Prodigals in Love: Narrating Gay Identity and Collectivity on the Early Internet in China

Home , Bisexual literature, Borders of China, Chen Ran, Chinese Odyssey 2002, Frog (novel), Gay Film Nights

Gang Pan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

Prodigals in Love: Narrating Gay Identity and Collectivity on the Early Internet in China

Gang Pan

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

2015 Abstract

This dissertation concerns itself with the eruption of a large number of gay narratives on the Chinese internet in its first decade. There are two central arguments. First, the composing and sharing of narratives online played the role of a social movement that led to the formation of gay identity and collectivity in a society where open challenges to the authorities were minimal.

Four factors, 1) the primacy of the internet, 2) the vernacular as an avenue of creativity and interpretation, 3) the transitional experience of the generation of the internet, and 4) the evolution of gay narratives, catalyzed by the internet, enhanced, amplified, and interacted with each other in a highly complicated and accelerated dynamic, engendered a virtual gay social movement.

Second, many online gay narratives fall into what I term “prodigal romance,” which depicts gay love as parent-obligated sons in love with each other, weaving in violent conflicts between desire and duty in its indigenous context. The prodigal part of this model invokes the archetype of the Chinese prodigal, who can only return home having excelled and with the triumph of his journey. The romantic part imbues love between men with the power of shaping and transforming the self and the weight of anchoring an identity. The result is often the parting of the two lovers, with one returning home a good son to his duty and another continuing as a ii

gay orphan, wandering in pursuit of his desire. The latter is a new desiring subject who chooses to integrate his desire as a core of his identity; and he is the figure bearing the purpose of the movement.

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Acknowledgments

I first of all want to express my utmost gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Richard Guisso, for many years of supervision, insightful guidance, support, encouragement and extraordinary patience that were indispensable to every step I made. As writing this thesis itself became a long journey, I could not imagine walking through it without Prof. Guisso’s help.

I thank Prof. Paul Perron, a real teacher of learning and life, from the bottom of my heart.

Prof. Perron taught me the narratology and semiotics that laid the basis of my dissertation. His kindness and encouragement will be a source of power from which I will always draw.

I’m deeply grateful to Prof. Mariana Valverde. A profound and erudite scholar, she brought me to see the larger picture and the principal themes of the thesis. I will always remember her encouragement and selfless support with appreciation.

I thank Prof. Wu Yiching for leading me to a more resolved course at a crucial point of writing. I’m grateful to Prof. Meng Yue for years of support. I’m indebted to Prof. Johanna Liu for being tremendously kind and supportive. I appreciate Prof. Hsiao-wei Rupprecht for her long-lasting consideration and support. I also got great help from Prof. Janet Poole, and I’m very grateful.

I’m also very grateful to Nathaniel Thomas, without whom completing this thesis would have been much harder. He read through the dissertation and brought critical insights into the topic. His companionship at the most difficult moments of writing is something I will value forever.

I also thank Jane Kalbfleisch for reading through a very early and rough draft of the thesis.

There are many, many others to thank and I keep all your kindness in my heart.

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents. Writing it helped me understand how deep their love is, and how much it shaped me and has sustained my life.

This dissertation is also dedicated to the men in the research. It’s for us.

Table of Contents Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Tables ...... ix

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 Was There a Gay Identity or Collectivity Before? Homosexual Life and Signification in Pre-Internet China ...... 12

1.1 Life, time, and narrative ...... 15

1.2 An Ever-Changing China, an Ever-Changing Field of Story ...... 18

1.3 Growing up in the Field of Story of the 1980s and Coming of Age in the 1990s ...... 23

1.4 Ambiguity against Homosexuality ...... 29

1.5 Post-1949 Homosexual Signification: Graffitiing ...... 35

1.6 Post-Cultural Revolution Homosexual Signification in High Literature ...... 41

1.7 Narratives and Lives before the Reform and Opening ...... 52

1.8 Post-Cultural Revolution Same-Sex Subculture: Fisheries and Legitimate Bachelors .....60

1.9 Beyond the Fishery ...... 70

1.10 Was There a Gay Identity or Collectivity Before? ...... 74

Chapter 2 When Legitimate Bachelors Met the Internet: The Rise of Gay Identity and Collectivity on the Early Chinese Internet ...... 79

2.1 The Internet in China ...... 82

2.2 Building an Online Gay China ...... 97

2.3 Reddust as an Example of an Early Gay Website...... 112

2.4 When Legitimate Bachelors Encountered the Internet ...... 123 vi

2.5 Conclusion: Individual Agency, the Internet and Gay China ...... 130

2.6 A New Stage of Online Gay Culture ...... 136

Chapter 3 Beijing Story and the Articulation of Gay Identity ...... 140

3.1 Beijing Story as a Cyber Sensation ...... 145

3.2 The Vernacular and the Internet ...... 150

3.3 Articulating Gay Identity in the Vernacular: Private Story in Private Language, Pornography, and Popular Romance...... 155

3.4 The Poetics of Beijing Story ...... 173

3.5 Dashing into the Erotopia ...... 180

3.6 Conclusion: The Articulation of Homosexuality ...... 184

Chapter 4 Narrating Gay Identity and Collectivity as a Popular Social Movement ...... 186

4.1 Narratives on Other Gay Websites ...... 190

4.2 Nanfeng and Other Websites: the Rise of Gay Narratives as a Movement ...... 193

4.3 Narrative Threads on “Left Bank” and Other Forums ...... 202

4.4 The Experience of Following a Thread Story ...... 208

4.5 Co-Authoring a Reality ...... 217

4.6 Popular Narrative and Gay Lore ...... 224

4.7 Conclusion: Narrating A Gay Collectivity Online...... 228

4.8 After the Initial Wave ...... 236

Chapter 5 Wandering out the Door: The Prodigal Romance of the Internet Generation ...... 239

5.1 The Prodigal Son in Chinese Narrative Tradition ...... 249

5.2 The Evolution of the Prodigal Journey in the Modern Era ...... 258

5.3 Romance, Heteronormativity, and Interpellation...... 267

5.4 Prodigal Romance ...... 273

5.5 Within the Realm of the Jia: The Parents as Grace Figures, the Crying Mother, and the Gay Prodigal Son ...... 289 vii

5.6 The Jia as a Temporal Framework for Homosexuality—Life, Marriage, Chinese New Year, and Death within the Chinese Family ...... 296

5.7 The Trial of the Gay Prodigal ...... 300

5.8 The World and the Prodigal Sons’ Movements to and from the Jia ...... 306

5.9 Prodigals in Love ...... 312

5.10 Coming-out or Not? ...... 323

5.11 Conclusion ...... 327

Conclusion ...... 331

Bibliography ...... 337

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List of Tables

Table 1 Demographical comparison: early internet users vis-à-vis average Chinese

List of Figures

Figure 1 Homepage of Reddust as captured on the Internet Archie Wayback Machine

Figure 2 Homepage of Nanfeng as captured by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Introduction

This dissertation concerns itself with the eruption of gay narratives, numbering tens of thousands, on the Chinese internet in its first decade, from about 1995 to 2005. The thesis itself is a story of how a generation of men swiftly translated a cluster of conditions converging at the advent of the internet to form a gay identity and collectivity in a society where openly challenging the authorities was minimal. There are two central arguments. First, composing and sharing narratives online played the role of a social movement that led to the formation of gay identity and a gay collectivity in China. Second, online gay narratives, in depicting gay love as parent-tied sons in love with each other, wove in violent conflicts between desire and duty in its indigenous context, narrating into the birth of the Chinese gay subject. Four threads run through and weave together these two major arguments. They are the primacy of the internet, the vernacular as an avenue of creativity and sharing, transitional experience of the internet generation, and the evolution of gay narratives.

