Later that day, I mentioned the phone call to Liu Zheng.
“Did you know that Lan Yu sold Tivoli?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“It’s odd . . . I have no idea what he did with the money. His dad called asking about it. I mean, what a horrible father! A time like this, right after his son dies, and all he cares about is whether he can get some cash out of it! But anyway, it doesn’t even matter because I don’t know what Lan Yu did with the money.”
Liu Zheng looked at me in shock. “He didn’t tell you?” he asked.
“Tell me what?”
“He used it to get you out of jail, Handong.”
“What?” I was stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“He didn’t want me to say anything. He said he wanted to tell you himself. Listen, Handong, that first week you were in jail, we thought you were going to be executed, and for all we knew you already were! Lan Yu called me every day to find out whether I had heard any news or found somebody with the right connections to get you out. Finally, our Ma was able to get in touch with some guy your dad knew, but the bastard said he wanted ¥10 million to pull the strings to get you out. We managed to come up with it, but it wasn’t easy!”
“¥10 million? You told me it was ¥1 million!”
“Lan Yu told you it was a million, but it was ten. Between me and our Ma we had seven, but we were still three million short. Our Ma asked everyone she knew for a loan, but no one would do it. Even your sisters said they didn’t have anything. At first, Lin Ping said she wanted to help, but when push came to shove she started saying she couldn’t come up with it.” Liu Zheng paused and appeared thoughtful. “Anyway, I guess I don’t blame them. For all they knew, they’d never see the money again.” He looked at me as if waiting for a response. When he didn’t get one, he continued.
“Lan Yu was desperate to come up with the money. He called me in tears, saying that never in his life had he thought money was so important. We talked for a long time, then he remembered the house. It was his idea, Handong. He knew it was in his name and that he was free to sell it, so he asked me to help. I sold it in a week. Everything—the furniture, even the car! We sold the entire lot for $380,000. When we converted it to yuan, it was exactly the ¥3 million we needed. We sold that place way below market value, but under the circumstances we weren’t exactly in a position to haggle. After we had the full ¥10 million, we transferred it to your dad’s contact, and that was it. You got out.” Liu Zheng sat next to me and gently touched my shoulder.
“Handong,” he continued. “It’s no secret that I didn’t like Lan Yu at first. You knew that. But after what he did for you, I really came to admire him. I mean, it’s like he became a friend, you know? And if you and him had—I mean, if you and him had that kind of relationship—then he really stepped up and played the part, didn’t he? If I had been in your shoes, I don’t know if my own wife would have done that for me!” He gave a gentle laugh.
“Then why did he hide it from me?” I cried, tears streaming down my cheeks.
“He just said he wanted to surprise you with it one day. I thought he would have told you by now. Either him, or our Ma.”
“Ma knew?”
“Of course she knew! The day you got out of jail, when we went to her house and Lan Yu was waiting in the car, what do you think she was doing while you were in your bedroom? She was standing at the window, watching Lan Yu in the car outside.”
Forty-One
It’s been three years since Lan Yu died. I live in Canada now, in West Vancouver, where I bought a house and live with my new wife and our daughter. My mother lives with us, too.
I never did find Lan Yu’s courage. The courage I would have needed to face—really face—my gay identity. But even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway since my heart died long ago. As for my young wife, I treat her well and do my best to take care of her, but I’ll never be able to love her. Not like I loved Lan Yu.
My wife is a devout Christian and often tries to share the gospel with me. I just laugh it off. I’ve always been an atheist, and besides, I know God thinks homosexuals like me aren’t worthy of his glory. But about six months ago, something happened that I’ll never forget.
It was Christmas Eve and my wife dragged me off to church as usual. Standing there, surrounded by congregants and the solemn sound of hymns rising in the air, I suddenly felt that there must be more to this life than the material world. For the first time it seemed to me that after we die, there must be a heaven and there must be a hell. I heard the pastor’s long, tedious sermon, but had only one thing on my mind: Where is Lan Yu now?
He must be in heaven, I thought, because when he was in this world he never harmed a living soul. He was so good, so decent, so kind to everyone around him. His only crime was that he loved someone he wasn’t supposed to. The world thought his love was ludicrous, sick, degenerate. But I knew it was pure, innocent, eternal.
And me? I won’t make it to heaven. Not because I loved another man, but because of the suffering I caused him. Lan Yu is dead now. I can’t change that. I can’t undo what I’ve done. All I can do is spend the rest of my life wondering whether his death was a punishment for him, or for me.
All around me, the congregants lowered their heads in prayer as the pastor continued eulogizing the universal love of the heavenly Father. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but it didn’t matter anyway. I closed my eyes . . .
God, I ask only for one thing, and I beg you to grant it. Wherever you have sent Lan Yu, please let me go there when I leave this world. If he is in heaven, let us be there together, able at last to openly share the love we had for each other in this world. There, I will repay him all that I owe. I will reverse the sorrow that I caused him in this lifetime.
If he is in hell, let me go there, too. Let me stand behind him and place my hands firmly on his shoulders. There, we will suffer hell’s torture and fiery torment together. I will have no regrets, and feel no resentment.
