A novel of gay love, grief and memory
CINEMA LOVE JIAMING TANG 304pp. John Murray. £16.99.
JIAMING TANG’S DEBUT NOVEL, Cinema Love, might best be described as a tragedy in the guise of a fable. Its portrayal of the lives of Chinese immigrants in the US has a plaintive, stoical, occasionally comical air. The past infiltrates the present like a charm, lending a dreamlike mood to thoughts and experiences. But in the end, life refuses to resolve into a redeeming story.
Close to the start of the novel, we witness Old Second – a man on the brink of old age – watching from the window of his apartment in New York’s Chinatown as rent strikers march in the street below. His wife, Bao Mei, arrives home with bags of groceries. Old Second and Bao Mei are, we are told, “two people who’ve grieved for thirty years”. From this precise co-ordinate the novel leaps into the past, inhabiting the couple’s younger selves and homing in on the subterranean world of the Workers’ Cinema in the city of Mawei in Fujian, China, some time in the 1980s.
In this earlier period, the run-down venue is a cruising spot, a place “where men loved, and loved, and loved”. (That repetition, disarming in its simplicity and insistence, is emblematic of the novel’s understated poetry.) The films that the projectionist plays are barely noticed by the “squalid and impolite dreamers” who frequent the place. The cinema is a place of assignations, but also of stories – of gossip and confidence. It is an apt figure for the novel itself, in which we flit between lives and personae, such that the stories themselves begin to feel like sequences in a film, projections in a void.
Bao Mei’s brother, Hen Bao, had frequented the cinema before his death in an accident, and in the mind of the young Bao Mei, his ghost inhabits the place. She takes a job in the box office, becoming a kind of custodian (“sister, madame, friend”) of the men who go there. Among these is Old Second, rejected by his rural family, who finds a lover in the cinema – a young man, Shun-Er, who is married to a still younger wife, Yan Hua.
In the novel’s second part we switch to Yan Hua’s story. It is 1989, and she has moved to East Broadway and remarried (to an unprepossessing “green card husband”). She longs “to be more than an immigrant haunted by her past”, but the memory of Shun-Er’s betrayal and her furious – catastrophic – response is inescapable. Old Second, also now in New York and married to Bao Mei for convenience’s sake, starts a romance with a married man called Kevin. When they are together, Old Second “can appreciate and yearn for the impossible, and therefore sacred, touch of another man’s fingers wrapped between his”. But alone afterwards he thinks of the older man’s rancid breath. A double mood of this kind runs t