I stress the primacy of the early internet in affording a new means of summoning, articulating, amplifying, accommodating, and finally, consolidating a gay identity and collectivity out of a prohibitive ambiguity. Endowed with the power to bypass geographic, social and cultural institutions, the early web carried with itself unprecedented opportunities of realizing homosexual desire, previously largely confined, and shedded a light on a possible lifestyle centred on that desire. More than this, as the early Chinese cyberspace rendered traditional media-bounded means of social control and censorship weak, or at times irrelevant, it became a platform to host a national gay network that was previously nonexistent. The gay web, then, accommodated the explosion of gay narratives with unlimited capacity and speed that are

beyond the reach of all the traditional media combined. The periodization of the early Chinese internet, starting with overseas Chinese students as early as the beginning of the 1990s, and ending with the convergence of the CCP’s (Chinese Communist Party) internet control policies around 2005, also defines the focus of this study. After this period, the fading of initial enthusiasm, the rise of blogging and commercial erotica, and the fragmentation of gay networks lead to the decline of gay cyber narratives. As a result, reading, writing, and the meaning of the narratives and the internet changed.

When the new vista brought by the internet rose just above the horizon, a specific group of men swiftly explored and converted it into the expansion of romantic experiences with unmatched agility, and then wrote, read, and shared these thrilling new experiences online.

These men, the heroes of this study, were among the first to encounter the internet, and most of them belong to the very generation of men coming of age when the internet entered China.

Access to the early internet and the computer defined the distinct characteristics of this group:

They were the first to grow up in the reform era, and the years of the onset of the internet in the mid-1990s overlapped with their bachelorhood. They were university-educated, economically and socially advantaged, and residents of metropolitan centres. Growing up in Deng’s era, this generation was attached to many threads of the old and the new: The first to cross the digital divide, they left behind the older generations and were the vanguard of the younger generations who were to grow up with or even “in” the internet. The first to grow up with the market, they on the one hand had the freedom of thought and social mobility to explore a new life in cyberspace, on the other they also stepped into the new era bearing the confinements of the past.

Leaping across the digital divide, they saw on the one hand the isolation from their own kind, the prohibitive silence on homosexuality, and the compulsory heterosexuality, on the other, the

promise of a new erotopia, a space to articulate homosexual desire, and the possibility of living a lifestyle true to oneself, along with a shared gay identity and sense of the collectivity. The sudden and sharp contrast and conflict of the new and the old charged these men with urgent motivation and a passion to build their own network, make connections with each other, narrate and share this new life, and finally, make the choice of defining themselves by their sexual desire. Thus, this group was tasked with a historical mission of articulating homosexual desire, leading a new lifestyle, and rewriting the meaning of homosexuality at the juncture of the early internet.

This very juncture, in the meantime, was first and foremost a narrative one. For marginalized sexual minorities whose lives were excluded from the dictated script, narrating has been the most significant means of engaging with life. Rather than literary representations of life from a distance, narratives of men desiring men anticipate, desire, implore a life going on side by side with the act of narrating. To narrate is to shatter isolation, to act up, to rebel, to summon, to break the silence, to resist the hegemonic life script, to discover oneself, to reach out to one’s kind. And to read narratives is to experience, to empathize, to answer the call, to hear, to engage with oneself, and to join in the group. This became all the more true for men living with homosexual desire and even acquired kinetic power at times when the old script was under revision by the new life. Generations of men desiring men have been composing their own stories and sharing them in all possible ways they could manipulate. At a threshold of new opportunities, especially, the need and urge to narrate erupted, the number of narratives magnify, and private narratives merged to each other to form a new shared life.

These narratives, in particular, came from the avenue of the vernacular as origins of creativity, sensibility, language, and styles, as opposed to the formal literary production system.

The vernacular stimulated men with little writing experience to narrate, dispelled the fear of writing by doing away with the standards of formal literature, and effectively converted men desiring men into the authors of their own stories. It cemented a shared sensibility to shed the authoritarian voice inherent in formal discourses, thus serving as a collective first-person voice

(“Us”) in which narratives could truly be written by and for; and shared among gay men themselves. The vernacular also accommodated a broad range of writers, genres, lengths, and styles, some of which were excluded from the established literary conventions: from a common reader who posted a single comment, to an author narrating his life in brief in the personals of a gay website, to gifted and prolific writers, from fictional to life writing, from a writer’s whole oeuvre to a few one-liners in the comment section, and from the very apex of literary ability to the very fundament of the vernacular. It also amplified the activities of these narratives by preserving authenticity and maintaining their engagement with real life.

These four factors—the internet, the generation of the 1990s, the narratives, the vernacular—converged in early cyberspace. The internet was a space to engender new experiences and then a medium to accommodate telling and sharing. Generational and group traits configured the stories and propelled the need to narrate. The vernacular democratized the ability to narrate to include everyone with access to the net. Narratives and lived experience intersected each other.

Yet these factors were not simply brought together statically side by side; they were, instead, catalyzed by the internet to a highly dynamic interaction with one another, and the result

was a violent eruption. At a highly time-sensitive crossroad, cyberspace extracted a set of social conditions newly emerging from the 1980s, i.e., consumerism, individualism, urbanization, social mobility, and Western-style gay images, and provided a sphere to bypass moral confinements and the interference of the authorities. A whole generation was awakened, greeted with new means of making erotic connections, and with that, new experiences that, for some of them, led to a new self and a new life based on desire. Resounding with their unmatched enthusiasm and creativity, this group crossed the early digital divide and swiftly built an online network, unimaginable in the real world, and extended it to and beyond the borders of China to form a transnational connection. Stories of the new experiences, fuelled by the stark contrast of the new and the old and charged by the tension between the two ends, proliferated by taking advantage of the new medium’s oceanic capacity and lightning speed safeguarded by anonymity.

In approachable language and sensitivity enhanced by hypertext, the use of the vernacular evangelized comradeship to maximize the participation of the group. Each of these four factors enhanced and amplified the other, interacting with each other in highly complicated and accelerated dynamics to ignite an explosion of gay narratives.

