Beijing Comrades Quotes

Stalin’s first move, uncharacteristically, was to apologize to the Chinese comrades for having underestimated them: “Our opinions are not always correct,” he told a visiting delegation from Beijing in July, 1949. He then went on, however, to propose the “second front” the Americans had feared: [T]here should be some division of labor between us. . . . The Soviet Union cannot . . . have the same influence [in Asia] as China is in a position to do. . . . By the same token, China cannot have the same influence as the Soviet Union has in Europe. So, for the interests of the international revolution, . . . you may take more responsibility in working in the East, . . . and we will take more responsibility in the West. . . . In a word, this is our unshirkable duty.56

He was so easy to satisfy, so easy to make happy. The reality was, he wanted very little from me. But the one thing I increasingly felt he wanted, that one precious yet utterly elusive thing . . . it was this that I was most afraid to give.

I’d rather be a shattered vessel of jade than an intact but worthless piece of clay.

I don’t have to come,” I whispered into his ear. “I just want to hold you.

As if reading from a cue card, he added that I was the cutest guy he’d ever done it with, carefully pointing out that while other guys may have had superior technical skills, sex was, overall, better with me. I knew he meant this as a compliment, but hearing this annoyed me. There I was, giving up my virginity twice—first to a girl then to a guy—and both times it was with some used-up slut!

I couldn’t stand bitchy supermodel types. They wanted it all, but the goods were secondhand and they had shitty dispositions to boot.

I never told him about you.” That surprised me. It was hard to believe he’d never said a about a relationship that had lasted as long as ours. But there was more. “I’ve never told anyone about us,” he continued. “Why not?” Lan Yu turned to look me in the eye. “It’s ours, Handong.

The second group of opportunists was the “Mahjong Party”—the students who, if given the chance, would be happy to do nothing but play mahjong all day. So when the revolution came, that was what they did. And finally there was the “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck Party.” Those were the couples, the students in love, who were not likely to complain about having additional time to gaze into each other’s eyes. I tried to make Lan Yu confess he was part of the Butterfly and Mandarin Duck Party, but he insisted he wasn’t. That party, he told me, was strictly for “serious” couples. I didn’t say anything, but it wasn’t lost on me that he obviously felt that what we had was nothing more than an illicit affair, a secret pleasure stolen in the night.

discreet. It didn’t matter anyway, because taking Lan Yu to these places was out of the question. To me he was like a perfect piece of jade: flawless, absolutely unblemished. Taking him out to enjoy Beijing’s incipient gay nightlife would have been tantamount to inviting other guys to go after him.

He stood close to me, so close that I could smell the familiar scent of his breath when he spoke. I felt the tension rise in my chest as I fought the urge to throw myself into his arms. I never would have thought I could have done this in public, but in one rapid motion I grabbed him and held him tight.

He stood close to me, so close that I could smell the familiar scent of his breath when he spoke. I felt the tension rise in my chest as I fought the urge to throw myself into his arms. I never would have thought I could have done this in public, but in one rapid motion I grabbed him and held him tight. The words raced through my mind—There’s no turning back for me either!—though I couldn’t bring myself to say them. I knew in my heart Lan Yu was becoming my world. I pulled him closer and pressed my lips against his, and I suddenly realized that this was the first time we had ever kissed in public. I remember thinking we should have been on a tropical beach, on the highest mountaintop, or in a beautiful clearing of trees. We should have been surrounded by a halo of sunshine. But there was only darkness.

between a husband and wife. Ling had had a good upbringing. She was full of life and energy and was a decent person. I’m sure she knew about my relationship with Lan Yu, but she didn’t have that prying, meddlesome personality so many people are cursed with. She never treated us like an oddity, or as if we somehow needed her pity. Whatever she might have thought privately, she never treated Lan Yu as anything but a close friend of mine.

