By Audrey Fong
This June marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, what many consider a turning point for the gay rights movement in the U.S. In an op-ed for LARB, Jonathan Alexander describes the riots as “when a group of faggots, trannies, and drag queens decided that they had had enough, that they didn’t want to be harassed anymore by police making periodic raids on queer establishments. Enough. Time to fight back. And they did.” Alexander also notes that while the Stonewall riots were not the first, and would not be the last, act of resistance by the LGBTQ+ community that it is, oftentimes, the one “LGBT folk across the world now celebrate gay pride during the month of June.”
However, in Jiaming Tang’s debut novel, Cinema Love, these riots act as more of a footnote than a focal point. Instead, another act of resistance serves as a focal point for which the rest of the novel’s plots orbit. Within the novel, the Mawei City Workers’ Cinema is “a rundown theater where gay men cruised for intimacy and conversation” in 1980s Fuzhou. When the government decides to tear it down, the theater’s guests protest its closing, only to be met with violence.
This protest lies at the center of Cinema Love. The novel follows three main couples’ lives in the wake of the protest: Yan Hua and Shun-Er, who are married; Shun-Er and Old Second, two men who find love with each other at the Workers’ Cinema; and Old Second and Bao Mei, who get married after the protest.
While the center of the novel is the Workers’ Cinema and a few of the gay men who frequented it like Old Second and Shun-Er, the novel revolves largely around the lives of the women who married these men such as Yan Hua and Bao Mei. By doing so, Cinema Love offers an intimate and gentle look at the complexity of these relationships and what societal and economic circumstances impact these couples.
What struck me the most about Cinema Love was the way it handles the topic of love versus care, the way Tang questions what is love and what does it look like, specifically with the relationships of the two straight women, Yan Hua and Bao Mei, married to gay men, Shun-Er and Old Second, respectively.
For the sake of brevity, I will focus on Yan Hua and Shun-Er’s marriage. In it, there is care and tenderness, yet a lack of understanding ruptures their marriage. For several years, Yan Hua “was happy with her marriage. She was happy that Shun-Er was gentle,” that he never beat her like other husbands did. The two of them get along and he encourages her to be her best self, buying her art supplies after she expresses an interest in painting and cheers her on to get her hair done despite their financial instability. Yan Hua even recalls a time when “they were both so happy,” a time when Shun-Er went shopping with Yan Hua and had “her try on a pile of clothes, one after the other, giddy as a child with a new toy.”
However, the moment Yan Hua catches her husband sleeping with Old Second, she realizes why she had felt for so long that there was something off about her marriage despite the joy and comfort. In an earlier scene, Shun-Er remarks to Old Second that, “The problem is, Yan Hua’s like my mother. She’s clueless about gay people…She couldn’t imagine that a person like me could exist.” This cluelessness makes it difficult for Shun-Er to ever be honest with Yan Hua. Additionally, it provides context as to why Yan Hua’s shock is so deep, leading her to do something that harms Shun-Er, which one could argue shows that she doesn’t care about Shun-Er as deeply as the reader is led to believe.
However, years later when Yan Hua has moved to the U.S. by herself, she looks back at their shopping trip differently, realizing “that Shun-Er wanted to become a woman by using Yan Hua’s body. She was his way of experiencing womanhood, of escaping himself through a body that wasn’t his.” At this stage in her life, she is no longer angry about Shun-Er’s relationship with Old Second and regrets what she did to Shun-Er. As she burns offerings at a temple, she whispers, “I hope that you’ve become the person you’ve always wanted to be.” This moment complicates what love and care can look like, blurring the two, making it unclear if Yan Hua continues to love Shun-Er or if it is more of a feeling of deep care for someone she spent many of her years with. One thing is clear though: she misses Shun-Er and has come to accept him for who he was.
These relationships and human-to-human moments are the strengths of Tang’s novel and I wish Cinema Love would’ve stayed focused on the main characters’ lives. However, these characters’ plots occasionally get bogged down by paragraphs’ worth of descriptions of the world and conditions around them such as descriptions of Chinatown when a few characters move to New York or the changing face of Chinatown over the decades the novel covers. While these passages can be interesting, they take the reader out of the characters’ lives and do not contribute much to the plot.
Cinema Love is a reflective debut that pushes readers to think about the way we treat those in our lives. It blurs the line between love and care to highlight how even in a marriage between a straight woman and a gay man, there can still be care, even if it’s not romantic love. Additionally, while the protests at the Workers’ Cinema are fictional, Tang’s inclusion of this pivotal moment points to the many ways, and the many moments in history, in which the LGBTQ+ community has resisted societal and/or government mandated heteronormativity.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.