The messages carried by these narratives, once articulated by a few pioneers, in no time disseminated to the first group of men desiring men who had access to the Internet, and were soon echoed by a whole generation, and an alternative gay self, collectivity and world took shape and was consolidated by even more narratives. At those moments charged with sparkles of historical poetics, writing and reading, narratives and lives, text and activity, the individual and the collectivity, were all constantly open to each other, and again and again they rewrote each other, making narrating stories the most powerful and magical activity to engage oneself and one another, and finally enact the new understanding of gay identity and collectivity. Interconnected,

the narratives formed a gay folklore strong enough to sustain an individual gay identity and a collectivity that no authority could ever erase or conceal. In their great number and retained activities, these narratives joined together to achieve effects only a social movement could afford.

Thus narrating and sharing constituted a gay social movement without the primacy of individualism, the public sphere, and even a pre-existent gay community in the real world—the set of conditions that fostered the gay movement in the West. If the case in China is as it has been argued by many—that the inchoate individualism arising from the recent and rapid adaptation of economic aspects of capitalism is paralleled by an evident nostalgia for socialist collectivism and a latent Confucian tradition, the rise of homosexuality was not via the route of individualism but, rather, resulted from the shift from the old to the new media. The internet provided significant sudden changes to consummate a set of new elements emerging as the result of market reform, in a way analogous to but also largely different from Stonewall’s stimulation of the social changes after World War II to bring up large gay movements in the West. What it afforded, however, was an ability to bypass the public media and the public sphere without compelling individuals into direct confrontation with authorities. The Western model derived from interaction between the individual and the community in public media was greatly compressed and accelerated, so rapid and effective that the individual and the collectivity appeared to arise out of simultaneous formation.

But the emergence of a new identity and and a new group needs a new purpose. The second undertaking of this dissertation is to elaborate the theme carried by a large share of gay cyber narratives. This theme, that which I term “prodigal romance”, frames gay romance as

struggles between and inside two men who see themselves primarily as sons with obligations to their parents. The prodigal part of this story model invokes the archetype of the Chinese prodigal, dating back to stories of the Tang Dynasty, who can only be accepted by parents when he returns home rectified and with the triumph of his journey. The romantic part, on the other hand, imbues love between men with the power of shaping and transforming the self and the weight of anchoring an individual’s identity. These two story models, one from the earlier same- sex narratives and one from the emerging market, place duty and desire in confrontation with each other, putting gay men in love into painful struggles between and within themselves. The result of these struggles is usually the parting of the two lovers, with one returning home to be a good son to fulfil his duty and another one continuing in the role of the gay orphan, wandering in pursuit of his desire. The wondering prodigal is a new desiring subject who chooses to integrate his desire as a core of his identity; and for that, he is the figure bearing the purpose of the movement.

The composition of prodigal romances indicate that they did not appear from a vacuum as completely new stories, nor as repetitions of existing narratives from the pre-internet era.

Rather, they are a recent link of a whole story chain evolving out of the old ones by incorporating new elements. Prodigal romance is thus the story of the internet generation, for it derives the meaning of homosexuality from Confucian concepts of duty, the self and the family, but in the meantime it opens itself to future mutation by emphasizing the power of love.

This study is itself an academic counterpart of the narrative articulation of gay identity and collectivity, narrating the grand story told in the chorus of millions of narratives. The time is the juncture from 1995 to 2005, the place the early internet, the people the pioneers of the

internet generation, the voice the vernacular, and the story is how they forged a new identity and collectivity by telling stories of their own about making choices. Not only the hero narrated in their own stories, by narrating collectively, these men joined together to become the heroes of the epic of the formation of a new identity and a new collectivity out of a prohibitive ambiguity.

A few notes on terms. I use “men desiring men” to indicate the homosexual existence in which many men were confined within either no or limited connections, despite their same-sex desire. I use “gay,” whose Chinese translation would be tongxinglian (同性恋, homosexual), rather than “tongzhi,” (“comrade”, slang for a fellow man desiring men) to refer to men who came to live an identity centred on homosexuality. I believe that the latter, appropriated from its political context, while rhetorically intriguing, cannot carry a straightforward connotation of homosexuality. The word “queer,” too, cannot articulate homosexual identity in China, as it is dislodged from its original contexts and becomes alien. Lastly, to reflect the inclusiveness of the vernacular, throughout this study I use “narrative,” as opposed to the more literary “works,” to refer to tens of thousands of fictions, and to millions of mini-narratives appearing as comments, some even as short as a single line.

The outlines of the chapters are as the following:

Chapter 1 sets the background and brings forward a few key concepts that will run through the thesis. It traces back to the moments when homosexuality was caught by a prohibitive ambiguity at the collisions of modernity and tradition in China. This ambiguity against homosexuality, maintained by the authoritarian nation-state in collaboration with the latent Confucian concept of family through a sophisticated system, had been effective in silently repressing homosexuality until the beginning of market reforms in China. Gay signification was

a history against this ambiguity, a release from a long dark age of silence that stretched from the

May Fourth movement to Mao’s era, to gay graffitiing appeared at the early stage of the market economy, to the narratives of legitimate bachelors who contained their homosexuality within a phase of life where their bachelorhood was acceptable to their parents and to society.

Chapter 2 tells the story of the encounter of the early internet and the pioneers of the internet generation. It first defines the early Chinese internet as the years between its inchoate beginnings and the convergence of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) internet control policies. Then it goes on to draw the generational characteristics of the pioneers who became the first to set foot in the early internet. The chapter then recalls the building of the early gay websites and the expansion of men’s romantic life brought about by these sites. I argue in the chapter that these websites formed a transnational network that played a crucial role in triggering men to write their narratives and in transmitting these narratives at a scale never seen before.

Chapter 3 narrates the first episode of the social movement that led to the emergence of gay identity and collectivity. Focusing on a brief but critical moment at the very beginning of gay cyber writing, I choose to represent this highly dynamic and complex moment in two snapshots. The first one is the articulation of homosexuality in a very popular novel written by

Xiao He (筱禾) in 1997, Beijing Story (Beijing gushi,北京故事). I argue that Beijing Story carries the “narrative understanding,” in Paul Ricoeur’s term, of a new life centred on homosexual desire that was just about to unfold itself to men in China. Beijing Story also sets forward the thesis of gay love and its position within the prodigal romance, as well as the avenue of the vernacular in which gay narratives will take shape. The second snapshot of the advent of the internet is Jet’s “Rush at Midnight” (Wuye kuanben, 午夜狂奔) and other stories. One of the

many inspired by Beijing Story, Jet’s narratives represent the whole generation’s great excitement, enthusiasm and sensitivity at the moment when they dashed into what appeared to them a fast-expanding erotopia.

