Beijing Comrades

by Scott E. Myers

  Published in 2016 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition 2016

  First English-language edition

  Text copyright © 2001 by Bei Tong

  A shorter version of this novel was first published in Chinese in 2001 by Tohan Taiwan Limited Liability Company under the title —Lan Yu (Beijing gushi)

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Scott E. Myers

  Afterword copyright © 2016 by Petrus Liu

  All rights reserved.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing March 2016

  Cover design by Isaac Tobin

  Text design by Suki Boynton

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bei Tong. | Myers, Scott E., translator.

  Title: Beijing comrades / by Bei Tong ; translated by Scott E. Myers.

  Other titles: Beijing gushi. English

  Description: New York : The Feminist Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015019785| ISBN 9781558619081 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gay men--China--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Gay. | HISTORY /

  Asia / China. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Censorship.

  Classification: LCC PL2833.5.E49 B4513 2016 | DDC 895.13/52--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015019785

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  Translator’s Note

  Scott E. Myers

  Beijing Comrades

  Bei Tong

  Postscript to the Revised

  Tohan Taiwan Edition

  Bei Tong

  From Identity to Social Protest:

  The Cultural Politics of Beijing Comrades

  Petrus Liu

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  Scott E. Myers

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

  ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

  Translator’s Notea

  An earlier version of this essay appeared as “Beijing Comrades: A Gay Chinese Love Story.” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 2 (2011): 75–94.

  To English-language readers who know it, Beijing Comrades by Bei Tong is more likely to be known as Beijing Story by Beijing Comrade. Others may know the contemporary Chinese novel as Lan Yu, or Someone Likes Lan, or Beijing gushi.1 The pseudonymous author, whose real-world identity has been a matter of speculation since the story was first published online in 1998, is known variously as Beijing Tongzhi, Beijing Comrade, Xiao He, Miss Wang, and Linghui. Given the dearth of information about Bei Tong, it is not surprising that there are a number of popular theories about her or his gender identity, sexual orientation, and life story. There are those who believe that she is a tongqi, a heterosexual woman with the misfortune of unknowingly marrying a gay man. Others suggest that he is novelist and essayist Wang Xiaobo, late husband of prominent sociologist, queer activist, and public intellectual Li Yinhe.2 Finally, there are those who insist that Beijing Comrades was written by a sympathetic female friend at the behest of the male lovers whose story the novel tells. But while chatroom critics and patrons of gay bars from Beijing to New York City have long debated the identity of the author, other less elusive figures, such as Stanley Kwan, director of the 2001 film adaptation of the novel, speak unequivocally of Bei Tong using feminine pronouns. In this essay I follow Kwan’s example, though I also think it is worth asking what bearing, if any, the extratextual identity of an author has on the way we read a story. Would greater knowledge of Bei Tong impact the way we read Beijing Comrades—the set of assumptions, expectations, and desires we bring to it? Would it guide our affective response to the novel or influence our conclusions about the “authenticity” of the characters or of Bei Tong’s authorial voice? These are questions I leave for the reader to answer.

  Beijing Comrades is among mainland China’s earliest, best known, and most influential contemporary gay novels. It is also a pathbreaking work of what may be called tongzhi or gay fiction from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It came into being when a young Chinese person living in New York City—absorbed by the world of the Internet, lacking direction in life, and bored by the titillating but artistically vapid Chinese-language gay erotica available at the time—decided she would try and write her own homoerotic fiction.3 Originally titled Dalu gushi (A story from the mainland), the novel was serialized on a mainland website, now defunct, called Zhongguo nanren nanhai tiantang (Chinese men’s and boys’ paradise), beginning on September 22, 1998,4 giving it the additional status of being one of mainland China’s earliest e-novels. It remains thematically sensitive today, not only because it includes explicit scenes of lovemaking between men (and between women and men), but also because it makes direct reference to government repression during the Tian’anmen Massacre of 1989.

  The story opens in autumn 1987 during China’s first decade of reform and eleven years after the death of Mao Zedong. It chronicles the ten-year relationship between Chen Handong and Lan Yu,5 two men from very different social classes. Handong is a wealthy businessman in his late twenties, the spoiled offspring of elite Communist Party officials with a string of male and female lovers whose affections he secures through a generous stream of money and gifts. Lan Yu is a university student from a working-class background who has just arrived in Beijing from China’s far northwest. Naive but by no means dim, he finds himself in Handong’s bed when he is alone in the capital and presumably unable to make ends meet.6 Narrated by Handong, the story chronicles the joys, hardships, and no small amount of sexual bliss the men share as they navigate the uncharted terrain of a same-sex relationship in the time and place where they live. A series of life-changing events propels the relationship into on-again, off-again status. In the central narrative of the story, Handong comes to confront and accept his internal awareness of himself as a gay man—shedding much of his appalling misogyny in the process—while also learning to have a relationship that is rooted neither in domination nor in an understanding of love as a system of investment and return.7 In this respect, it is quite possible to read Beijing Comrades as a critique of the new economic policies that began to take hold in China under Deng Xiaoping’s program of reform, first launched in late 1978. The novel may be seen as a response to a moment when money was rapidly becoming a disruptive and mediating force in interpersonal relationships, a dynamic further impacted by China’s pursuit of a mixed and globalized economy. As if to highlight these changes, Handong and other characters in the novel calculate their transactions not only in Chinese yuan but also in US dollars.

