing more than to stop it so we can come out whole for them to sell.’

Juliette was grimacing when Rosalind turned back around. ‘Okay, first of all, that’s a disgusting metaphor and not how biology works.’

Rosalind jazzed her hands around. ‘Ooh, look at me. I studied with Americans and I know how biology works.’”

With this exchange between Rosalind and Juliette, Gong portrays the dual experience of living through historical turmoil, in this case, colonialism. Rosalind, a daughter of a colonized city, must be aware of the larger political machinations happening around her. To remain safe, Rosalind must be able to predict the mindset of the colonizer, while the colonizer is never asked to understand the mindset of the colonized. Simultaneously, though, the cousins are young women living their daily lives, teasing and joking despite the constant threat of violence.

“Every time Juliette walked into a Settlement establishment, she left behind the parts that juggled crime and party in the same hand, and instead entered a world of pearls and etiquette. Of rules and dazzling games only maneuverable by the fluent. One wrong move, and those who did not belong were immediately ousted.”

Juliette here experiences the “code-switching” required of a colonized subject when moving through colonizer-controlled space. She must be “fluent” in the language—not only the literal language but other social cues such as dress, attitude, and behavior—to move through these spaces, though they are still part of her city. As Juliette and Roma are reminded during their time in the Settlement, however, no level of “fluency” can completely erase their outsider status. Unlike some members of the Settlement club they attend, they speak both perfect French and English, but they are still brazenly asked to account for their presence in this space: as gangsters, as a Chinese woman, and as a Russian man.

“Some dark part of Juliette reveled in it, the rush that surged through her veins each time her name was spoken with fear. Some darker part still was more rapt at the sight she gave, looming while Roma waited at her side. They would rule this city one day, wouldn’t they? One half each, fists over empires. And here they stood, together.”

The ability to inspire fear is one of the weapons Juliette wields. As a young, Chinese woman, she lives in a world that seeks to limit her autonomy, and her reputation as someone willing to do violence is a tool she can use when the odds are against her. She finds pleasure in wielding power, even if she knows there is a “darkness” to it. This is, in turn, a reclamation of a certain kind of power on Gong’s part; she (also a young Chinese woman) offers her protagonist a chance to be violent, dark, and angry in a cultural landscape that often demands “likability” from women protagonists.

“Foreigners who moved into this city long-term liked to call themselves Shanghailanders, and though the term gave Juliette such nausea she preferred to permanently block out its existence from her mind, it was the only acceptable one that she could think to use to describe every person in this room.

How dare they claim such a title. Juliette clutched her fists tight as she let a couple pass in front of her. How dare they label themselves the people of this city, as if they did not sail in with cannons and forced entry, as if they are not here now only because they come from those who lit the first fires.”

The gentility of the “Shanghailanders” obscures their history of violence in a way that Juliette, whose family lives in a bloody present, finds abhorrent and disingenuous. Language has its own potential for violence; by calling themselves “Shanghailanders,” the colonizers both distance themselves from the more common “Shanghainese” that is also used by the Chinese residents of Shanghai and from the violent means through which they came to live in Shanghai. Erasing their foreignness (but only to an extent) naturalizes their relationship to the city, linguistically positing that their colonized spaces are a natural, correct part of Shanghai.

“‘These violent delights have violent ends,’ Juliette whispered to herself […] ‘You have always known this.’”

Juliette here utters the lines from which Gong’s books derive their titles, spoken by Friar Laurence in Act 2, Scene 6 of Romeo and Juliet. Laurence does not necessarily mean “delight in committing violence” when he references “these violent delights.” Rather, he refers to the passionate extremes of both love and hatred—the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues is destined for a “violent end,” but so is the emotional affair between Romeo and Juliet. For Juliette Cai, this line is similarly double-edged. Unlike Juliet Capulet, Juliette has always known that her affair with Roma will result in suffering; the promise of a violent end is not surprising to the heir to the Scarlet Gang. This Juliette, however, will perpetuate as much violence as necessary to avoid her ultimately inevitable tragic fate.

“There was only one way this could end. [Marshall] drew the pistol from his pocket in one fast motion and fired—fast and first, because that was what mattered.

At the end of the day, that was the only thing that mattered.”

Gong’s dual use of “only”—“only one way to end,” “only thing that mattered”—highlights both the inevitability and senselessness of the increasing violence that grips Shanghai. The two phrases become causally linked in a way that emphasizes their illogic: If things can only end in violence, then only violence matters, and if only violence matters, then things can only end in violence. The tone of the narration suggests a weariness at this situation, yet Marshall does not hesitate to kill the White Flower who recognizes him, nor does he dwell on the killing as the story goes on.

“Don’t close your eyes, Juliette commanded herself. Watch the carnage. Watch the destruction. Feel the slick of the blood as it paints the carpeting red, and remember what is at stake in this city, all because some foreign merchant wants to play greedy.”

Though Juliette is no stranger to violence, she is sickened by the scene that unfolds when the monster unleashes the “madness” that causes its victims to tear out their own throats. The sensory contrast of the blood—slick and red—with the arbitrariness of greed emphasizes the visceral cost of the violent games that the powerful play with Shanghai.

“When are we going to stop letting the colonizers pick the comparisons? Why don’t we ever call Paris the Shanghai of the West?”

Juliette pushes back against the colonizer mentality that centers Western civilizations as central and East Asian locales as imitations. Her phrasing—“letting the colonizers” —suggests that language is a potential avenue for anticolonialist action. Though the gangs, politicians, and armies in China are unable to stand against French and British military power, Shanghainese people can decline to accept the linguistic terms set by foreigners.