Chapter 4 is the second episode of the social movement of the gay collectivity, delineating at a macro level how gay narratives, having just appeared, explosively proliferated and spread a sense of connectedness and commonality that led to the emergence of a gay identity and collectivity. Two snapshots illustrate this delineation. The first one is an early writing group congregating on an online forum, Nanfeng (男风, male mode). The group on Nanfeng showed the early convergence of gay narratives and authors to the formation of a collectivity that inspired many more to narrate. Nanfeng also had unmatched influence on later gay narratives in themes as well as styles. The second snapshot is Xiaohu, a thread novel on the popular social forum website Tianya. More than a single novel but a combinatory of interlaced stories authored by all the participants, Xiaohu drifted further away from literary conventions to host a highly dynamic and receptive ongoing interaction between author and reader, life and text. This, together with the performative and experiential aspects of the hypertextuality intrinsic to the forum experience, contributed extra weight to a rapid social movement that gave birth simultaneously to individual identities and a sense of the collectivity.

Chapter 5 enters the depth of the semiotics of gay narratives. I first argue that the story prototype that carries the nexus of gay love is what I term the prodigal romance. The prodigal story, in which gay men see themselves as sons to parents, invokes the long-standing traditional

Confucian image of the Chinese prodigal that shapes gay sons by their duty to the family. The romance, on the other hand, brings to the fore the desiring subjects in love who valorize that love

with the power of shaping life and the self. As such, prodigal romance is not a primary story but a juncture of the legitimate bachelor’s narrative from pre-internet times, emerging in the 1990s with the market and the reception of the coming out story from the West. Struggles between the prodigal and the romance, reflected in the struggles between the two men in love and inside each and every one of them, very often lead to the denouement of the separation of one protagonist who chooses to return to the family from the other who chooses to wander further in search of love. The latter, I argue, emerging as the gay desiring subject who makes the choice of defining himself by his homosexuality, is the hero of the gay narrative movement, and he is yet to go through the ordeals that are awaiting ahead.

The Conclusion evaluates and qualifies the arguments of the thesis and extends the study to a larger social scale and future studies. I conclude that this gay social movement is by and large virtual, informal, and anonymous, and it might paradoxically serve as a digital closet at the same moment as it gave rise to a gay identity and collectivity. As long as the authorities remain unchallenged in the real world, this movement will remain an unfinished project.

Chapter 1 Was There a Gay Identity or Collectivity Before? Homosexual Life and Signification in Pre-Internet China 1 « »

I’m begging you on my knees! I’m twenty six/seven, but still a virgin. I’m begging you to introduce me to a partner. [If I can get one] I can die with my eyes closed. I know that I will die because of sadness… If you write back, please be discreet. I don’t want to be exposed before I die. 1

I have been looking for someone I can spend my life with, but have never succeeded. Once I walked ceaselessly on a deserted street on a cold night. An idea seized my mind: leave this world, leave it. 2

The passages above are excerpts from two letters, published in the second volume of the most influential homosexual bimonthly magazine in China, Pengyou Tongxin (朋友通信,

Friends Exchange - henceforth PYTX), founded by Dr. Zhang Beichuan (张北川) in 1998. The first one, dated August 22, 1997, was written by a farmer from an interior province. The second, dated November 1, 1997, was sent by a graduate student from a provincial capital city in northwest China. In the same year when Pengyou Tongxin published its first issue, a man posted a novel, Beijing Story, on the internet, and it soon became the most read Chinese gay story. The novel ends with death, but it is death after the two heroes have experienced a tempestuous romance. Beijing Story was only the most visible tip of a vast gay story-writing internet subculture emerging at that time. Between the letters and the internet, and between offline life and the novel, lies a geographical, generational and social cleft and that is the subject of this work.

1 Anonymous. “Xinjian 1” (信件 1, Letter 1). Pengyou Tongxin (朋友通信, Friends Exchange ) 2 (1998).

2 Anonymous. “Xinjian 2” (信件 2, Letter 2). PYTX 2 (1998).

This chapter starts in the offline world. I will first delineate Paul Ricoeur’s theory about narrative, time, and life, which leads to what he calls “narrative identity,” the key concept of the dissertation. From Ricoeur’s narrative theory and Alfred Schuter and Karl Mannheim’s theories,

I develop a narrative-based method of understanding the experiences of generations and groups.

I propose that a set of stories, specific to the times, with an active potency applicable to real life, forms the “field of story” for generations or groups to develop a sense of belonging. Individuals tell their own stories by drawing from the field of story and by creatively combining them or inventing new elements. As time advances, the field of story mutates and so do individual and group narratives. Following this theory, I will then lay out a general social background of the

1980s and 1990s by sketching their fields of story.

The second task is to delineate various modes of male homosexual signification. An unstated categorical rejection of homosexuality from both official political authorities and underlying traditional attitude, I believe, constitutes the primary symbolic as well as existential confines in modern China. Under this rejection, which I call ambiguity against homosexuality, signification of same-sex desire until the 1990s was scattered and incoherent, hence requiring an unorthodox method of reading. The first mode is graffitiing, exemplified by graffiti inside public toilets, but with the term “graffiti” I propose a general mode of illicitly appropriating surfaces to signify homosexuality under stringent social and thought control. The second mode is the representation of homosexuality in high literature and mainstream discourse, which under the limited increase in liberty since the end of the Mao era, had to maintain a derogatory depiction and a distanced male author. The third mode, appearing in the 1990s, is a few academic works and magazines that allowed positive voices in speaking and narrating homosexuality.

It is from the materials gathered from these positive publications and the internet that we can carry on the third task of this chapter, which is to review the pre-internet same-sex subculture and ponder two crucial questions: Was there a gay identity and collectivity in China before the advent of the internet? Or were the appearance and maintenance of the gay identity and collectivity conditioned and defined by the emergence of the internet? To answer these questions, this chapter will survey the life and narratives of men desiring men before the advent of the internet. After a brief review of the Mao era, we will review a pattern of life for a few men desiring men that took shape in appropriated public spaces in urban centres, or “fisheries”

(yuchang, 渔场) in Chinese gay slang, alongside China’s economic reform and social transformations. The fishery subculture was centred on a group of single young men, or

“legitimate bachelors”, who took advantage of the freedom of the “legitimate period” of their bachelorhood to pursue their homosexual desire within all the social and cultural confines. As time advanced, a particular group of the legitimate bachelors who came of age in the late 1990s would encounter the internet. Carrying their generational experience into the new cyberspace, this group expanded their homosexual desire beyond these confines, authored the first cyber gay narratives, and thereby, invented a gay identity and collectivity in China. It is therefore important to lay down a preliminary depiction of the existence and homosexual signification of legitimate bachelors before we move on to depict that encounter in the next chapter. At the end of this chapter, I counter that the existence of gay identity before the internet, asserted or assumed by many, was in a preliminary stage as crucial conditions were still missing. I also argue for the primacy of studying the emergence of a gay identity and collectivity, as many have taken it for granted and moved on to some other secondary issues.

1.1 Life, time, and narrative

Like the body and the shadow, life and narrative are inseparable. In many cultures, the shadow is conceived not as a hollow in the light but as the substantive of the soul; a body without a shadow, as many folklores go, is cursed. No life can be lived without a story. A life without a narrative can only happen to someone locked in a cell forever—even in that case there might be some unexpected stories to tell. A life lived merely to tell a story one was told to tell, on the other hand, would be a life wasted in mental slavery. Everything we do, we do to tell to ourselves, to our fellows, to others, to the authorities, the ultimate existence of our own story.