It was a fantastic trip. Everywhere we went we just blended into the crowd. No one knew us there and my constant worries about being spotted together dissolved. Southeast Asian culture is different from China’s, and for the first time since we had met, Lan Yu and I could actually express a little affection in public. Nothing major, just simple things like touching an arm or shoulder while walking down the street. Something so simple, yet so precious.

Lan Yu fell into my arms, alternating between kissing the curve of my neck and looking up at me. His beautiful dark eyes were full of something—what was it? Fervor, a fervor that was as passionate as it was intoxicating. His lips touched mine and my head swirled with one thought: I cannot, will not, lose you!

love you!” My heart pounded in my chest. I cradled his cheeks in the palms of my hands and my eyes burned into his. I would have liked to dive headlong into his body if I could. I couldn’t believe I had said it, but at the same time it felt so natural coming out. It was the only thing I felt at that moment, the only thing I could think of to say. I love you, I had said. And it was love. It wasn’t just sex. Whatever other people might have thought, whoever other people thought we were, I knew we were in love. When I think about it today, the bittersweet pain is almost too much to bear.

With each passing day, I realized more deeply the impact Lan Yu had on me. He, on the other hand, hadn’t changed a bit. Other than the fact that he was taller and more handsome now—not to mention considerably more skilled in bed—he was exactly the same as the day I’d met him.

For the rest of the night I sat in the bedroom my mother still kept for me at the family house, obsessing. Again and again, I considered the ways in which Lan Yu and I being together was absurd, abnormal, and ultimately impossible. I even thought of a ridiculous word: love.

On February 5 Lan Yu and I spent New Year’s Eve reveling in the joy of the bed we shared. When the clock struck midnight and the Year of the Snake arrived, I looked into his eyes and kissed his lips, promising myself that from this moment on, it was only going to be the two of us. Me and him, nobody else. But I wasn’t able to keep that promise, at least not then. Nineteen eighty-nine turned out to be an extraordinary year—for me, for us, and for the entire nation.

I had made sure it wasn’t too late for either of us to return to a normal life. Breaking up was good for him, and it was good for me.

Fuck it! I thought, jumping on top of him and grabbing his wrists more roughly than I meant to. I raised his arms, pinning them one by one above his head. He was totally overpowered by me. In this position, I thought excitedly, it was almost like I was raping him. “You’re really asking for it.” I stared into his eyes menacingly. “You brought this on yourself, you know, so don’t blame me if I get rough!” Lan Yu squirmed beneath me as if trying to escape, but his inviting smile told me he loved it. Before I could escalate the assault, however, he abruptly stopped moving around and looked up at me with an absurd tough-guy look on his face.

I averted my eyes and gave a self-deprecating laugh. Lan Yu’s words touched me, but they also provoked a vague feeling of guilt. He was so easy to satisfy, so easy to make happy. The reality was, he wanted very little from me. But the one thing I increasingly felt he wanted, that one precious yet utterly elusive thing . . . it was this that I was most afraid to give.

In the early years of our relationship, the sparks between Lan Yu and me when we saw each other after one of my business trips were like those of a newlywed couple on their honeymoon. That’s

Frantically, we rolled on the bed—so frantically that we nearly fell to the floor. That gave me an idea. Taking Lan Yu by the hand, I got off the bed and pulled him with me. We were standing face-to-face now. I kissed him, then used my hand to push his head downward. He lowered himself to his knees and blew me for a few minutes. Then, joining him on the floor, I pushed his face up against the side of the mattress. In all our time together we had never had sex this way. I lifted my cock to enter him. Lan Yu looked back at me mournfully and motioned toward the bed as if trying to tell me he wanted to get back on it. But I held him in place. “Don’t move,” I said. That’s how I wanted to come. And I’d make Lan Yu come that way, too. I wanted Lan Yu to know the nostalgia I felt. Nostalgia for the way things used to be, the way he used to be. Before everything changed, he was attentive, deferential: I always looked good in his eyes. As we made love that evening, I imagined that the man I was kissing, touching, holding, making love to, was the Lan Yu I had loved in the past, the Lan Yu I would never let go of again. I wanted him to know these things. But the words wouldn’t come out.

