Cinema Love: A Novel - Hardcover

Tang, Jiaming

 
9780593474334: Cinema Love: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593474333 ISBN 13: 9780593474334
Verlag: Dutton, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Winner of the Ferro-Grumley award for LGBTQ Fiction
Finalist for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick

“Part ghost story, part love story, and part tale of hardscrabble immigrant life.” —The New Yorker

A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them.

For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented the Workers’ Cinema: a theater where gay men cruised for love.

While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found intimacy in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men, guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when Old Second’s passion for his male lover is revealed, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.

Spanning three timelines—post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York—Cinema Love is an “exceptional" and "moving” (Alice Hoffman) epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships; the weight of secrets; and the way memory forever haunts the present.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer. He holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, and his writing has appeared in such publications as AGNI, Lit Hub, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a 2022-23 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Cinema Love is his first novel.

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IN NEW YORK, in Chinatown, a man named Old Second remembers. He has freckles all over his face. Burn scars and blackheads, like barnacles on a whale. Trembling hands attached to long, hairless arms pick up and light a cigarette. A ceiling fan spins, and the open window offers a view of people marching. He watches them. They are mostly quiet, but sometimes they chant words he can’t understand, hold up signs he can’t make out. Still, he knows what this is for. They’ve come to him in the past, with cameras and notebooks and sputtering words.

Hi, my name is . . . We’re here to get your signature . . . Do you mind if. . .

And so on, until Old Second says, in broken Mandarin: “Sure.”

Old Second grew up in the mountains, missing all but a year’s worth of school. It was the same for his siblings. The girls went for longer while the boys went straight to the fields. They preferred it, anyhow—They claimed it gave them freedom. Especially in the hot, damp, sticky summers. Instead of Mandarin, they learned how to  fish. How to transform old shirts and water bottles into river traps. They’d wait in the stream with their buckets, their eyes gleaming and their bodies completely still. Then, suddenly, a shout. There! There’s one! Old Second remembers a thrust of the body. Gold, sinewy skin; the muscles taut and firmer than steel. He remembers, too, the weight of his brothers’ limbs as they leaned against him, not quite hugging but almost.

Now, decades later, he watches a similar kind of love outside his window.

He may not understand the words or the signs, but he’s aware of what’s going on. A rent strike. The marchers are trying to save Chinatown. Like the mall on East Broadway with the Fuzhounese kiosks and the decades- old restaurants on Eldridge Street. The marching started three hours ago— small. A trickling of Chinese protesters walked down the street like shoppers. Then a woman with a loudspeaker arrived, and youngsters in lion dance uniforms. Passersby joined in, and soon it became a crowd.

From above, the marching resembles hugging. It moves Old Second, causes him to remember. Not just childhood and brother- love, but also the time he stood with thirty- seven men outside the Mawei City Workers’ Cinema.

That was a long time ago, Old Second thinks.

In August, it will have been thirty- five years.

--

BUT FIRST WE MUST VISIT AN EARLIER TIME. NOT THIRTY- FIVE years back but forty. This is where the story begins, where a boy from the mountains learns that the wrong kind of laughter can kill. You’ve already met Old Second, but there are other characters, too. Family members and neighbors who will remain in the background, like cardboard forests in a play. Mother and Father. Big Sister, Little Sister, Old Third. The brother named Eldest matters more to our story, but only by a little. He’s the oldest son and works at a welding factory in Fuzhou. He’s also the darling of the family, the one des­tined to be killed, and he dies in a factory accident in 1980. The other important characters are Old Second’s youngest brother, Spring Chicken, and a neighborhood boy, age sixteen, who goes by the name One Meter Sixty- Five.
 
None of the boys resemble their names. Spring Chicken has matchstick arms and medium- rare cheeks. Instead of tanning, his skin burns under sunlight. Blushes pink, then red, and the boils that form resemble the bumps on a plucked goose. He’s ugly, and that’s why people love him. Then there’s One Meter Sixty- Five, loved for the opposite reason. He’s had his nickname since childhood. It rep­resents the height of every man in his family except for him: a giant with a voice that sounds like a stroking hand. Its cadence approaches your ear like a curious cat. Then it romps, playful, before boredom sinks in, leaving with a piece of your heart. Which is what happens to Old Second.
 
 
SUMMER 1980. A VILLAGE WITHOUT ELECTRICITY OR HEAT, and whose name literally means High Mountain. One morning, El­dest will leave for his factory job in Fuzhou, never to come back. No roads connect High Mountain with Fuzhou, so the journey will take an afternoon and an evening. Spring Chicken will watch Eldest leave. His dark, round, curious eyes will stare until his brother dips out of sight. There are so many trees up here, so many places to hide. You can climb up a tree and disappear for hours. There’s a reason High Mountain kids don’t play hide- and- seek, and it’s not for lack of imagination. It’s simply too easy to vanish. Too easy to climb into the leaves and forget that life exists.

Today is Old Second’s turn to collect firewood. He’s already tied a bundle with rope and packed it into his basket. There’s more to be gathered, but for now, he’ll rest by the stream his brothers call River. In two hours, morning will have passed and the sun will have reached its highest peak. Sweat on his skin, under his arms and be­tween his legs, gets splashed away in the water. Nearby, a river trap is laid— one of Eldest’s. The scene is quiet aside from the water sounds, the rustling of leaves. Old Second assumes it’s an animal until One Meter Sixty- Five falls, crashing to the forest floor.

“Shit,” he says. “You scared me.”

“I scared you?”

“All that noise you made. I thought you were a bear.”

“A bear in these parts?”

“I’ve seen them. They look just like you.”

“Where’d you see a bear?”

“Right now. He’s talking to me.”

“Don’t be funny with me. I know where you live— I’ll kick your ass here and I’ll kick your ass there.”

The play in his voice burrows under Old Second’s skin. It’s not merely the sass and the teasing. There’s also a look in his eyes. A curling of the lips that makes Old Second’s cheeks burn with anger. The boys consider each other friends despite running in separate circles. Most days, their interactions are brief. A distant nod or glance, neither of them smiling. Yet here they are: joking, grinning, the heat rising in Old Second’s belly. He’s fifteen and tends to experience every emotion as anger. Now is no exception, though this time he doesn’t feel the itch to strike. He stays and listens, ob­serving the knots of muscle like tree roots running along One Meter Sixty- Five’s legs. The straightness of his torso, bare under a lifted flap of shirt. Most aggravating of all: his laughter, beckoning and beckoning.

“You always come to this stream, bear?”

“Why? Do you own it?”

“Sure. But you’re welcome here anytime. No fee.”

From that day on, the boys claimed each other. One because his oldest brother and best friend had left High Mountain, the other because he was bored. Curious. If I ask, will he come? He does in the day, but what about at night? They look at each other in the dark­ness, examine bits of face illuminated by moonlight. An eye here and a smile there. No words, because they don’t want people to hear them. Neither says it, but they know their friendship is strange. Ru­mors would form if they were caught. Yet all they do is silently embrace. This is what Old Second tells his mother when she finds out. He omits the part where they sneak away from home at two, sometimes three in the morning. He doesn’t talk about the waiting, his anger and impatience at always being the first to arrive. Nor does he mention the part where he performs twice the amount of work the...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593474333
ISBN 13 
9780593474334
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
Deutschland

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