Yet the relation between narrative and life is complicated. Narratives do not simply represent life; they can twist, remark on, dress up, conceal, or reveal the real life. Different manners, voices, spaces, languages, or even different gestures in and with which a story is told can make a story different, and different audiences understand it differently. A life, on the other hand, can be told in many versions, or completely different stories. Narrative and life are not one, as Louis Mink contends, “stories are not lived but told” on the one hand, and “lives are not told, but lived” on the other.3

For Paul Ricoeur, the relation between narrative and life is a prominent philosophical, as well as practical, question. Ricoeur’s theory, in the voluminous Time and Narrative and other works, seeks to expound the relation between narrative and human existence by bridging phenomenology and hermeneutics with narratology, and further extend this relation to ethics.

The thesis of his study is, in short, that narratives are the indispensable medium between the self

3 Mink, Louis, Historical Understanding, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 257-8.

and the lived life, and that only in the dimension of narrative can we gain meaningful understanding of life.

Ricoeur’s narratology consists of three layers: prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. As he argues, each of us has a pre-understanding of the symbolic world we live in that is endowed by our lived experience as a result of interaction with it, and so with this pre- understanding we preconfigure the world.4 Configuration “grasps together” otherwise scattered and discordant events and organizes them into a temporally and causally related coherent story through the act of emplotment;5 the narrative that comes out from configuration itself has to be refigured when a reader reads, as reading is to merge and understand the narrative with one’s own prefiguration.6

Self-understanding and identity, then, must be built, first of all, on narrative. The narrative dimension of life, as Karl Simms comments, “justifies hermeneutics not only as a process of reading texts, but of reading lives. If hermeneutics is the route to understanding, then reading oneself is the key to self-understanding.”7 And from this circle, identity—“narrative identity,” as Ricoeur calls it—arises:

The subject then appears both as a reader and the author of its own life, as Proust would have it. As the literary analysis of autobiography confirms, the story of a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life a cloth woven of stories told.”8

4 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. I, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 54-55. 5 Ibid., 64. 6 Ibid. 7 Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur, (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 101. 8 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 246.

Since only narrative can sum up the totality of life, identity that becomes narrative as being-for-oneself is a process rather than a state: “To answer the question ‘Who?’... is to tell the story of a life. The story told tells about the action of the ‘who’. And the identity of this ‘who’ therefore itself must be narrative identity.”9 And further, the theory of identity extends from an individual to that of a community. “We can speak of the self-constancy of a community, just as we spoke of it as applied to an individual subject.”10 Communities like biblical Israel, as Ricoeur exemplifies, form their identity by narrating their founding stories and incorporating them into their future.11

Narrative understanding of life leads to Ricoeur’s answer to the ethical problem, “What is a good life?” If life is lived and can only be lived by the mediation of narrative, human actions, too, are mediated by narrative, for the story that is unfolding carries the past and projects into the future in a three-step manner of “describe, narrate, prescribe.” In that way, one is the author of one’s own life, not so much someone writing her memoir at the desk as an actress playing out a script she writes for herself, constantly revising that script in the course of performing it. In turn,

Ricoeur’s ethics emphasizes the activity of narration: it is not a passive representation of life; rather, it always comes with a choice one makes for one’s life that will realize itself in the ongoing action of narrating. The action of narrating is the primary responsibility one must take for oneself, for it leads to the real life itself, in the sense that real life is lived by choice. The commitment to narrating one’s own life is thus the ultimate drive of the gear of life. The life we narrate with our life, by living out the events we desire, not by living by the events happening to

9 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, 246. 10 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, 247. 11 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, 248.

us, is a choice that makes us human. Thus Ricoeur acknowledges Sartre, who maintains existence prior to essence; but contributes a temporal dynamics to that thesis. Socrates’ dictum, then, is rephrased as “a life worth living is a life worth recounting.”12

1.2 An Ever-Changing China, an Ever-Changing Field of Story

In Deng Xiaoping’s “new ‘New China’,” as John Gittings calls it, “almost no one has

[been] left unaffected by this transformation.”13 Some of the most salient changes brought by the market economy were perhaps the increase in social mobility as class disparities rose and the expanded life choices. As the market economy grew both in pace and scale, metropolitan centres, too, were growing rapidly, and cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou became places many young people chose to live a modern lifestyle. Local communities were swept away to give way to a new society of strangers. Social life, too, had also become commodified. Yan

Yunxiang observes that individualism replaced collectivism to form the new mores of Chinese society.14 The commodification of society contributed to the emergence of consumerism, especially among the younger generations growing up in the post-Cultural Revolution era.

Desire for goods, in the meantime, replaced the passion for political struggle. In the disenchantment with the old socialist ideals, younger generations defined themselves in terms of fulfilment of their own desires, as much as in terms of their position in their work unit or family as the older generations did. Chinese society in general, and its younger generations in

12 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, 246. 13 John Gittings, Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. 14 Yan Yunxiang, “The Politics of Consumerism in Chinese Society,” in China Briefing 2000: The Continuing Transformation, ed. Tyrene White, (Armonk, NYand London: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 159-93.

particular, had become, in Lisa Rofel’s words, “desiring subjects” who rejected the class subjectivity under Mao and longed for “material, sexual, and affective” gratification.15

These social and political changes were accompanied, and very often propelled, by cultural changes. Right after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, intellectuals vigorously introduced and rediscovered Western social sciences and literature that had been forbidden.

Traditional Chinese classics were reclaimed. The new cultural abundance culminated with

“Cultural Fever” (wenhua re, 文化热) in the 1980s, which was ended with the tragedy of

Tiananmen. As high literature and other elite art forms fell into crisis after June Fourth, another cultural movement came along in the realm of popular culture, thanks to new communication technologies and the consumerism that popularized them. Magazines and periodicals were followed by the television, then the pager, the cellphone, and, finally, the internet. No longer fully sponsored by the state, mass media had to cater to a consumerist culture, leaving less room for direct state propaganda. Together, they contributed to the partial formation of a public sphere in China in the late 1990s.16

15 Rofel, Lisa, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 22. 16 Whether or not China has a public sphere in Habermas’s sense under the CCP’s cultural control policies and censorship, or if it does, how much it should qualified, are still questions under discussion. The internet has further complicated the situation. However, it seems that scholars can at least agree that the changes in politics and means of communication and mass media happened in China since 1980s have fostered new channels of communication partially independent of the official media controlled by the government. For the emergence of China’s public sphere in the 1980s, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema, (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997), 3-4. For the political and cultural potency of public sphere in China, see Philip C. C. Huang, “‘Public Sphere’/‘Civil Society’ in China? The Third Realm between State and Society,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (1993): 216-40. For China’s unofficial social space from 1980s to 1990s, see Davis et al, Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Furthermore, in Link, Madsen, and Pickowiz, eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), the

Sexual culture, too, has undergone dramatic transformation in post-Cultural Revolution

China. After the 1983 Strike-Hard campaign, sex was gradually disengaged from excessive political interference. As social mobility increased, the composition of population in urban centres shifted and so did patterns of courtship and sexual norms. More and more young men and women came to live in a society of strangers, freeing themselves from family, traditional kinship, and other forms of norm keepers. Even the young adults living with their families were offered more “third space” such as cafés, restaurants, and parks, at a distance from family or work unit. Courtship became more of personal choice, and mutual attraction became more and more important for forming the pursuit of marriage. At the same time, living in a society of strangers also intensified the importance of mutual support from lovers, be it emotional, financial, or logistical.