“Shanghai is its people. And if you let its people die, it’ll come back to bite you.”

Juliette personifies Shanghai as something that can “come back to bite you,” building on the way the duology frames the city as a character rather than a mere setting. With the singular pronoun “it,” she unifies Shanghai despite its manifold divisions. The city is not Scarlet, White Flower, Communist, or Nationalist; it is all of these, and General Shu’s attempts to divide it will, Juliette predicts, lead to ruin.

“‘I’m not saving this city because it is good’ [Juliette] said carefully. ‘Nor am I saving this city because I am good. I want it safe because I wish to be safe. I want it safe because safety is always what is deserved, goodness or wickedness alike.’”

Juliette here elucidates an answer to the ongoing question as to why she fights so hard to help Shanghai when it has only caused her pain. There is a twist of irony in her pronouncement; though Juliette claims that she is not “good” and describes her desire for safety to be at least partially selfish, she also states a willingness to fight for others’ safety, regardless of what they have done to “earn” it. This generosity aligns with the very “goodness” she disavows and shows a compassionate side to the morally gray protagonist.

“My own people will not suffer if the White Flowers suffer less too. Your loss is not my gain.”

This statement by Juliette inverts the premise of the blood feud; rather than meeting suffering with further suffering in revenge, she proposes that alleviating the suffering of both gangs can be shared. This presents an alternative—although, one that comes too late—to the premise of “violence begets violence” that pervades Gong’s duology. Juliette instead offers a circumstance in which cooperation begets cooperation.

“Hatred has been lurking in the waters before the first bullet was fired from Scarlet to White Flower; it’s been there since the British brought opium into the city and took what wasn’t theirs; since the foreigners stomped in and the city split into factions, divided by rights and wrongs that foreign law put into being.

These things do not fade away with time. They can only grow and fester and ooze like a slow, slow cancer.

And any day now, the city will turn inside out, corrupted by the poison in its own seams.”

This extended metaphor characterizes “hatred” in several ways. It is personified as something that “lurks,” specifically in “the waters,” a recurring motif for the essence of and access to Shanghai. (The monster in These Violent Delights hides in the river; in Our Violent Ends, the Scarlets intend to disseminate the vaccine through the water supply, and rain falls consistently over the final day of Roma and Juliette’s lives.) As the city is “split into factions,” so too does the hatred split, shifting from “it” to “they”—growing and spreading like a cancer. Finally, it is likened to a “poison”; unlike cancer, something toxic that comes from internal corrupt systems, poison is something external that has become internal, stitched into the fabric of the city.

“‘Isn’t that the whole point of a blood feud?’ [Roma] finally asked in response. ‘We are equals. We do not try to colonize the other, as the foreigners have done. We do not try to control the other. It is only a game of power.’”

Roma here distinguishes different power struggles and forms of violence that are happening in Shanghai. The feud between the gangs, though bloody and ultimately pointless, is nothing but a game in comparison to the evils of colonialism, an antagonist so great in the novel that it cannot even be challenged by the might of a civil war. The feud is cruel and violent, but because it is between rival forces, is not evil, whereas the totalizing control of colonial powers backed by military might is a vast historical ill.

“One purge was never one purge. The Nationalists were not only forcing out all opposition. They also had to maintain their control. No Communist could show their face on these streets ever again. No White Flower could continue living within the city’s borders, at least not without hiding their identity. The purge would never end.”

This passage counteracts General Shu’s proposal that one great act of violence (a purge) could forestall future violence. To “maintain their control,” the Nationalists will have to commit ongoing violence, forcing various Shanghainese to live in hiding and fear. In concluding that the “purge would never end,” this passage equates living under continued violent control with the initial murderous “purge” that the Nationalists enact. This continues the novel’s meditations on the different natures of violence and why these differences may not ultimately matter all that much.

“‘You can call a rose something else, but it remains yet a rose.’

Juliette flinched, hearing a shout outside. ‘So we are never to change?’ she asked. ‘We are forever blood-soaked roses?’

Roma took her hand. Pressed a kiss to her knuckles. ‘A rose is a rose, even by another name,’ he whispered. ‘But we choose whether we will offer beauty to the world, or if we will use our thorns to sting.’

They could choose. Love or blood. Hope or hate.”

In Act 2, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet (sometimes referred to as “the balcony scene”) the following lines are spoken:

Juliet:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

With this passage, Gong references the famous line, often paraphrased as “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In the play, Juliet says that if Romeo were not called Romeo (if he were not a Montague, a member of the rival family), she would still love him, so Romeo vows he will give up that allegiance for her love. Roma, however, takes the comparison to a rose in a different direction; rather than attempting to give up his nature (or name), he argues that what matters is how a rose is used, whether for beauty or violence. This emphasis on action rather than language underscores the increased agency that Gong’s characters have over their Shakespearean antecedents.

“So this was the Scarlet Gang. They had said yes when foreigners demanded an alliance, choosing capital over pride. They had said yes when the politicians demanded an alliance, choosing survival over all else. Who cared about values when the history books were being written? What did it matter if the history books rewrote everything in the end?”

Juliette here considers the role of historic forces in her father’s decision-making. As Our Violent Ends progresses, the power of the gangs becomes less and less apparent; Juliette is reminded several times that she is not equipped to stand up against a political movement. As the text asks “who care[s] about values” and the scope of the violence grows, Juliette finds herself more attached to her values, and the scope of her concern narrows down to the people she loves. For Juliette, the political atmosphere’s increased complexity has a clarifying rather than confounding effect.