Gao Lian

Gao Lian is a boy held in a concealed room in Sofia Zetterlund’s apartment, where prolonged isolation makes dependence on his captor feel like protection. His story turns on the force of that confinement: the woman who controls his access to the world becomes, in his understanding, the only person whose touch is safe and the only barrier against an evil outside.

Identity and Confinement

Gao lives in a room hidden behind a bookcase. When Sofia opens its concealed door, the air is stale and fetid; Gao sits in a corner with his arms around his knees, squinting toward the light. The room’s secrecy is not merely architectural. It separates him from ordinary life and makes his captor the mediator of everything beyond it. When Sofia later finds the room empty, Gao has tidied and cleaned it, leaving the coarse blanket folded neatly over the mattress. The syringes and bottle of Xylocain remain on a small table, physical traces of the conditions in which he had been kept.

His attachment to the woman who holds him is expressed through touch and rules. She alone is allowed to touch him; she combs his long hair and washes him with water in a bowl, while teaching him to keep control of his hands because other people may use touch to plunder or exploit. Gao accepts her account of the world beyond the room. Having once left to explore the city, he concludes that the excursion was wrong: beneath its apparent cleanliness lie human remains, and within its buildings and living bodies he sees only death. The room thus functions at once as refuge and prison, and his conviction that its keeper protects him shows how captivity has narrowed the terms in which safety can be imagined.

Violence and the Memory of Samuel Bai

Gao’s confinement does not erase the violence he has witnessed or learned to enact. In Sofia’s mind, he attacks Samuel Bai while Samuel, already gravely injured, can do little more than stagger and weakly shield himself from the blows. Blood loss from Samuel’s crushed eye eventually makes him lose consciousness. Gao recognizes the moment as the near certainty of death: from his experience in Sierra Leone, he knows what happens when a victim can no longer resist, and understands the encounter as a pursuit whose outcome has already been decided. The scene places the boy’s brutality beside the violence that has shaped his expectations, without making the two equivalent.

After Samuel Bai’s death, Gao and Sofia transport his body to Mikael’s building in Monument block, carry it up to the attic, and hang it from the ceiling. Their shared work binds them through an act that is both practical and disturbing: Gao, kept under Sofia’s control, becomes a participant in concealing the dead man. Yet Sofia thinks of him as a victim rather than as guilty for the terrible things he did as a child soldier. The contrast leaves his position unresolved: he is at once someone formed by violence, someone capable of inflicting it, and a boy whose dependence on the woman beside him makes their actions inseparable.

Drawing, Memory, and the Black Stain

In the hidden room, drawing gives Gao a practice that is his own, even though the woman who confines him supplies the pen and paper. He spends hours selecting subjects from an internal store of remembered people, lost things, and feelings he has forgotten he once possessed. One picture is a small bird in its nest with its young; when he finishes, he sets the sheet aside and begins another. The scene makes drawing more than a way to pass time: it is a means of arranging fragments of a world from which he has been cut off, and of giving form to memories that might otherwise remain inaccessible.

The woman teaches him to regard his hands as both vulnerable and powerful. Other hands, he believes, may plunder or exploit him, so he is taught to keep them under control; through drawing, however, he can use them to take the world inside himself and send it back out. He imagines that this capacity will let him stop fearing and eventually change the world. The small, repeated labor of drawing therefore carries an immense promise of agency, though it develops inside a system in which his movements and understanding are still shaped by his captor.

Gao’s account of the outside world turns danger into a total explanation. After leaving the room once to explore the city, he decides that the excursion was wrong and that nothing beyond his refuge is good. Its apparent cleanliness, he reasons, conceals human remains beneath the ground and water; death also inhabits buildings and living people. He describes evil as a black stain in the human heart and counts seven ways into it, arranged as two, two, and three. That pattern becomes bound to the year 223, which he associates with the founding of Wuhan, the city from which he is identified. His numerical scheme gives a fearful worldview the shape of a system: the outside is not simply threatening but, in his thinking, structured by an underlying corruption.

The novel also places his name beside a worn book that Sofia finds behind the bookcase: the 1591 Eight Treatises on the Nurturing of Life, by Gao Lian. The discovery supplies a concrete echo of his name without establishing a direct connection between the imprisoned boy and the historical author. In the context of the concealed room, the book’s title nevertheless sits in suggestive contrast with Gao’s restricted life: the language of nurturing appears beside the hidden space where his ideas of safety, danger, and the human heart have been shaped.

Recorded Memory and Shared Space

Sofia’s archive of recorded monologues gives Gao’s private drawings a parallel form of memory work. After switching off the recorder, she rewinds the tape and returns it to a collection arranged on the study shelf; she has spent years recording and analyzing conversations with herself, through which she came to know Victoria and accept that they would have to live together. Then Gao’s nearly silent steps and the creak of the hidden door announce his arrival. Sofia joins him in the room they share as a secret refuge, finds him drawing on the floor, sits on the bed, and places a fresh cassette in the recorder. The sequence brings two kinds of preservation into the same confined space: Sofia’s recorded recollections and Gao’s images drawn from memory. His quiet entrance and her preparation of another tape make their routine feel intimate, but it remains organized around the concealed room and the unequal conditions governing his life there.