  The author’s choice of pen name, Beijing Tongzhi (literally, Beijing Comrade),8 may have been an auspicious one, for it likely helped to attract an intended audience while escaping notice of those who would wish to impede the novel’s circulation. Consisting of the Chinese characters for tong (same) and zhi (will, aspiration, or ideal), the word tongzhi was widely used in the socialist era (and earlier9) as a signifier of revolutionary camaraderie,10 equivalent to the English word comrade or Russian word tovarisch. In rec
ent years, the word tongzhi has been adopted and resignified by LGBTQ activists seeking a new vocabulary to describe themselves.11 The new usage was first proposed in 1989 by playwright Edward Lam, who used it in the Chinese title of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Since then, it has come to designate a subaltern sexual identity, similar in some ways to the English word gay.12 Like gayness, tongzhiness has been a catalyst for the emergence of a personal and collective identity capable of challenging the archaic and pathologizing pseudoscientific term homosexuality (tongxinglian). Today, the use of tongzhi is so widespread—for some, the word carries primarily or only this “secondary” meaning—that it would be inaccurate to describe it as a form of gay slang. Indeed, the term has emerged as a site of culture wars in recent years, as evinced by editorial struggles over whether or not to include the additional meaning in new editions of Chinese dictionaries.13

  Beijing Comrades is full of many twists and turns, but none are as complex as the genesis of the text—or texts—itself. There are, in fact, three separate and quite distinct versions of Beijing Comrades, each with its own tone, length, subplots, intended audience, and publishing platform. The first version is the one written and posted online by Bei Tong in 1998, when the author was living in New York City.14 Hastily executed and with no shortage of typos, this sexually graphic e-novel bursts with an exuberant and spirited amateurism that, far from blemishing the novel, is precisely a part of what makes it a pleasure to read. In the postscript accompanying the revised Taiwanese version that would be published in print more than three years later, Bei Tong reflects on her decision to write:

  The days of autumn 1998 were the grayest I’d had since coming to the United States. I had no idea where my life was headed. . . . I immersed myself in the world of the Internet: playing chess, chatting online, surfing porn sites.

  After reading all the pornographic stories that were out there, I cursed: FXXX!15. . . I knew I could write something better.

  And so I threw myself furiously into writing, then posted my writing online. . . . Had I created a story, or stepped into one? Was this a dream or was it the real world?16

  The intermingling of dreamworld and reality that Bei Tong describes in the novel’s postscript is discernible in Beijing Comrades itself, where the boundaries dividing truth from falsehood, deception from certainty, and this life from the next are porous and flexible. Throughout the novel, Handong’s path to greater self-awareness is paved with stumbling blocks of misrecognition, whereby class, gender, and other anchors of identity are turned upside down. Even the urban topography of China’s capital city is hazy and elusive; an underground gay quanzi (circle) is hinted at but never directly shown. Indeed, most of the place names in Beijing Comrades are fictitious, including the names of universities. In the present translation, I preserve these imaginary names, even when clues in the text point suggestively to specific locations.17 Why Bei Tong chose to fictionalize place names can only be a matter of speculation, but the novel remains a response to a very real time, the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Beijing’s gay community was at an early stage of formation.

  The 2002 print book edition, published by Tohan Taiwan as Lan Yu, presented an edited version of the novel. Significantly polished in its language, this second version of Bei Tong’s book arrived on the heels of Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan’s 2001 Mandarin-language film, Lan Yu, which was based on the e-novel and shot without permits in Beijing. Kwan had learned of the story from film producer Zhang Yongning, who had personally hunted down Bei Tong after reading the story online and would later become the film’s producer. The movie differs in significant ways from the novel and won a number of awards in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also made history by being shown at China’s first LGBTQ film festival, the China Homosexual Film Festival (now the Beijing Queer Film Festival) in 2001. The film strips away much of the novel’s depiction of Handong’s work and family life in order to focus in a quiet and restrained way on the closed, intimate world that he and Lan Yu share.

