Jiaming Tang’s maiden novel commences within the confines of a cinema. It is a portrayal of the secretive engagements of gay men in the Workers’ Cinema located in Mawei, China during the 1980s. Tang introduces us to characters like Old Second who finds love in the form of Shun-Er amidst the pulsating darkness of the theatre; Shun-Er’s young spouse, Yan Hua, who is left distraught by his infidelity; and Bao Mei, who takes up employment at the cinema’s ticket counter as she battles the ghost of her brother’s demise. As the tale unfolds, we meet the same characters later in life, now residing in New York’s Chinatown, grappling not only with their new surroundings but also with the aftermath of their hidden romantic episodes and the demolition of their clandestine sanctuary, the cinema.
Tang draws a parallel between love and visibility. In his piece Cinema Love, the homosexual men, bound in matrimony to women, barely acknowledge their male lovers. They hide in the shroud of darkness, with eyes shut. Yan Hua’s appalling discovery of her husband’s affair with another man leads her to an ambivalent space that oscillates between self-denial and enforced silent agreement, where she doesn’t utter a single word of what transpired to her husband. Thus, love under such tragic circumstances becomes an exercise in selective blindness and forces one to clutch onto a fallacy sewn by absolute necessity.
It is in the navigation of this delicate landscape of secrecy that Tang uses Bao Mei as his literary representation. Working from East Broadway, she drafts unsent letters to the men associated with the Workers’ Cinema as she attempts to reconstruct their lives and secret love affairs. Through her concerted efforts to retell ‘their stories’, she envisions every man who graced the theatre. Thus Tang presents fiction as an effort to recollect past experiences with clarity and fondness, which in the narrative becomes the ultimate embodiment of love. Although Tang tiptoes on oversharing in this narrative approach, he leaps to his characters’ defence, affirming her ability to embody different identities and her penchant for metaphors, despite a hint of scepticism towards his own literary approach.
“Cinema Love, despite being an innovative and hopeful first-effort, successfully delivers a compelling narrative with a “bullet wound” intensity. This is accomplished by Tang, even with the complexities of the plot and the wide-ranging timeline.”