Beijing Comrades (34 page)

But although
Beijing Comrades
does not promote positive gay images, easy identification, or catharsis, it is still a richly complex work that captures the Zeitgeist of 1990s China in paradoxical ways. Instead of positive or negative gay characters, it offers a complex cultural fantasy of the separability of human connectedness (gay or straight) from economic entanglements. At the same time, the novel also undermines that very fantasy by showing economic developments' deterministic and even devastating effects on the ways in which human beings love and relate to each other. For the provocative questions it asks about the relationship between gay identity and social constraints,
Beijing Comrades
is a refreshing work that covers uncharted territory in Chinese queer writing.

Notes

  
1
.
  
Beijing Comrades
(
Lan Yu
) emerged during the height of the
tongzhi wenxue
(queer writing) movement of the 1990s, which significantly broadened the cultural archive of gay references in popular culture. In addition to the literary counterparts discussed in this essay, significant cinematic works that prepared the viewers for the success of
Lan Yu,
the film adaptation of the novel, include
The Wedding Banquet
(1993),
Farewell My Concubine
(1993),
Boys?
(1996),
East Palace, West Palace
(1996),
A Queer Story
(1997), and
Happy Together
(1997).

  
2
.
  
For a study of the interactions between new digital media, censorship, and literary production in China, see Hockx 2015.

  
3
.
  
On the prevalence of such perceptions, see Rofel 2010.

  
4
.
  
Versions of this text may vary. Myers treats the epilogue as a final chapter in the current forty-one-chapter translation, with Lan Yu's death in chapter thirty-nine.

  
5
.
  
Eng 2010, 470.

  
6
.
  
See Martin 2003 for a lucid analysis of Pai's New Park in the geography of desire.

  
7
.
  
See Liu 2015 for the development of first-person confessional narratives in modern Chinese queer literature.

Bibliography

Eng, David L. 2010. “The Queer Space of China.”
positions
18 (2): 459–87.

Hockx, Michel. 2015.
Internet Literature in China.
New York: Columbia University Press.

Liu, Petrus. 2015.
Queer Marxism in Two Chinas.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Martin, Fran. 2003.
Situating Sexualities.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Rofel, Lisa. 2010. “The Traffic in Money Boys.”
positions
18 (2): 425–58.

Translator's Acknowledgments

A number of people assisted me in the realization of this project. I am grateful to my literary agent, Jayapriya Vasudevan, who enthusiastically embraced
Beijing Comrades
after I sent it to her to read. I am also grateful to Jennifer Baumgardner at the Feminist Press for her support of the book. In particular I would like to thank my editor, Lauren Hook, for her patience, guidance, and meticulous work on the manuscript, and Kait Heacock for her excellent publicity work. Special thanks are due to Dr. John Balcom, my graduate adviser at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who was tremendously supportive when I decided to translate the novel for my master's thesis. I am also indebted to Marcus Hu of Strand Releasing and to Zhang Yongning, producer of the film
Lan Yu,
who helped put me in direct contact with Bei Tong when I approached them for help in locating her.

Additionally, a number of individuals shared their ideas, insights, support, and, in many cases, friendship. Clarence Coo, Cui Zi'en, Yali Dai, Fan Popo, Angela L. Gibson, Ted Gideonse, Ziqin Hu, Ivo, Henry Lien, Ma Xiufeng, Vestal McIntyre, Ng Yi-Sheng, Michelle Kathleen O'Kane, Rakesh Satyal, Mikkel Sonne, and Xiaogang Wei: thank you. Thanks also to my parents and brothers for their love and support over
the years. Petrus Liu wrote the afterword to this book, and it is that much more enriched because of it.

Most of all I am grateful to Bei Tong, who had the passion, vision, and drive to write this novel; who enthusiastically supported my desire to publish it in English translation; and who patiently answered the many questions I had along the way. Though we have not met face-to-face, we shared many months of correspondence and I have come to regard her as a friend.

The contemporary poet Mu Cao has written of the “cry of a hundred Lan Yus.” It is to those Lan Yus, numbering not in hundreds but in millions, that this book is dedicated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BEI TONG
is the anonymous author of
Beijing Comrades.
The pseudonymous author, whose real-world identity has been a subject of debate since the story was first published on a gay Chinese website over a decade ago, is known variously as Beijing Comrade, Beijing Tongzhi, Xiao He, and Miss Wang.

ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

THÉRÈSE AND ISABELLE

VIOLETTE LEDUC

Translated by Sophie Lewis

Afterword by Michael Lucey

Thérèse and Isabelle
is the tale of two boarding school girls in love. In 1966 when it was originally published in France, the text was censored because of its explicit depiction of young homosexuality. With this publication, the original, unexpurgated text--a stunning literary portrayal of female desire and sexuality--is available to a US audience for the first time. Included is an afterword by Michael Lucey, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

VIOLETTE LEDUC (1907-1972) has been referred to as “France's greatest unknown writer.” Admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Albert Camus, Leduc was championed by Simone de Beauvoir when she published her scandalous autobiography
La Batarde
(1964). Like
Thérèse and Isabelle,
many of her audacious novels are largely inspired by her life. She is the subject of Martin Provost's recent biopic, Violette (2013).

MULBERRY AND PEACH

HUALING NIEH

Translated by Jane Parish Yang & Linda Lappin.

Afterword by Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong

This extraordinary novel by the co-founder of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, recounts the story of two women—Mulberry and Peach—who are really one. Mulberry
is a young woman who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she develops a second personality: fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited, Peach. Brilliantly innovative in style, Mulberry and Peach offers a rare women's perspective on the upheavals of modern China, and a compelling portrait of the cultural and psychological dislocation intrinsic to the immigrant experience.

THE COSMOPOLITANS

SARAH SCHULMAN

Greenwich Village, 1958. Earl, a black, gay, actor, and Bette, a white secretary, have been neighbors for thirty years, forming a deep bond as refugees from small-minded hometowns. But when Hortense, a wealthy young actress with links to Bette's painful past, shows up, Earl and Bette's hard-won assumptions are shaken to the core.
The Cosmopolitans
is a beautifully written, page-turning novel about friendship, love, and revenge set in the disappeared world of 1950s New York.

SARAH SCHULMAN is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, AIDS historian, and journalist. Her seventeen books include
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, The Gentrification of the Mind,
and ten novels including
The Mere Future
and
Rat Bohemia.
Her awards include a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and the Kessler Prize for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies, among many others. She is cofounder of the ACT UP Oral History Project and MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival. Her plays and movies have been seen at Playwrights Horizons, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art. Schulman is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University
of New York, College of Staten Island; a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU; and on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

The Feminist Press
is a nonprofit educational organization founded to amplify feminist voices. FP publishes classic and new writing from around the world, creates cutting-edge programs, and elevates silenced and marginalized voices in order to support personal transformation and social justice for all people.

See our complete list of books at
feministpress.org