  The cover of the Tohan book is a still from Kwan’s film, depicting a steamy encounter between Handong (played by Hu Jun) and Lan Yu (played by Liu Ye), accompanied by a stern warning that the book was not to be read by anyone under the age of eighteen. Even with the warning, graphic sexual content was largely removed from the book. Whether one considers the Tohan version “graphic,” of course, depends on the standard one is using, but in most cases, the explicit sex of the e-novel is replaced by sensual pleasures confined to kissing, caressing, and holding, aided by a liberal use of euphemism. In the first erotic encounter between Handong and Lan Yu, for example, what were once orgasm and ejaculation are alluded to by means of associated physiological responses such as heavy breathing and clenched fists, and direct references to genitalia are deleted entirely.18

  Soon after the Tohan publication,19 a greatly expanded version of the novel was drafted by Bei Tong in the hope that official (guanfang) publication20 in mainland China would be possible. This hope was not realized, as Bei Tong was not able to find a publishing house that would accept the manuscript. The expanded version adds nine new chapters to the original thirty-two21 and was given to me directly by Bei Tong for translation and inclusion in this edition; it has never been seen by readers in any language. Since Bei Tong prepared the manuscript in anticipation of publishing through official PRC channels, graphic sexual content was also absent in this third version. In the expanded, forty-one chapter version, new characters and subplots are introduced beginning with chapter four, but it is only from chapter twenty-six onward that significant new content is added.

  The present edition represents an attempt to synthesize these three distinct versions into a single English translation. It uses the third and final version as the basis, but restores in full the erotic sections of the original e-novel and also takes into consideration many of the edits that the author made for the Tohan version.22 Often, it was necessary to choose between two or even three versions of a single line or paragraph, and in some cases entire sections would jump about from one version to the next. In each case, the decision to go with one version over another was a subjective one, always made with a view to what I believed would be the best contribution to this translation. In the long course of our communication, Bei Tong also sent me numerous fragments of text—paragraphs, sentences, words, ideas—for me to translate on an ad hoc basis and include in this volume. Beijing Comrades is thus very much a hybrid text. It is an experiment in translation and could not have been otherwise. As such, it has the potential to raise practical and theoretical questions about the relationship between a translation and its source text(s), for the paradox of Beijing Comrades is that it is a translation for which there is no unified original. I am grateful to Bei Tong for reading and enthusiastically voicing support for this translation.

  I first came into contact with Beijing’s gay quanzi in 1998 when I was a foreign student in that city. There, I frequented Beijing’s newly established gay bars, eventually working at one of them part-time and meeting a young Chinese man with whom I entered into a romantic relationship. I could not, of course, have known that Bei Tong was in New York City at precisely the same time I was in Beijing. Her postscript suggests that there can be something productive about cultural distance and the experience of displacement. It is this displacement—not only in space, but in time—that compelled Bei Tong to write a story about Beijing, just as my experience as a foreign student in the formative years of Beijing’s still-emergent gay culture and community planted the seeds for my later fascination with this project. It is something of this sense of displacement that I hope the English-language reader might experience in encountering this most unusual work.

  Notes

  1.The original Chinese title of Beijing Comrades is Beijing gushi, which may be translated as Beijing Story.

  2.Wang Xiaobo died in April 1997, more than a year before Beijing Comrades was written, but I have spoken with several readers who, unaware either of
his passing or of the novel’s publication date, believe that he is the author of the book. Part of the basis for the belief is that Wang cowrote the screenplay for Zhang Yuan’s 1996 film East Palace, West Palace, widely cited as China’s first queer movie. Wang’s involvement with Zhang’s film, in addition to his personal relationship with Li Yinhe, has led some to the conclusion that he may have penned Beijing Comrades.

  3.Bei Tong 2002.

  4.A number of English-language online sources state erroneously that Beijing Comrades was published in 1996. The inaccuracy originated with an error that appeared on the English-language website of Stanley Kwan’s film Lan Yu, which was based on the novel. In a personal correspondence, Bei Tong confirmed that she posted the first instalment of Beijing Comrades online on September 22, 1998.

  5.In this essay and throughout Beijing Comrades, I preserve the Chinese convention of placing family name before given name.

  6.Numerous online sources debate whether or not Lan Yu should be seen as an “MB” (“money boy” or gay male sex worker). This is not surprising, for Beijing Comrades skillfully crafts ambiguity precisely around this question to build narrative tension in a story that is centrally concerned with the uneasy relationship between love and money. On the one hand, Lan Yu’s entrance into the story is facilitated by Handong’s assistant, Liu Zheng, who picks the young man up to feed his boss’s insatiable appetite for new sexual adventures. And yet, we learn almost nothing of the circumstances surrounding this procurement, nor do we find out what Liu Zheng and Lan Yu might have said to each other when they met. This narrative lacuna lends itself to varied speculations about Lan Yu’s motives for going with Liu Zheng and pursuing a relationship with Handong. For a discussion of Chinese gay men’s views about money boys, see Rofel 2010.

  7.Michael Berry makes a similar point when he writes that the novel “gradually interweaves the characters’ material and sexual desires in a complex web of exchange and symbolic ownership” (2008, 315).