北京故事, 北京同志
One of the most surprising things for me when I compiled my original list of read countries what that I had never read a book by a Chinese author. I’d read many history books, biographies and memoires about China and books set in China, but never a novel by a Chinese author. Given that my uni degree was in East Asian Studies, this seems like a pretty huge oversight on my part.
I had a few days stopover in Shanghai visiting an old friend, so what better occasion that to finally rectify my lapse in world reading? China has thousands of years of literary history under its belt, and counts on a few Nobel Prize winners too. So the prospect of narrowing it down to one book to read was rather daunting. Serendipity struck and when I ordered my entry for Taiwan; Beijing Comrades popped up in the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section. Intrigued by the blurb, it went straight into my cart.
Beijing Comrades is the story of a gay love affair set against the backdrop of Tiananmen-era Beijing. Owing to its controversial subject matter and challenge to Party ideology, it was published anonymously on an underground gay website in China. It became widely successful and although no Mainland publisher would dare pick it up, the book was eventually published in Taiwan. It later also became a Hong Kong film called Lan Yu. Scott E Myers’ excellent translation marks the first time Beijing Comrades is available to English readers.
The story follows Lan Yu, a poor university student from rural China, and Chen Handong, a businessman profiting from China’s opening to the outside world at the end of the 1980s. Despite their differences, they fall together in a romantic, tragic love-for-the-ages in the turbulent upheavals and Confucian family pressures of the time. Beijing Comrades offers a realistic, intimate portrayal of two people struggling with love, sexuality and each other when the world around them was coming of age.
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