Beijing Comrades (33 page)

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company with other queer texts in significant ways: as the current translation of the original text, Tohan version, unpublished chapters, and other fragments show, the novel is a living text, a dynamically evolving dialogue in the making of global gay history.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 officially 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.

By constructing Lan Yu as a figure of true love who, despite his background as an impoverished migrant, remains utterly uninterested in monetary gain, the novel appeals to contemporary Beijing gay men's prevalent fear of being associated with or, worse still, mistaken for “money boys.”
³
In this sense, Lan Yu is a modern version of Du Shiniang, the well-known prostitute figure in classical Chinese literature who turns out to be not only a pure-hearted person but also an unexpected reservoir of rainy-day funds.

Written in the period of intense neoliberalization in China that brought about, among other things, the birth of a “pink economy” sustained by trendy gay bars, bathhouses, and restaurants,
Beijing Comrades
articulates a cultural fantasy about the separability of love and money in human relations.
The centrality of this fantasy also explains a strange inversion of the fortunes of the humanities in the story. The novel begins by telling readers that Handong majored in Chinese literature in college. This seemingly trivial detail accrues a new layer of significance in the first meeting between the lovers, when Handong tries to make small talk by praising Lan Yu for picking a major that will “make a lot of money,” unlike “humanities majors” like himself who are, when in college, “chronically broke” (19). However, the three principal characters who are financially dependent on Handong all have very “practical” skills: Liu Zheng (Handong's old classmate and loyal employee), a physicist by training; Lan Yu, an architecture major; and Lin Ping, an English interpreter with a degree from the fictitious Fifth International Studies University (which could be a stand-in for Beijing International Studies University). As depicted by the novel, a person's chosen subject of study has no bearing on his or her economic standing. The source of Handong's fortune is instead a combination of family connections and shrewd capitalist investments. Lan Yu never once acknowledges Handong's literary training; instead, he repeatedly addresses Handong in the collective: “you businessmen” (123). The novel's emphasis on the disconnect between access to economic resources and the interiority of a person (suggested by various majors and interests) helps to characterize Handong and, by extension, China's postsocialist economic boom as a mirage without substance. Hence, Handong's business crumbles as fast as it begins. By the time Handong ends up in prison, the novel's anticapitalist discourse is finally complete: love perseveres, while money is only ephemeral.

We never find out exactly why Handong goes to prison, only that he has made some enemies in the business world.
However, we may explain the sudden collapse of Handong's business as a representation of the volatility of material wealth in the service of the novel's critique of the postsocialist economy. With Lan Yu's sudden car accident resulting in his death,
⁴
the novel's ending may serve to highlight the fragility of life and the anguish suffered because of missed opportunities. Bei Tong succeeds in bringing a sense of closure: after Lan Yu's passing, Handong decides to enter a second heterosexual marriage and lead a peaceful life, now living in Vancouver at an emotional distance from his “Beijing story.” Both his daughter and second wife remain nameless. Contrasted with the finely detailed sex scenes, scintillating conversations, and textured emotions in the preceding chapters, the blurriness of the story post–Lan Yu succeeds in creating a clear shift in narrative tempo. Clearly, the novel's center of interest remains in Beijing.

The development of Handong's materialism and the vicissitudes of his economic fortune have allegorical dimensions which inspire critic David L. Eng to characterize the film adaptation of this novel as a melodrama of neoliberalism that “places the emergence of homosexual subjectivity . . . squarely within . . . a gendered developmentalism.”
⁵
While the novel's anticapitalist themes place it in the context of postreform China, the storyline has an abstract quality that suggests that it could have happened anywhere. The decision to keep the story unanchored appears to be deliberate in comparison to Pai Hsien-yung's
Crystal Boys
, which memorializes certain venues like the New Park in the popular imaginary.
⁶
By contrast, while Bei Tong's work provokes thinking on the mutual entanglement of modern gay subjectivity and postsocialist development in China, the novel does not produce a distinctive narrative about Beijing. References to Beijing's unique
colloquialism (
zan ma,
“our Ma”), political events (Tian'anmen), fictive venues (Lan Yu as a student at “Huada”), and urban problems (traffic, inflation, corruption, income disparity, real estate development, and the influx of migrant workers) are incidental to the plot. Many chapters begin with a comment on Beijing's inclement weather, though the primary purpose of these details is not to ground the text in locality but to create a journal-like quality, which, together with the two confessions that conclude the novel (a legal one after Handong's arrest and a Christian one after the loss of Lan Yu), place
Beijing Comrades
in a family of first-person confessional gay writing in modern Chinese literature.
⁷

The radical generalizability of the novel's setting elevates one of the novel's most unique contributions: its rejection of identity narratives. Whereas both the novel and its film adaptation represent a consolidated, self-affirmative social identity,
Beijing Comrades
never congeals into a predictable coming-out narrative. Unlike
The Wedding Banquet
and other influential queer works from the 1990s,
Beijing Comrades
is not a melodramatic story centered on a closeted gay man who eventually comes to accept his identity. Polyamorous in practice, Handong does not believe in labels such as gay and bisexual. The tale concludes with Handong's decision to marry another woman, on the conviction that he will “never . . . find Lan Yu's courage to . . . face . . . [his] gay identity” (364). The word “courage” seems improperly attributed to Lan Yu, for Lan Yu never develops a self-conscious gay identity. In fact, neither Lan Yu nor Handong defines their relationship in terms of sexual orientation. If Lan Yu never struggles with his sexuality, it is not due to a precocious degree of self-awareness or unparalleled courage that Handong never finds in himself; rather, it is because
homosexuality simply appears to be a nonissue for Lan Yu. At the beginning of their sexual relationship, Lan Yu is only sixteen and just arriving from China's northwest. If Handong does not consider himself gay at this point though he has had sex with men, Lan Yu is an even less qualified candidate for the term. Whereas Handong has given the matter some thought, Lan Yu's positive responses to Handong's sexual advances seem to be more of a natural reaction than the expression of a carefully chosen identity. The fact that Lan Yu “always greatly enjoy[s] the pleasures of sex” (295) with Handong can hardly be described as a politically progressive act embodying the “courage to be gay.” Rather, Lan Yu's embrace of their relationship can be explained as the result of an absence of identity, a romanticized innocence untainted by the descriptive powers of social categories. Similarly, Lan Yu never develops an identity as a top or a bottom, unlike the drummer Huang Jian. We learn that Lan Yu prefers hand jobs and oral sex to both positions but usually bottoms because it pleases Handong, or sometimes just “to get it over with” (74). By contrast, the act of penetrating the less powerful partner (in terms of age, gender, or status) furnishes an important kernel of Handong's identity: for Handong, the “sexual pleasure” is only “part of it; the real high [is Lan Yu's] unswerving commitment to endure” the pain of anal penetration to please him (56).

Lan Yu's inexperience thus makes him a role model of non-identity, whereas Handong stands as an example of a failed gay identity.
Beijing Comrades
is therefore a significantly different kind of identity narrative. The resistance to identity politics is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this text and sets it apart from other examples of late-1990s queer sinophone literature. In
Beijing Comrades,
we encounter an intriguing
moment in the history of modern Chinese gay writing that disrupts a unilinear movement toward identity politics.