By the 1990s, Chinese had changed itself from a nation swarming with identically dressed asexual crowds, or “blue ants,” to become a sexualized nation where, as Pan Suiming’s observes, “a sexual revolution, rather than a gradual evolution in sexual behaviours and relationships, is taking place.” 17 Sex became a personal matter, a vehicle of pleasure, a

significance of an alternative communication platform in the formation of an unofficial public culture is discussed. Finally, for an early general discussion on the topic, see William Rowe, “The Public Sphere in

Modern China,” Modern China 16, no. 3 (1990), 457-74. 17 Pan Suiming, “Transformations in the Primary Life Cycle: The Origins and Nature of China’s Sexual Revolution,” in Sex and Sexuality in China, ed. Elaine Jeffreys, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 22. Joanna McMillan is more cautious with the claim that China has experienced a “sexual liberation,” pointing out this view needs qualification, as the changes in sexuality in contemporary China are far from diversified but rather, dominated by a certain view on sex, i.e., “knowledge that takes expedient arrangements and transforms them into facts of nature” sponsored by the Chinese state. See Joanna McMillan, Sex, Science and Morality in

demonstration of freedom and independence, and increasingly, a commodity. Pre-marital sex became common. The number of sex partners grew. Public displays of affection among teenagers became common. By the mid-1990s, night clubs, karaoke clubs, bars and other newly established commercial venues became popular places among the younger generations. By the late 1990s, sex shops, selling sex toys, condoms, aphrodisiacs, and other novelties, mushroomed in streets and alleys, openly mingling with restaurants and grocery stores, and providing an explicit reminder of a newly sexualised China.18

This process of sexualisation of China is, simultaneously and necessarily, one that heterosexualized the nation. The market economy brought up new definitions of masculinity and femininity, as Mayfair Yang comments: “It is clear that the new consumer culture is based on a fundamental gender bifurcation, and the exaggeration and celebration of gender difference and sexuality.”19 Success in the marketplace was increasingly taken as a marker of nanziqi

(masculinity, 男子气), whereas domestic roles and beauty became indicators of nürenqi

(femininity, 女人气).20 Beautification for women is not only “just about performing a gender

China, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). McMillan’s observation is insightful, but with qualification, sex does have the effect of expressing individualism against the authorities. 18 In McMillan’s account, China’s sex shop industry was documented no later than 1993, but rapidly took over the street scene by 2000s. McMillan, Sex, Science and Morality in China, 40-41. 19 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference,” in Space of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Translational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui, Yang, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 50. 20 See Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference,” in Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, 35-67; Nancy Chen, “Embodying qi and masculinities in post-Mao China,” in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, ed. Susan Brownell, Jeffery Wasserstrom andThomas Laqueur, (Berkeley: Canifornia University Press, 2002), 315-31; William Jankowiak, “Proper men and proper

role. It is also a matter of economics, and perhaps understandable that many women might choose, through cosmetics and surgery, to maximize their capital assets.”21 The sexological discourse and new sex institutions such as sex clinics, tightly binding social norms to anatomy, generated a “naturalized view” of sex that compulsorily equates sex with “‘penis-in-vagina’ acts,” to use McMillan’s terms. 22

Male same-sex relationships, too, underwent significant changes. Romantic erotic love sexualised many social conducts, once socially acceptable between men, and associated them only with heterosexual romantic relationship. Passionate friendship and physical and emotional closeness between men—holding hands, for instance—once congruent with both communist comradeship and everyday Chinese attitude, were now viewed with homosexual connotations.

Out of the ambiguity against homosexuality, reports about gay lifestyles in Western countries sporadically surfaced starting in the 1980s. While usually depicted as a “corrupting capitalist lifestyle” that was alien to China, some of the reports also illicitly conveyed coming-out stories.

Some scientific studies and sex surveys in the late 1980s included the issue of homosexuality. Li

Yinhe (李银河) and Wang Xiaobo’s (王小波) 1989 survey, published as Their World (tamende shijie, 他们的世界) in 1992, for the first time provided a chance for men desiring men to tell their stories, and was followed by a handful of social surveys and news reports. Even by the

women: parental affection in the Chinese family,” in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, 361-80, and McMillan, Sex, Science and Morality in China.

21 McMillan, Sex, Science and Morality in China, 22. 22 Ibid.

1990s, however, scientific studies retained a negative attitude. The general public, once completely innocent in regard to same-sex relations, became more sensitive to the topic. Sexual orientation, a term Chinese society was ignorant of under the “single uniform sexuality” ideology, was by the early 1990s in the consciousness of some people.23

1.3 Growing up in the Field of Story of the 1980s and Coming of Age in the 1990s

A great part of an ever-changing society, such as China in the 1980s and 1990s, is experienced by citizens as the transformation of stories of the times circulating around and through them and that brings changes to their own stories. These stories, carrying the message of the times, are active and relevant, and also applicable to real life. They come from a large variety of sources, some new, brought about by the emerging conditions; some archetypes from the past, remaining relevant in their mutability; some imported, seeking their Chinese adaptations. They appear in different media, from high literature and folklore to TV shows and everyday gossip, or even lived out in someone’s life. Together these stories make up a field of story in which they circulate, mutate, mate, collide, or get eliminated. Every era has its own particular field of story, and its changes are also the changes in its field of story: Historical changes not only take place in the form of material conditions and social relationship, but, as importantly and simultaneously, in a society and period’s field of story and, accordingly, life.

New life perspectives appear as old ones fade out, realizing themselves in the form of new stories.

23 The popularization of the concept of homosexuality will be explored in detail in the section dealing with scientific discourses in this chapter.

Individuals are born into the peculiar field of story of the times to which they belong.

Their life is first of all lived in a field of story in which the unfolding of one’s own is in the constant influence of other stories, under which one undoes, redoes, invents, and reinvents one’s own. Or, to quote Ricoeur again, “this life [is] a cloth woven of stories told,”24 it is the field of story that provides the materials for one to weave the cloth that is life. Sharing the same field of story of their times, members of the same age range form a generation. Youth grow up under the influence of the field of story, and when coming of age they interact most violently with it, as they are right at the age of forming their own story as well as changing the field of story, while many elders let their lives be lived by the old stories and are passed by the new ones. Groups and minorities relate to their own kind and anchor their identity on a very particular part of the field of story, so particular that sometimes it becomes secret.

