In Jiaming Tang’s first novel, Cinema Love, the action begins in Mawei City, of Fuzhou City, in Fujian Province. Specifically, the action happens at Mawei City Workers’ Cinema, a place where gay men go for quickie liaisons with other men, on the down low, even as they have wives and children at home. On the big screen is propaganda films of war and other dross. The Projectionist lives in the world of celluloid dreams, and the woman selling tickets is Bao Mei; the two are lovers.
Flash forward nearly 35 years later. The cinema has long been razed by corrupt government officials to build some other development project. Lao Er (“Old Second”) lives in the U.S. in the NYC Chinatown, with Bao Mei. Theirs is a long-term marriage of convenience. This novel flashes back to his growing up years, his awareness of his desire for “man-love,” and how the drama of the cinema and some of the men from that era fare as they emigrate to the U.S.
“Old Second” grows up as a boy in a village known as High Mountain. It is the summer of 1980. Old Second is attuned to the societal rules of survival. He learns as a boy that “the wrong kind of laughter can kill.” His older brother, the Eldest, is off to a factory job in Fuzhou. The children of the village are aware of risks.
There’s a reason High Mountain kids don’t play hide and-seek, and it’s not for lack of imagination. It’s simply too easy to vanish. Too easy to climb into the leaves and forget that life exists.
At 15, Old Second experiences emotions for another boy, known as One Meter Sixty-Five. A moment of tenderness and exploration between the two is witnessed by the 9-year-old Spring Chicken, a younger brother of Old Second, who tells on him. Old Second is punished brutally by his family to save face and by the villagers. China is a country without privacy, and villagers make everyone else’s business theirs as well. Jiaming Tang writes:
This is the kind of place where words don’t matter. Only the language of bodies, and the sound of machines. Can you hear the machines? They approach slowly, but to the villagers it’s too fast. Way too fast. A road is paved; a telephone pole goes up. Then another, and another—giants obscured by gravel dust. The stream Old Second calls River becomes a puddle, and his bottle traps with the croakers still in them are buried in mud.
The societal rules—based on 1980s rural China—are simple. It reads as “Don’t ask don’t tell.” Marry a woman. Bear a child. There are so many strictures that even young adults may be quite naïve and ill-informed in the countryside. Women and men end up in arranged marriages when there is not much in the way of actual connection between people, and then, social pressures ensure that many stay in marital union for long periods.
The cinema is physically not a very impressive place. It is a barebones setup, with spaces lit by single bulbs and dirty mattresses. The housekeeping is simple, mostly actualized with a broom, wielded by the ticket clerk. It is a place where police do not care to look. Men converge on the space based on hearsay and rumors. They offer other men cigarettes as a cruising signal, and if the cigarette is accepted, the furtive sexual acts follow. Their exchanges are physical and transactional for the most part. A few find actual affection and perhaps a relationship.
The ticket clerk Bao Mei observed the discrepancy between cinema and life:
It’s interesting how death is different in real life. Bao Mei’s gone to the movies many times, and there, death is a grand, dramatic, and heroic event. It’s waterworks and fists against the chest. Soldiers wailing and a wife-mother-sister collapsed on the ground.
The same observation applies to sex depicted in cinema vs. in real life. Bao Mei’s brother, Hen Bao, observes:
He’s sure that he’ll be able to communicate with his sister again if she goes to the cinema. Within those walls exists a force that allows the hidden parts of people to be seen. Come alive. Like the first time he went, and a man offered him a cigarette, and Hen Bao learned that sweat and saliva and piss were the smells of love…The cinema is a place where a certain kind of reality pauses. Where, if a sissy’s hand brushes against another man’s knuckle hairs, his first reaction is to grab it. Hard. Then harder, and harder again, until that nameless, scentless flower blooms.
For a short period, there is an open celebration of the man-love sub-culture and the furtive sub-population in Mawei. Their community is defined by their social persecution.
The wives of these men are seen in a sexist misogynistic light: they are for cooking, housekeeping, bearing a child, and working a job. Their needs and wants are not a concern.
Lao Er finds his person in the form of a married man Shun-Er. Cinema Love follows their affair and the fate of the cinema and the move of some of the principals around the cinema stateside through snakehead networks and green card marriages.
In the narrative, true passions (“heart-rambling”) are a rare luxury; living individual “truths” are thwarted and squelched. They exist in the margins of accepted mainstream lives. The wives of the gay men (and the transgender) are not without their own abilities to wreak revenge. The working class immigrants cluster in Chinatown to live many-to-a-room with bare needs met and low wages at restaurants and sweatshops. Marriages are depicted as mutual compromises. Even those between heterosexuals are not necessarily stable or loving; however, as love does blossom between one “green card” wife and her husband.
The novel asks whether it is more desirable to live a convenient life or to pursue inner desires but at the cost of many adjustments. In a sense, old age draws away some of the fire in the blood, and the drive for lovers diminishes and makes moot the argument.
Jiaming Tang is based in Brooklyn, NY. Cinema Love is his first novel. He identifies as a “queer immigrant writer.” With the imbalance of males to females given the former one-child policy and the mass-scale abortions of female fetuses in prior generations, one wonders what the state of sexual liaisons and love may be in the present.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
