Beijing Comrades

Starred review from January 4, 2016
Emotionally rich and tender, this story follows a nearly decadelong love affair between two men in Beijing. The book began as a series of online posts (from the U.S.) during the early days of the Internet, and then became something of a cult classic in China, inspiring a 2001 film called Lan Yu. When the story opens in 1987, the year before the Tiananmen Square protest, Handong, a wealthy and corrupt businessman, is selfish, superficial, and wholly unlikable. But from the beginning of his on-again, off-again relationship with Lan Yu, the teenage boy several years his junior with whom he finds himself unexpectedly smitten, Handong’s entire character begins to evolve. Initially frustrated and bewildered by his love for Lan Yu, Handong is eventually fortified by it. In his translator’s note, Myers explains that the novel’s author’s identity has been a “matter of speculation since the story was first published online in 1998.” Even the writer’s gender is unknown, which casts an intriguing light on readers’ assumptions about authorial intent and experience. While the book provides a meaningful excavation of homophobia and daily life in a rapidly changing China, it is ultimately a traditional story of forbidden love in all the most classic, wonderful, and devastating ways.

January 15, 2016
When cultural attitudes favor heterosexuality over homosexuality, gay youth often grow into troubled adults. Chen Handong, a rich, well-connected Beijing businessman, is known for getting what he wants--at work as well as at play. In fact, both men and women gravitate to him, and he has no trouble attracting sexual partners for short flings and longer-term hookups. But when he meets handsome Lan Yu, a 16-year-old college student, he is immediately smitten. Lan Yu is initially wary of the older man--Handong is 27 when they first meet in 1989--and it takes some wooing to get him into Handong's bed. Once enticed, however, he enters into a decadelong, on-again, off-again liaison that brings the pair great joy as well as great agitation and pain. As the story unfolds, the shifting social and political mores of urban China come into sharp focus, and student uprisings, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, the rise of the entrepreneurial community, and the unraveling of communist values, become important backdrops to the story. So does the underground gay scene, with clubs and dance halls hidden from public view but an open secret among those in the know. Similarly, homophobia and the pressure on youth to marry and have children are palpable and cause Handong to enter into a tempestuous, if short-lived, marriage to materialistic Lin Ping. There is melodrama here, but the novel--first published online in 1998 by a still pseudonymous author, then made into a movie by Taiwanese director Stanley Kwan in 2001, and subsequently rewritten and expanded by the author--captures the reality of a homophobic society and the pressures placed on gay men (and presumably women) to deny their essence and live less-than-fully-realized lives. A riveting, if slightly dated, look at China's gay male community.

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