I knew he wouldn’t say he loved me if it wasn’t true. But it is true, I told myself again and again. So why did I have to force it out of him?

The New Year was right around the corner, and even if I’d wanted to weasel out of it, there was nothing I could do. The last night of the year would have to be spent at my mother’s house. Back when Lan Yu and I were still together—really together—I had always spent New Year’s Eve at my mother’s house until the clock struck midnight. Then I would rush back to Tivoli to be with him. So when the last day of the lunar calendar came I figured I would do the same. But when I spoke with Lan Yu about it, I found out that he had other plans.

What Zhou Wen had said was right: the point of two people being together is to find happiness. But Lan Yu and I had nothing. No bond of marriage, no consideration of property, profits, children, or social opinion. It’s one thing to have nothing in the world but the happiness you feel. But when you have nothing and you’re not happy to begin with, then what’s the point?

It was getting harder and harder for me to know what was going on inside Lan Yu’s head. Each time our relationship entered a new crisis, he would turn around and surprise me with another expression of intimacy.

It had been six months since my release from jail. Half a year since the day I vowed to myself that unless Lan Yu left me, I was going to stay with him forever. Half a year. It felt like half a century. After lunch with Lin Ping, I walked back to my car in the crisp, almost spring air, my mind whirling with contradictory thoughts and emotions. Does the vow still mean anything to me? Again and again I rolled the question over in my mind.

In this sense, Lan Yu is a modern version of Du Shiniang, the well-known prostitute figure in classical Chinese literature who turns out to be not only a pure-hearted person but also an unexpected reservoir of rainy-day funds.

Lan Yu’s inexperience thus makes him a role model of non-identity, whereas Handong stands as an example of a failed gay identity. Beijing Comrades is therefore a significantly different kind of identity narrative. The resistance to identity politics is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this text and sets it apart from other examples of late-1990s queer sinophone literature. In Beijing Comrades, we encounter an intriguing moment in the history of modern Chinese gay writing that disrupts a unilinear movement toward identity politics.

Ah-ha!” I said, pouncing on top of him. “You see how lucky you are?” We rolled around in each other’s arms, kissing and chatting vivaciously about everything that had transpired in the previous week.

I had always loved his smell.

Life was so good in those days, I even started to think it might be possible for Lan Yu and me to stay together forever. Our relationship was my nesting ground, a home for my heart. As to whether or not love between two men could ever gain social acceptance, I never gave it much thought. Financial security meant not having to worry about things like that.

We stepped into the lush, well-lit dining area, my right arm hooked around her waist. Testosterone surged through my veins as we made our way through the maze of tables, lighting up a runway of grandeur as each man we passed, whether Chinese or foreign, turned to drink her in with his eyes. I beamed with a kind of pride I never thought possible. Lan Yu would never be able to give me that.

There’s something I need to know,” she continued, turning away from me and resting her folded hands in her lap. “Do you have a wife?” I laughed. I found it amusing that she would even ask such a question. “What makes you think that?” I asked. “Let’s just call it a woman’s intuition,” she replied, gazing straight ahead through the windshield.

With women, even the tiniest trace of tenderness could be expressed as if it were the greatest love in the world. But with men—with Lan Yu—it was the exact opposite. No matter how much love I felt for him, I couldn’t show even the slightest trace in public.

To my great surprise, Lan Yu was more than prepared to tackle the subject. “Well,” he began, “I’ve read a lot of literature about this, and they don’t think it’s an illness anymore, at least not outside China. It’s just—I mean, I can’t remember exactly what they call it—it’s just, some people like women and some people like men. They’re just two different choices. That’s all.

sit up in bed, trying to calm himself before going back to sleep. Things were even worse in the daytime. Tired and sluggish because of poor sleep, he was also rapidly losing weight because he had lost his appetite. When I asked him what it felt like to be in treatment, his reply was always the same: “Nothing.” He had become empty, hollow.