The field of story has an innate tie with the vernacular—the vernacular not only as the language in which the stories are told, but in a much broader sense, as an avenue of telling, sharing, interpreting, and applying stories in the midst of real life. In the meantime, however, this field also extends itself to official or high literature, feeding it and feeding off it, as long as the stories produced there are not too alienated from life.

For those who were born in the 1970s and raised in China’s market economy and later to encounter the internet, the Cultural Revolution only came across in vague fragments. To grow up in the 1980s was to grow up in the field of story of that time. The story of China, told as the grand narrative of the nation, was in the air. In one case, “Without the Communist Party there

24 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, 246.

would have no New China” (没有共产党就没有新中国), it is the salvation of a humiliated mother from the hands of the West, Japan, and then the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek. In another, the “waking of the sleeping lion” that is China—a quote popularly attributed to

Napoleon—was the metaphor of the rejuvenation of a nation with a splendid past. However, beyond larger nationalist narratives, the life script for that generation, infused by the parent who went through political turmoil during Mao’s era, was to succeed in their education, and ideally, pass the highly competitive Gaokao (College Entrance Examination, 高考) to enter university— a version of the universally ingrained timeless Chinese story applauding individual prosperity, family status, and education, all at once.

The CCP’s propaganda machine, mobilizing art production systems, textbooks, radio, serial picture books, movies, and any other means at its disposal, also told the official stories of exemplary figures in stilted productions full of resolute voices and vexing repetition that appeared everywhere. A long gallery of heroes and heroines, from the 1950s model worker

“Ironman” Wang Jingxi (王进喜), “Chairman Mao’s Loyal Soldier” Lei Feng (雷锋), to

“Teenage Hero” Lai Ning (赖宁), “A Contemporary Pavel” Zhang Haidi (张海迪) and “The

Party’s Good Cadre” Jiao Yulu (焦裕禄) were presented for commoners to emulate, but also served to eclipse the ordinary life itself.25

25 “A Contemporary Pavel” refers to Pavel Korchagin, the hero of the Soviet socialist realist novel, How the Steel was Tempered, written and published in the 1930s by Nikolai Ostrovsky. This novel continues to be popular, both officially and unofficially, in China.

However, other stories, coming from a more vernacular channel, were marvelous. Book stands outside of primary school gates offered serial picture books, or lianhuanhua (连环画), ranging from the Chinese classics such as Journey to The West (西游记), to Communist heroes in Red Rock (hongyan, 红岩), to Soviet stories like How the Steel Was Tempered (gangtie shi zenyang lianchengde,钢铁是怎样炼成的), to Western imports like the Sherlock Holmes series.

At 1 or 2 fen (Chinese cent) per book, these were an affordable and abundant part of childhood pleasures. Popular magazines in the 1980s, too, were in their golden age. Story Gathering

(gushi hui, 故事会), specializing in folk stories, had more than seven million subscribers in

1985. Reader’s Digest (duzhe wenzhai,读者文摘), another top-seller, offered well-pruned allegorical stories, combining everyday wisdom with taste. Many other magazines provided enjoyable reading for more a particular readership, be they primary school students or teenagers.

Literary magazines, too, enjoyed their largest reader base before they declined.

Slightly later, in the mid and late 1980s, larger book rental stores offered middle school or university students popular novels for cheap prices. The most welcomed genres were martial art novels, among boys, and popular romance, among girls. Jin Yong’s (金庸) martial art novels, unexceptional bildungsromane about a fatherless young man’s quest for the highest fighting power, love, and the salvation of the nation, were by far the most popular. Qiong Yao’s (琼瑶) popular romances, on the other hand, telling delicate love stories from a female perspective against an implicitly alternative Chinese background in Taiwan, were on young girls’ must-read list.

For those who wanted to become writers—a dream passionately pursued by many youth in the 1980s and early 1990s—or to acquire artistic tastes, there were yet other items to add to their field of story. That list included not only orthodox writers but also some modern writers, dismissed during Mao’s era, as well as some foreign literary works. Eileen Chang, for example, was reprinted and appeared in the emerging bookstores, and if not there, in the temporary stalls of the night markets, bringing back the sentiment of balancing the equations of love in changing times. Foreign romance such as Gone with the Wind and Pride and Prejudice were so commonly read that they, too, formed a part of the field of story.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and its suppression, told in different versions by the

CCP and average people, was an initiation rite that came all too early for that generation.

Entering the 1990s, literature was in decline. Many stories centred around tales of xiahai

(plunging into the [commercial/capitalist] sea, 下海)—leaving the comfort of the work unit to venture to become the first ones to get rich, providing a powerful subversive alternative story to the old story of merging into the system. For those who could not succeed in their university entrance exams, the stories of leaving one’s hometown to work in bigger cities sounded more appealing than becoming an unemployed youth, and that trip invoked the much older story of the

Chinese “prodigal son” leaving and coming home. Wang Shuo’s (王朔) “rascal” novels, featuring commoners cynically seeking life opportunities and love, had consigned the CCP’s exemplary heroes to a nostalgic background with a sneer. Writers like D. H. Lawrence and

Henry Miller, meanwhile, reached ordinary Chinese readers as soft pornography in pirate editions. Going abroad, especially to America, to study as an overseas student was a remote but

exciting dream, for many young men and women now in university, who watched the 1994 TV hit Pekingers in New York (Beijingren zai niuyue, 北京人在纽约) in a dizzy of globalization.

By the mid and late 1990s, popular romantic love, emphasizing mutual sexual attraction, passionate devotion and delicate emotional interplay, had found its way into real life. New personal stories confessing romantic and erotic experiences as the ultimate secret of oneself, emulating An Dun’s (安顿) bestseller, Juedui yinsi (Absolute Privacy, 绝对隐私, 1998), proliferated in the newly expanded public space.26 Sex and romantic love were now the gauges of happiness in marriage, and they were essential to one’s individuality. Romantic love became, on the one hand, an anchor to individual identity, and also the new social contract on sexual matters between young people, the family, and the Party, on the other.

All of these, and many other stories not mentioned above, constitute an evolving field of story in and with which the generation of the 1970s grew up. Each person, conditioned by different life circumstances and personal dispositions, of course, drew different stories from that field to compose their own different individual stories—or different recipes made out of materials gathered from the field of story, but a shared field of story, overlapping both with the generations of the Cultural Revolution and those of the market, was a definitive factor of the

1970s. The lines between generations, as in Alfred Schutz’s formula of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, 27 should be thick and blurred, and sometimes only subjective.28

26 For a study of personal storytelling, see Farrer, James, Opening Up: Youth Sex and Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 27 Schutz, Alfred, The Phenomenology of Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1967).