A melody rose from the pews, stirring me out of my reverie. Amid the sound of singing churchgoers, my wife turned to look at me, her face frozen in stunned silence when she saw the tears streaming down my cheeks.
It’s all warm blue sunshine here in Vancouver. In early autumn there’s no trace of the chilly fall winds that howl through the streets of China’s northern capital. Even the leaves stay green—just a few golden, dying ones that flutter through the air and land on the lawn outside.
I am sitting in the front yard, my back to the house, watching the horizon as the sun sets on another dying day, thinking with wonder how the end of the day here brings a new one to the other side of the world. I hear the happy, laughing sound of my mother, wife, and daughter behind me. I look at the sky, where the faint rouge of the setting sun lingers on the edge of space and time. Sweet, radiant, beautiful.
Postscript to the Revised
Tohan Taiwan Editiona
This postscript was originally published in the 2002 Tohan Taiwan version of the novel.
Bei Tong
Translated by Scott E. Myers
I shot my first roll of film in 1994 in the United States. When I finished the roll, I rushed uptown to a drugstore near Columbia University to have it developed, thinking about how I was going to send the pictures back to my family in China. They were anxiously awaiting my news, and I wanted to tell them that everything here was fine. I pulled the pictures out of the envelope and flipped through them one by one.
“Great shots!” a voice behind me creaked.
I turned my head and saw a person in their seventies speaking to me with a smile.
This is how I met Bob and his wife, Jan. They were the first friends I made in America. Bob was a World War II veteran who had served in MacArthur’s military command center and fought against the Japanese while stationed in the Philippines. He enjoyed befriending students from Asia, especially young people from mainland China, Taiwan, and South Korea. He didn’t like Japanese people. He
said the world was changing too quickly, that yesterday’s enemies were today’s friends, and that yesterday’s friends were the adversaries of today.
Bob and Jan had long ago sold their big house in New Jersey and moved into an apartment in New York City’s Upper West Side. They had two sons and two grandsons who, one could easily tell, were their greatest riches and source of pride.
For Bob’s eightieth birthday, his sons planned a series of surprises. First, the older son arrived from Ohio with his family in tow. Then Bob’s seventy-seven-year-old brother arrived from out of state for the party his nephews had planned.
A few months later the family celebrated Jan’s eightieth birthday even more grandly than her husband’s. The entire affair was organized single-handedly by their younger son, Christopher. Jan’s eyes filled with tears as she described the details, and before long she became so choked up that she couldn’t speak. I was surprised to discover that in a money-driven capitalist society there existed strong family sentiment after all.
Once when we were chatting, I casually mentioned to Bob and Jan that a friend of mine never went to the hospital, not even if they had a fever, because they couldn’t afford health insurance. A few days later Bob and Jan mailed me a check for $300 with a note telling me to give it to my friend. In their letter they wrote that the money had come from an organization devoted to helping people in need.
By 1996 life was getting better and better. Bob and Jan called to convey their good wishes, then told me with great excitement that they had gotten a computer for their home. They also invited me to their place for dinner.
“Chris helped us get it and showed us how to use it!” Jan enthused. She was elated.
I knew their son Chris was a computer engineer and that he, too, lived in New York. Bob and Jan hadn’t had him until they were in their forties. Each summer, Chris would take his parents to Acadia National Park to vacation and escape the summer heat.
“Jan’s already a computer maniac!” Bob laughed.
After dinner, Bob and Jan grabbed a stack of photos and showed me pictures of their sons and grandsons. “This is David and his wife. They just moved to Louisiana. And this is their son Matthew. He studies at UC Berkeley. He’s only seventeen and is so smart!”
“This is Chris, he visits us a lot. He’s not married, he’s gay.” Jan raised her head and smiled, and her face beamed with happiness and pride.
I looked at the picture and saw a mature, gentle-looking, handsome man in black.
After a period of good luck, 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 had tried everything I could, and for the rest, resigned myself to fate. 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! What the hell is this? I knew I could write something better.
And so I threw myself furiously into writing, then posted my writing online. Some readers said they liked it, so I wrote more, and gradually lost track of where I was. Had I created a story or stepped into one? Was this a dream or was it the real world? Was all of this taking place in the bone-chilling cold of early winter in Beijing, or in the late autumn rain of New York? The only thing that was clear to me was that I had profoundly learned the meaning of these five words: forgetting to eat and sleep.
There were people on the Internet who asked, “Is this a true story?” I told them I didn’t know how to answer the question. When they pressed me for an answer, I said, “It’s pure fiction.”
Some people said it was the most moving story they had read in recent years. Others said that the author was probably writing with one hand while masturbating with the other.
Having nearly drowned in the tidal wave of praise and vitriol that followed, I made a vow to myself: I would never write another novel.
It now seems to me that 1998 was the dark night before the sunrise. By the second half of 1999, my eyes had been greeted not only by the rising dawn but by a bright sunlight that shone on all things.
There are still people on the Internet who ask, “Are you Handong? Are you Lan Yu?” I tell them that I’m not Handong. Even less am I Lan Yu.
