Myers speculates that she may have been a foreign exchange student.Īlthough a more widespread phenomenon in Japan, there is a small subculture of women, called funü, who write and read gay erotic fiction in China. As Myers writes in his postscript, she told him she was living in New York at the time she wrote the novel, up near Columbia University.
Although they've never met or spoken, after nearly six years of occasional correspondence (primarily over email, occasionally via snail mail), he said, "I don't have any doubt whatsoever" that he has been corresponding with the real author. When interviewed, Myers said he thought that the author (whom he refers to as Bei Tong) is likely a woman. First, that the author is a tongqi, a "heterosexual woman with the misfortune of unknowingly marrying a gay man." Second, that the author is Wang Xiaobo, the "late husband of prominent sociologist, queer activist, and public intellectual Li Yinhe." And third, that the author was a female friend of a real-life couple who asked her to document their story online.
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. I squeezed his ass, so firm and compact… then tried to put a finger inside. 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."
Watch: The Women Running an Erotic Publishing Empire
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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. Beijing 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.