Having weathered this storm, his attachment to me felt even deeper than before. And yet, this was exactly what worried me.

I was barely able to hide my excitement as we walked out of the glass door and into the parking lot. Since we were in public I was unable to grab him the way I would have liked to, so I compensated by glancing at him again and again, flashing him my dreamiest bedroom eyes and going over in my mind what I was going to do to him the minute we were alone. I stood next to him as close as possible while putting my suitcase in the car,

Well, let me tell you something,” he continued. “It’s not worth it, okay? A man only gets so many chances in this lifetime to get serious in a relationship. And when he does, he damn well better be sure there’s a future in it. It has to lead to some bigger picture. Family. Kids.” He lit a cigarette. “But you know what? With this kind of thing, there is no bigger picture. This is it! You can’t even tell people about it without ruining yourself.

With Lan Yu’s cock still in my mouth, I looked up at him, consumed by the desire to make him mine. I reached up and gripped his chin. “Do you love me?” I asked, as his swollen dick slipped out from between my lips. He said nothing in reply, so I tightened my grasp. Frowning and twisting his head from side to side, he pried the offending fingers away. He knew I was waiting for an answer, he knew the words I wanted to hear. I knew something too—that he wasn’t going to say it. My eyes filled with tears. I moved up higher until we were face-to-face and drilled my eyes into his. My stare excited him, yet he remained quiet.

Whereas Handong has given the matter some thought, Lan Yu’s positive responses to Handong’s sexual advances seem to be more of a natural reaction than the expression of a carefully chosen identity.

Although the author’s effort to officially publish the text in book form in mainland China has not been successful, the circulation of the cyber novel preserves the author’s daring style. Scott E. Myers’s marvelous translation captures the richness and intensity of Beijing Comrades’s sexual vocabulary, putting to rest, once and for all, the myth that gay sex remains an unspeakable topic in the PRC’s “traditional” culture.

This text follows the emotional roller-coaster ride of the on-off relationship between Handong, an arrogant, wealthy businessman born to high-ranking communist cadres, and Lan Yu, an innocent and hardworking sixteen-year-old student who falls for Handong, not because of, but in spite of the latter’s money.

Handong concludes that “happiness” alone cannot sustain a viable relationship, which is unable to escape factors such as the “bond of marriage” and the “consideration of property, profits, children, or social opinion” (338). For Handong, therefore, a relationship is always also an economic arrangement. Handong leaves Lan Yu again and again for different reasons: his intimacy issues after he and Lan Yu get too close, boredom with a monogamous relationship, social and family pressures to get married, the intervention of medical experts, a plot hatched by Handong’s wife and mother to ruin Lan Yu’s reputation, and Handong’s bouts of internalized homophobia.

It was getting harder and harder for me to know what was going on inside Lan Yu’s head. Each time our relationship entered a new crisis, he would turn around and surprise me with another expression of intimacy. Was he for real or just playing games? Often I didn’t know the answer to this question, but on that one cold winter morning, at least, I felt that he cared about me.

Lan Yu laughed and raised his eyes to look at me. “Well, friends are more reliable than lovers, aren’t they?

He was much less conservative in his lifestyle now, too—in sexual behavior, at least, or so it seemed from the fragments of information he’d given me. A vague foreboding told me that we were going to break up again. But for real this time—forever.

Lan Yu looked down at me in a way I had never seen before: controlling, dominant. It was the cold stare of contempt, the look of someone who intended to dominate. And for the first time in my life, I wanted to be the object of that domination. It was damaging to my self-respect, but it was precisely this humiliation that propelled me to further extremes of wanting to be degraded and even abused by him. Yes, I thought. I’ll be the bitch tonight. I was going to give him what I owed him.

Lan Yu entered my mouth and I sucked him with a sense of purpose.

