Crystal Boys

Expelled from home for his sexuality, the young A-Qing joins the hidden community of gay youths who gather after dark in Taipei's New Park, a secret 'kingdom of the night' with its own laws and legends. Pai maps the real city of the early 1970s: New Park with its lotus pond, the bar the outcasts open together, the family homes and military-dependents' villages they are cast out of, and the neon nightlife of Ximending.

A-Qing

New Park (the kingdom)

Part 1

Thrown out by his father, A-Qing finds his way to New Park at night, where a hidden community of gay boys and their elders has made a 'kingdom' with its own history and rules. Pai turns the real park, forbidden and tender, into a whole secret world, a refuge for those cast out of every other.

Part 1

explicit The heart of the novel is New Park, now the 228 Peace Memorial Park in central Taipei, the real nocturnal gathering place of the city's outcast gay youths in the 1970s.

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Wang Kuilong

The lotus pond

Part 1

By the lotus pond the boys tell the legend of Wang Kuilong, the Dragon Prince, who out of a doomed love killed his beautiful lover A-Feng years before and vanished into exile. His story haunts the kingdom, the pattern of desire, jealousy and self-destruction against which the younger boys measure their own hearts.

Part 1

explicit The lotus pond at the centre of New Park is the real feature around which the community gathers, and the site of its most famous, tragic legend; sited in the park.

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