Jiaming Tang’s debut novel begins in a cinema – a dark room of “thumping heartbeats”, men “waiting for love” and films that no one watches. The Workers’ Cinema in 1980s Mawei, China, is a cruising spot for gay men, and where the characters’ lives first overlap: Old Second finds his lover, Shun-Er; Shun-Er’s young wife, Yan Hua, becomes embittered by his betrayal; Bao Mei, haunted by her brother’s death, takes a “job in the box office”. Years later, now in New York’s Chinatown, the same characters deal not only with displacement but also the fallout from their furtive passion and the destruction of the cinema that cradled their secrets.
Love, for Tang, is about seeing and being seen. In Cinema Love, the men, married to women, hardly look at their male lovers: the “darkness hid[es] everything” and they invariably keep “their eyes closed”. When Yan Hua discovers her husband in bed with an “older”, “uglier” man, she waits outside the room until they are both dressed. Stranded somewhere between self-deception and desperately loyal discretion, she never says “one word” to her husband “about the incident”. Love, when as wretched as this, is about turning a blind eye, about believing a fiction of which necessity is the author.
Storytelling, then, needs to be salvaged from secrecy, and Tang finds in Bao Mei a neat avatar for his own authorial ambition. From East Broadway, Bao Mei writes letters addressed, but never sent, to the men from the Workers’ Cinema. She “recreates” their ‘lives’ and “their forbidden loves”. Through her imaginative fidelity “to their stories”, she sees “the faces of the men in the theatre. Each and every single one”. Fiction, for Tang, is the attempt both to see clearly and remember generously and it, in turn, becomes the ultimate act of love in the novel. If this is a kind of vicarious redemption, Tang perhaps risks being heavy-handed in his manoeuvre. Bao Mei “takes on a persona” and has a “remarkable facility for metaphor”, he reassures his readers, as if not quite convinced by his own literary device.
Cinema Love, nonetheless, is an ambitious and promising debut, and despite his novel’s intricate plot and expansive time frame, Tang succeeds in making the story land with the “urgency of a bullet wound”.