It was pleasure, but a strange kind of pleasure, a pleasure tainted by the sadness of knowing he wasn’t really mine and never would be. For a moment I thought I was going to cry right there with his thick, pulsing dick lodged in the back of my throat.

effect was jarring. He picked up his jacket and stormed out of the office. I sat back down, utterly shell-shocked that someone I’d known for decades would turn against me in this way. Whatever else had been said, we both knew the real issue was Lan Yu. There was nothing I’d been unwilling to sacrifice for him. I’d worried my mother to death. I’d sat idly by while my friends and associates gossiped about me. I’d insulted my closest friend and lost my wife. And yet, for all that, I was still alone, unable to hold on to the one person for whom it had all been done.

discreet afternoon playmates” I had read about in the personal ads of American newspapers.

It was a chilly late-October night and Lan Yu had waited outside for me for over three hours. What did it mean? I was completely thrown off guard by the idea that he cared for me that much. First he rejects me, now he’s here. What kind of game was he playing?

One night later that month, Lan Yu and I were in bed enjoying the kind of quiet conversation that lovers all around the world have while lying in each other’s arms after sex. At first we talked about nothing in particular, but soon the conversation shifted to heavier terrain. We began speaking of the journey of the human soul.

I looked at him closely. Why didn’t he tell me he loved me? I had nothing to go on but intuition. I knew he loved me, and I had once thought that knowing it without having heard him say it was more romantic and exciting than a million sweet words. But knowing it was no longer enough. I wanted to hear it.

I closed my eyes. How could I put my feelings for Lan Yu into words? He still distrusted me because of what I had done in the past, and yet there he was, forgetting the past so he could be with me. I opened my eyes again.

Well, I’m not,” he said, throwing his bag into the back seat. “And I’m not getting married, either. Don’t you get it, Handong?” He turned to me austerely. “I just don’t understand why so many people like us get married. It doesn’t make sense. And it’s wrong.

It often occurs to me today that we could have been much happier if our relationship had not been so intimately tied up from the start with that peculiar thing called money.

When Lan Yu and I kissed, nothing else mattered. The world disappeared and there was nothing but the mingling of our bodies. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood, the present moment and time without end—all these categories became meaningless. I needed him, needed his beautiful body. I could sculpt him like clay. I could bite him, even violate him. There was only us. He was mine.

Unlike the first time we had broken up, for some reason this time wasn’t especially hard for me. By that point, my heart had been broken so many times there was nothing left for me to feel.

Lan Yu’s eyes filled with tears again. He threw himself into my arms, peeling off my clothes and kissing me with such intensity that I almost lost my balance and fell to the floor. He took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom, where he pushed me onto the bed. My head spun. He was on his knees now. I didn’t want him to blow me, didn’t need him to, but that’s what he was doing. All I wanted was to say something. Something that needed to come out. Something I’d waited a lifetime to say. At the very moment I reached climax, I looked down at Lan Yu and cried out, “Don’t leave me!” Tears streamed down my cheeks. “Don’t ever leave me! I’m begging you!

Lan Yu and I had been together for four years before breaking up, so when it came to sex, we mixed as easily as milk and water.

When Lan Yu and I were together, especially during those precious moments when we made love, I felt so close to him that he sometimes seemed an extension of my own body.

Forty-five minutes later, Lan Yu and I stepped out the front door of his apartment building and into the street, looking like nothing more than two ordinary friends. Even less than friends, I thought bitterly. Everything that had just transpired in his bedroom—none of it mattered now. We had nothing. No recognition from the outside world. None of the pressures keeping couples together, but all the ones keeping them apart. Walking down the street together, it was as if nothing had happened.

large like fat, blood-filled ticks. Most days I tried not to think much about them, filling my mind only with the two people in my life who mattered most: my mother and Lan Yu.

as much. I knew he’d be fine. With him it was just a feeling of sadness and regret. He was the one true love I had had in this lifetime, yet he never fully understood it. Nor had he ever said, not even once, that he loved me, too.

I did everything I could to stop thinking about him and the private, intensely emotional world we once shared. And yet, every time I had sex with my wife, I thought only of him.

