Beijing Comrades

by Scott E. Myers

  By constructing Lan Yu as a figure of true love who, despite his background as an impoverished migrant, remains utterly uninterested in monetary gain, the novel appeals to contemporary Beijing gay men’s prevalent fear of being associated with or, worse still, mistaken for “money boys.”3 In this sense, Lan Yu is a modern version of Du Shiniang, the well-known prostitute figure in classical Chinese literature who turns out to be not only a pure-hearted person but also an unexpected reservoir of rainy-day funds.

  Written in the period of intense neoliberalization in China that brought about, among other things, the birth of a “pink economy” sustained by trendy gay bars, bathhouses, and restaurants, Beijing Comrades articulates a cultural fantasy about the separability of love and money in human relations. The centrality of this fantasy also explains a strange inversion of the fortunes of the humanities in the story. The novel begins by telling readers that Handong majored in Chinese literature in college. This seemingly trivial detail accrues a new layer of significance in the first meeting between the lovers, when Handong tries to make small talk by praising Lan Yu for picking a major that will “make a lot of money,” unlike “humanities majors” like himself who are, when in college, “chronically broke” (19). However, the three principal characters who are financially dependent on Handong all have very “practical” skills: Liu Zheng (Handong’s old classmate and loyal employee), a physicist by training; Lan Yu, an architecture major; and Lin Ping, an English interpreter with a degree from the fictitious Fifth International Studies University (which could be a stand-in for Beijing International Studies University). As depicted by the novel, a person’s chosen subject of study has no bearing on his or her economic standing. The source of Handong’s fortune is instead a combination of family connections and shrewd capitalist investments. Lan Yu never once acknowledges Handong’s literary training; instead, he repeatedly addresses Handong in the collective: “you businessmen” (123). The novel’s emphasis on the disconnect between access to economic resources and the interiority of a person (suggested by various majors and interests) helps to characterize Handong and, by extension, China’s postsocialist economic boom as a mirage without substance. Hence, Handong’s business crumbles as fast as it begins. By the time Handong ends up in prison, the novel’s anticapitalist discourse is finally complete: love perseveres, while money is only ephemeral.

  We never find out exactly why Handong goes to prison, only that he has made some enemies in the business world. However, we may explain the sudden collapse of Handong’s business as a representation of the volatility of material wealth in the service of the novel’s critique of the postsocialist economy. With Lan Yu’s sudden car accident resulting in his death,4 the novel’s ending may serve to highlight the fragility of life and the anguish suffered because of missed opportunities. Bei Tong succeeds in bringing a sense of closure: after Lan Yu’s passing, Handong decides to enter a second heterosexual marriage and lead a peaceful life, now living in Vancouver at an emotional distance from his “Beijing story.” Both his daughter and second wife remain nameless. Contrasted with the finely detailed sex scenes, scintillating conversations, and textured emotions in the preceding chapters, the blurriness of the story post–Lan Yu succeeds in creating a clear shift in narrative tempo. Clearly, the novel’s center of interest remains in Beijing.

  The development of Handong’s materialism and the vicissitudes of his economic fortune have allegorical dimensions which inspire critic David L. Eng to characterize the film adaptation of this novel as a melodrama of neoliberalism that “places the emergence of homosexual subjectivity . . . squarely within . . . a gendered developmentalism.”5 While the novel’s anticapitalist themes place it in the context of postreform China, the storyline has an abstract quality that suggests that it could have happened anywhere. The decision to keep the story unanchored appears to be deliberate in comparison to Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys, which memorializes certain venues like the New Park in the popular imaginary.6 By contrast, while Bei Tong’s work provokes thinking on the mutual entanglement of modern gay subjectivity and postsocialist development in China, the novel does not produce a distinctive narrative about Beijing. References to Beijing’s unique colloquialism (zan ma, “our Ma”), political events (Tian’anmen), fictive venues (Lan Yu as a student at “Huada”), and urban problems (traffic, inflation, corruption, income disparity, real estate development, and the influx of migrant workers) are incidental to the plot. Many chapters begin with a comment on Beijing’s inclement weather, though the primary purpose of these details is not to ground the text in locality but to create a journal-like quality, which, together with the two confessions that conclude the novel (a legal one after Handong’s arrest and a Christian one after the loss of Lan Yu), place Beijing Comrades in a family of first-person confessional gay writing in modern Chinese literature.7

  The radical generalizability of the novel’s setting elevates one of the novel’s most unique contributions: its rejection of identity narratives. Whereas both the novel and its film adaptation represent a consolidated, self-affirmative social identity, Beijing Comrades never congeals into a predictable coming-out narrative. Unlike The Wedding Banquet and other influential queer works from the 1990s, Beijing Comrades is not a melodramatic story centered on a closeted gay man who eventually comes to accept his identity. Polyamorous in practice, Handong does not believe in labels such as gay and bisexual. The tale concludes with Handong’s decision to marry another woman, on the conviction that he will “never . . . find Lan Yu’s courage to . . . face . . . [his] gay identity” (364). The word “courage” seems improperly attributed to Lan Yu, for Lan Yu never develops a self-conscious gay identity. In fact, neither Lan Yu nor Handong defines their relationship in terms of sexual orientation. If Lan Yu never struggles with his sexuality, it is not due to a precocious degree of self-awareness or unparalleled courage that Handong never finds in himself; rather, it is because homosexuality simply appears to be a nonissue for Lan Yu. At the beginning of their sexual relationship, Lan Yu is only sixteen and just arriving from China’s northwest. If Handong does not consider himself gay at this point though he has had sex with men, Lan Yu is an even less qualified candidate for the term. Whereas Handong has given the matter some thought, Lan Yu’s positive responses to Handong’s sexual advances seem to be more of a natural reaction than the expression of a carefully chosen identity. The fact that Lan Yu “always greatly enjoy[s] the pleasures of sex” (295) with Handong can hardly be described as a politically progressive act embodying the “courage to be gay.” Rather, Lan Yu’s embrace of their relationship can be explained as the result of an absence of identity, a romanticized innocence untainted by the descriptive powers of social categories. Similarly, Lan Yu never develops an identity as a top or a bottom, unlike the drummer Huang Jian. We learn that Lan Yu prefers hand jobs and oral sex to both positions but usually bottoms because it pleases Handong, or sometimes just “to get it over with” (74). By contrast, the act of penetrating the less powerful partner (in terms of age, gender, or status) furnishes an important kernel of Handong’s identity: for Handong, the “sexual pleasure” is only “part of it; the real high [is Lan Yu’s] unswerving commitment to endure” the pain of anal penetration to please him (56).

  Lan Yu’s inexperience thus makes him a role model of non-identity, whereas Handong stands as an example of a failed gay identity. Beijing Comrades is therefore a significantly different kind of identity narrative. The resistance to identity politics is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this text and sets it apart from other examples of late-1990s queer sinophone literature. In Beijing Comrades, we encounter an intriguing moment in the history of modern Chinese gay writing that disrupts a unilinear movement toward identity politics.

  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

 

 

  m.Net