Cinema Love

December 1, 2023

Subject of a bidding war in the U.S. and preempted in several European markets, Tang's debut is a queer love story and an immigrant tale that spans across post-socialist China to contemporary NYC. Tang is a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow and works at Scribner. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from March 18, 2024
This resonant and textured debut traces the secret lives of gay men and their wives in 1980s China and their loneliness in contemporary New York City’s Chinatown. As a young man, Old Second leaves his village in shame after his family discovers his sexuality. In the city of Fuzhou, he falls in love with a man named Shun-Er, whom he meets at the Workers’ Cinema, which is known for showing war films to a gay clientele who meet for sex in the screening rooms. Out of convenience, Old Second marries Bao Mei, a woman who works at the cinema’s ticket counter, and they immigrate to New York City in the 1990s. A parallel narrative follows Yan Hua and her marriage to Shun-Er, who dies by suicide in 1989 and whose ghost continues to haunt her after she comes to the U.S. as a “puppet wife” to Frog, the “discount-bin husband” her family paid in exchange for her green card. Tang laces the narrative with Dickensian details of Chinatown’s underground economy (Frog and Yan Hua live in a cramped, six-dollar per night “motel” room shared by many others in bunk beds), and lyrically portrays Old Second’s longing for same-sex intimacy (“A barrier has been erected around his heart, and though he can look past it like clean glass, he finds there are certain thresholds he can no longer cross”). Tang announces himself as a writer to watch with this unshakable novel. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.

April 1, 2024
Tang chronicles the complex connections among a group of Chinese immigrants. In the beginning of this novel, readers will find themselves ushered into a movie theater they'll come to know as the Mawei City Workers' Cinema. "The customer knows the cinema like the lines on a lover's face," Tang writes, and that comparison resonates in a few ways--not least of which is the theater's role as a pickup spot for gay men in 1980s China. In the chapters that follow, Tang introduces a number of characters with ties to the Workers' Cinema who have since left for the United States, including Old Second (who found a place where he could be himself) and Bao Mei (who communed with the ghost of her brother there). Tang moves deftly across the years, finding parallels between the government and business interests looking to destroy the Workers' Cinema and efforts to save the East Broadway Mall in 2020s New York City. Slowly, tensions from the past return to the present, mainly via the character of Yan Hua, who immigrates to the U.S. as the "puppet wife" of a gay man. She's a complex character; her second marriage, to a man named Frog, is described as "a tolerance that sometimes creeps toward friendship." And she, too, has a connection to the Workers' Cinema, albeit one that's left her with a growing sense of guilt over the decades. Tang has plenty to say here--with intimacy, sadness, and aging being frequent subjects. The prose moves from omniscient to highly focused with ease, as when Tang zeroes in on an aging Old Second, noting that his "main issue, now, is his inability to disregard pain." A haunting story of shared pasts and troubled memories.

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April 1, 2024
A fixture of the Chinese town of Mawei, the Worker's Cinema is where gay men go to cruise in the darkened theater. It is there that Old Second meets Shun-Er, and despite the fact that Shun-Er is married to Yan Hua, the two men become lovers. The cinema's woman ticket-taker, Bao Mei, is a fixture too and the self-appointed friend and guardian of the cinema's patrons. When Yan Hua discovers her husband's affair, she betrays him and Old Second. Shun-Er dies by suicide, and in the aftermath, Yan Hua emigrates to America and pays a man called Frog, who has a green card, to marry her. Now an unlikely couple, Old Second and Bao Mei emigrate too--illegally. Working in a garment factory, Yan Hua befriends May, whose husband, Kevin, turns out to be having an affair with none other than Old Second. The growing complexity of Tang's fully realized characters is as fascinating as the interrelationships among them. Rich in simile and metaphor, Tang's book is beautifully written too (things happen ""with the urgency of a bullet wound,"" a city grows ""like a tumor""). An excellent first novel and a captivating reading experience.

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