I forced myself to have sex with her, but it was nearly impossible for me to come. Each time, I had to close my eyes and think about having sex with Lan Yu or, sometimes, with other men I had seen on the street that day, usually with Lin Ping on my arm.

Lan Yu stood up from the couch and looked down at me coldly. “You’re very considerate when dumping your lovers,” he said bitterly. “Any other instructions?” Without waiting for me to reply, he turned around and went upstairs. “I’m taking a shower and going to bed,” he said, then disappeared at the top of the staircase. That night Lan Yu and I had sex as always, but he was distant, mechanical. When I looked into his face I saw nothing. His eyes were empty. It was as if he had seen me so many times that he was numb to what he was looking at.

I knew I couldn’t do with Lan Yu what I had always done with guys in the past: keep them as fuck buddies. Leaving things at the purely physical level would have been impossible, in part because he wouldn’t go along with it, but also because each time I saw him I would be drawn anew into the turbulent waters of emotional entanglement. Keeping things as they were but just seeing less of him wasn’t the solution either, since the greater the distance between us, the more powerful my longing. My break with Lan Yu had to be permanent, absolute.

see my pain? When I needed you the

looked at Lan Yu’s ass perched up high in the air, his face buried in the pillow. I desperately desired to tell him something: I want you. But I was too ashamed to say it. How could I when I had just told him I would be getting married? Yes, I wanted to be with him, but there were also times when I felt a kind of hatred for him. And yet, I knew, this was a completely unreasonable impulse on my part: How could I hate him when he had done nothing wrong?

Not really,” he replied offhandedly. In a period of great uncertainty in our relationship, one thing was for sure: Lan Yu was no longer the docile, compliant guy he had been when we first met.

Don’t do this, Lan Yu . . . Please don’t make me spend the rest of my life with this guilty conscience . . . Maybe I’m not some kind of noble and virtuous gentleman, but neither am I so cruel that the last vestiges of humanity have been wiped away from me . . . Come back, Lan Yu . . . Come back to me.

Holding Lin Ping in my arms as we danced, I remembered something Lan Yu had once told me. He said the true historical basis of the legend was a passionate love affair between two real boys, not between a girl and a boy as depicted in The Butterfly Lovers. It was only that the legend had been distorted over time to have a heterosexual storyline.

Thus went my first, short-lived marriage—down in flames. But just as Lan Yu had said: Where there’s a loss, there’s always a gain. Going through a charade of a marriage followed by a very real divorce made me confront something I’d never been able to, but which I had known all along. I finally admitted to myself that I was gay.

It had been a late autumn day when I turned to look at him one last time before walking out the door, when I saw him sitting on the arm of the couch, eyes fixed on me but communicating nothing, and that strange, elusive smile dancing softly on his lips. How many late autumns would pass before I saw him again?

He and he alone had the power to deprive me of the peace of mind I would have gained by seeing him accept all that I had given.

Lan Yu, on the other hand, had changed. The man I saw at the expo dwelled in the same physical body, but the boy I had once known was gone. There was a time when I would look into his eyes and understand what he was feeling: melancholy, a sense of infatuation, admiration. But now he withheld everything. The esteem in which he had held me was gone, replaced by cynicism, distrust. He was no longer mine.

In the darkness we started to make love all over again. This time it was beautiful, powerful. We shared something no words could express, but we intimately understood. Our future was uncertain, and our lovemaking was filled with hopelessness and despair.

The mere thought of him being surrounded by men he might find attractive was enough to make me feel as though my heart had been ripped from my chest.

I looked at Lan Yu’s ass perched up high in the air, his face buried in the pillow. I desperately desired to tell him something: I want you. But I was too ashamed to say it. How could I when I had just told him I would be getting married? Yes, I wanted to be with him, but there were also times when I felt a kind of hatred for him. And yet, I knew, this was a completely unreasonable impulse on my part: How could I hate him when he had done nothing wrong?