“Then why does your email address have the name Lan Yu in it?”
“Because I like this name, just like you do. Because the story is going to be published as a book with the title Lan Yu.”
Yesterday I called Bob and Jan to tell them that my novel is going to be published. They offered their congratulations.
“We can’t read Chinese, but please send us a copy when it comes out!”
“Of course!” I replied.
From Identity to Social Protest:
The Cultural Politics of Beijing Comrades
Petrus Liu
Owing in no small part to the commercial success of its film adaptation as Lan Yu, Beijing Comrades is one of the most iconic texts of 1990s China that influenced and, one could say, defined an entire generation. Like other landmarks in the history of modern Chinese queer writing, Beijing Comrades encapsulates the worldviews, memories, and angst of a community in the making, bearing dense emotional freight and witness to the changing tides of history.1 While many of its salient characteristics can be traced back to the specific tradition of writing same-sex desire in Chinese, Beijing Comrades also parts company with other queer texts in significant ways: as the current translation of the original text, Tohan version, unpublished chapters, and other fragments show, the novel is a living text, a dynamically evolving dialogue in the making of global gay history. To the extent that the Internet made it possible for the author not only to publish the novel but also to incorporate netizens’ feedback with complete anonymity, Beijing Comrades can be characterized as an “authorless” text, a vortex of signifiers emanating from different circles across two decades. This aggregated text stands in contrast to queer works that are thematically transgressive but socially legitimated under the strong “aura” (in the Benjaminian sense) of a single author, such as Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys and Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. The suppression of Beijing Comrades’s authorial identity—the fact that its author’s ambiguous gender identity and sexual orientation did not prevent gay men’s enthusiastic reception of the text—raises interesting questions for the cultural politics of gay identity and identification. Indeed, the rise of “cyber literature” (for which there now exist writing contests and professional associations in China) has fundamentally altered the ways that queer people in China articulate their subterranean desires and organize their lives.2 All of this makes the analysis of Beijing Comrades a critical task for understanding global queer cultures.
Queer literature is always a site of identification and a form of social protest. Regardless of their literary merit, queer texts are important cultural artifacts bearing the indelible imprints of a collective struggle for recognition, enfranchisement, and community. Just as each queer text signals a different way of projecting our cathected desires, each offers a different tactic of intervention that must be historicized. A queer text could, for example, combat the stereotypical conflation of AIDS and homosexuality by disarticulating same-sex desire from other forms of sexual stigma, or a text could offer a model of thinking that encourages gay men and women to stand in solidarity with all victims of normative conceptions of sexuality. One could seek acceptance on the basis of the commonality of gay and straight people (“don’t ask, don’t tell”; “we are just like you except for what we do in the bedroom”), or one could defend alternative configurations of kinship and desire on the basis of diversity (“we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”). As an erotic text that does show what gay people do in the bedroom, Beijing Comrades embodies and enables a historical resistance to heteronormative assimilation. Bei Tong’s straightforward depictions of gay sex are powerfully liberating: no shame, no euphemisms, no apologies. Although the author’s effort to offi
cially publish the text in book form in mainland China has not been successful, the circulation of the cyber novel preserves the author’s daring style. Scott E. Myers’s marvelous translation captures the richness and intensity of Beijing Comrades’s sexual vocabulary, putting to rest, once and for all, the myth that gay sex remains an unspeakable topic in the PRC’s “traditional” culture.
But in addition to the intricately detailed and candid descriptions of gay sex, what exactly explains the historical influence and success of Beijing Comrades? This text follows the emotional roller-coaster ride of the on-off relationship between Handong, an arrogant, wealthy businessman born to high-ranking communist cadres, and Lan Yu, an innocent and hardworking sixteen-year-old student who falls for Handong, not because of, but in spite of the latter’s money. The novel portrays love and money as diametrically opposed goals in life, symbolized by Lan Yu’s unwavering devotion and Handong’s worldly mercantilism. The novel romanticizes the conceptual dichotomy between love and money, presenting Lan Yu as the embodiment of values and emotions found in our “natural” state of being prior to, or at least untainted by, the complications of economics. The drama centers on Handong’s struggles between his desire for Lan Yu and his recognition that he cannot “live in a vacuum” without considering his family and career (203). Toward the end of the novel, Handong concludes that “happiness” alone cannot sustain a viable relationship, which is unable to escape factors such as the “bond of marriage” and the “consideration of property, profits, children, or social opinion” (338). For Handong, therefore, a relationship is always also an economic arrangement. Handong leaves Lan Yu again and again for different reasons: his intimacy issues after he and Lan Yu get too close, boredom with a monogamous relationship, social and family pressures to get married, the intervention of medical experts, a plot hatched by Handong’s wife and mother to ruin Lan Yu’s reputation, and Handong’s bouts of internalized homophobia. Circumstances, however, keep bringing Handong back to Lan Yu, who remains loyal. After Handong goes to prison for “bribery, smuggling, [and] illegal pooling of funds” (282), his family and his ex-wife Lin Ping declare him a lost cause, but Lan Yu comes to his rescue by paying an obscenely large sum of money to someone who can pull strings to help Handong.
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