In his "Translator's Note," Myers mentions three commonly discussed possibilities. Like Elena Ferrante, the Italian author whose name, gender, and identity are actively debated online, Bei Tong remains anonymous. Given its nearly two decades of significance, then, the continued mystery surrounding the author of Beijing Comrades is quite surprising. "Even though they didn't show it in the cinema, people still found a way to watch."
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"The movie means a lot in Chinese society," said Wei. Today the book is mainly remembered through Stanley Kwan's blockbuster film Lan Yu, according to Xiaogang Wei, a filmmaker and LGBT rights activist in Beijing. In the words of Professor Liu, it "gave a voice to a group, and also to social issues that couldn't be articulated before this particular language was made available." The book didn't create same-sex desire in China, obviously, but it did promote an understanding of homosexuality as an identity one could organize a community around. It became a touchstone for a generation of queer men, who would use the names of the characters as slang for different types of guys. "When came out, there was simply nothing like it in the Chinese language," Liu said. When books with queer content were published in China, said Professor Liu in an interview, they tended towards academic texts or novels that were never explicitly labeled as "gay." However, "by the mid- to late-1980s, it was possible for writers to experiment with avant garde forms and countercultural creative expressions." These works often had to find publishers elsewhere, though, as was the case with queer writer and filmmaker Cui Zi'en, whose novels were published in Hong Kong. "Very little gay fiction has actually been published in China," said Scott Myers, the translator and driving force behind the new edition. When I went in a little deeper he pulled back and hunched over, holding the back of my head for balance as if he was about to fall.ĭue to the subject matter, Beijing Comrades has never been published in print in mainland China. Gripping his shoulders, then his arms, I slowly lowered myself to the floor, pausing to kiss his chest, his stomach, his hands and fingers, until finally I was on my knees and his cock was in my mouth. I kissed him with feverish excitement, pressing my body against his and travelling the length of his back with my hands. Take, for example, this description of Handong and Lan Yu's second meeting: James's notoriously drawn-out first novel, there are multiple sexual encounters within just the first 50 pages of the book, and the text doesn't shy away from the details.
In an article appended to the back of TFP's new edition, scholar Petrus Liu, an associate literature professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, wrote that Beijing Comrades "put to rest, once and for all, the myth that gay sex remains an unspeakable topic in the PRC's 'traditional' culture."
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Kait Heacock, the publicist for the Feminist Press, said that the Feminist Press was interested in the book because "it speaks to our mission of publishing work that has been silenced." Moreover, now that Fifty Shades of Grey has cracked the door for sexual work to cross over into the mainstream, they were excited to be publishing Chinese erotica for the first time. Set against the cultural and political upheavals in China in the late 80s and early 90s, the narrative is at once a story about love, loss, and neoliberal capitalism. Yet to this day, the true author-variously referred to as Bei Tong, Miss Wang, Beijing Comrade, Ling-Hui, and Xiao He-remains a mystery.īeijing Comrades tells the story of Handong, a businessman with an outsized ego and sexual appetite, and his unexpected love affair with Lan Yu, a young man from the provinces who has come to the city to study architecture. This month, thanks to the Feminist Press, it is about to be published for the first time in English, under the title Beijing Comrades. It would go on to be adapted into a movie by Stanley Kwan in 2001 and published in an edited print version in Taiwan in 2002. It was one of (if not the) first self-reflexively gay novels to be published in any form in mainland China, as well as the first Chinese novel to be written natively on the Internet. The book-originally called Dalu gushi ( A Story From the Mainland)-quickly gained cult fame in China's gay community. On September 22, 1998, the first installment of a gay erotic novel appeared on the now-defunct website Chinese Men's and Boys' Paradise ( Zhongguo nanren nanhai tiantang).