Nevertheless, members of a same generation relate to each other through the same field of story whose evolution interacted with their own life courses; hence they come to share a sense of, in

Alfred Shultz’s words, “a community of time” in which “we are growing older together,” and hence a sense of generation, or the “simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity of the other self’s consciousness with my own.” 29 As Ricoeur comments on Schutz:

Simultaneity is not something purely instantaneous. It brings into relationship two enduring individuals (if, with Spinoza, we understand duration as “the indefinite continuance of existence”). One temporal stream accompanies another, so long as they endure together. The experience of a shared world thus depends on a community of time as well as of space.30 1.4 Ambiguity against Homosexuality

For most men desiring men who came to their adolescence in the 1980s, however, there was no one in that era with whom to endure life together. That sense of belonging to a generation of their own kind was an aching absence. There were, as we will discuss later, clandestine venues for a very small number of men to engage in anonymous sex in bigger cities, but that would have been located outside of a boy’s knowledge. There were no stories about others, no trace of predecessors or contemporaries, nor anyone to tell one’s story to. All one

28 An important differentiation between the field of story and generational memory needs to be made, since a generation is also related by the latter. The field of story is different from generational memory in two aspects: First, the former circulates around the life lived in the moment, and advances forward together with life, whereas the latter is conceived retrospectively. Second, the former is an array of influential and applicable stories from which one draws to compose one’s own, whereas the latter is a narrative in its finished shape. 29 Schutz, The Phenomenology of Social World, 163, 143. 30 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, 113

could feel was a prohibitive ambiguity in which desire found no story but was reduced to an abstract melancholy.

This cloud of ambiguity came to enshroud a long-standing Chinese tradition, that as Bret

Hinsch has argued, supported “a society in which homosexuality was relatively open and tolerated,” since many generations ago. 31 A sharp decline in homosexuality’s presence in

Chinese society, or at least its representation in public discourse, happened during the late Qing and the Republic years, and was followed by a total void during the first three decades of the

Communist government.

This silence on homosexuality is not ignorance, even though it often appeared to be; rather, together with the reticence of expression on the topic was the ambiguity or aimei (暧昧), a definitive Chinese attitude as well as the major mechanism against homosexuality. Never juridically decreed, formally stated, institutionally implemented, explicitly propagandized, or publicly discussed, but diffused and maintained in both the informal and the formal, the unofficial and the official, the traditional and the modern, the ambiguity against homosexuality has been intangible yet all the more suffocating. While different from passive ignorance and inactivity, this ambiguity has been far from impotent in its effects. Until the 1980s, in public discourse—the law, government regulations, Party documents, news reports, literary representations, and scientific discussions—coverage of the topic of homosexuality was next to nonexistent. The general public had no vocabulary to talk about homosexuality; even the

31 Bret Hinsch, Passion of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 162.

language of Western homophobia was unknown. Homosexual activities happened, if at all, clandestinely. Men desiring men epistemologically related same-sex desire to an innate, intuitive, and unspeakable shame and fear, and to break out to tell stories about that desire, even to oneself, was inconceivable. The solid illusion that homosexuality had nothing to do with

China in these four decades was seemingly achieved effortlessly. If active punishment or public condemnation would at least grant homosexuality a presence, ambiguity almost dissolved homosexuality into a conceptual nonexistence.

John Austin’s speech act theory sheds light on the effect of the silence on same-sex relations in China. Speeches in the common sense are meant to convey descriptions of a situation or statement of a fact. However, as Austin points out, certain speeches function as acts, in the sense that these speeches not only convey a message but also perform an action in an appropriate context. The priest’s speech of “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” for example, is a speech act to enact a marriage.32 The concept of speech action could be extended further to facilitate understanding of the effect of the Chinese criminal code’s silence on homosexuality. In Austin’s account, a speech act must be an utterance. We could extend the term, however, by recognizing that active silence on a certain topic can also constitute a speech act. While passive ignorance does reflect innocence, not to speak about a certain thing can be a speech act that serves to deny the very existence of the unmentionable object, or casts unspeakable disparagement on it by positively maintaining a boundary between exclusion and inclusion. Moreover, if an articulate speech may lend itself to debates, refutations, or even

32 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

subversion, active silence casts indiscriminate negativity that provides no specific claim to be worked on. Thus, to follow the common saying “less is more,” we could add that “nothing is the most.”

The crime of hooliganism in the 1979 criminal code is especially worth close reading.

The Chinese term for hooligan, or liumang (流氓), literally refers to “vagabond outcasts.” It carries a derogatory meaning for an array of non-conforming social conduct, ranging from disturbances to gang activities; “disrespectful” sexual deviations take only a minor share of what the law was intended to cover. In the years after 1949, as all social and cultural conduct was politically polarized into “revolutionary” and “counterrevolutionary,” “hooliganism” became a term used to polarize social and sexual conducts. A wide range of sexual deviations, such as pre- marital and extra-marital sex, were increasingly referred to by and subsequently lost their specificity behind the term “other hooligan activities.” The strong but ambiguous derogatory attitude carried by the word fused all unacceptable social and sexual conducts at once, while at the same time repressing them to a level of disgust beyond the bearing of the language, cancelling the necessity of discernment and discretion. What Gayle Robin describes as a hierarchy of sexual deviations, or a spectrum of sex in Euro-American societies, 33 with the employment of hooliganism, became a starkly polarized sex binary between the state-Party sanctioned penis-in-vagina intercourse on the one hand, and everything else covered by the umbrella term “hooligan activities” on the other. The 1979 criminal code’s article regarding

33 Gyle Robin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3- 44.

hooliganism, then, is a speech act of “positive silence” that prescribes an almost perfect heterosexualist world, one almost doing away with homosexuality by foreclosing it in the black hole of “other hooligan activities.”

From the Republic to the People’s Republic, the ambiguity against homosexuality has been consistent. Such consistency was not derived from a silent political apparatus and reticent popular support. The maintenance of it in the public arena in the Republic era has been examined in Sang and Kang’s works, and there are still areas open to future inquiry. The

Cultural Revolution passed as a dark midnight, when anything sexually explicit became taboo in public, unless for political attacks. Up until the 1980s, homosexuality was not mentioned even once in the CCP’s formal discourse, let alone condemned officially. 34

Entering the 1980s, when the reviving popular media opened a cleft for discussions of homosexuality to surface, the task of maintaining the ambiguity was placed within the mandate of the CCP’s Department of Propaganda, which holds the ultimate right of speech control.

Though a branch of the Party, the Department of Propaganda has prerogative over the cultural and administrative governmental departments such as the Department of Culture, the Bureau of

News and Publications, the Bureau of Broadcasting, Television, and Film, and the Federation of

Literary and Art Circles. It can also mobilize military departments such as the Department of

Public Security, and it can impose its instructions on the legal system to influence the result of a judgement. It usually gives orders orally to governmental departments, newspapers, magazines,

34 Tze-Ian D Sang, Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 163. Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender Since 1949, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 206.

publishing presses, and later, websites, through interior passes, telephone calls, or workshops for the leaders of publications and news agencies, thus leaving little trace of its tight and very often capricious control over speech. The only official sanction against homosexuality appears in a regulation of the Bureau of News and Publication, which categorizes “obscene and explicit depictions of homosexual or other perverted behaviours” as obscene publication.35 Despite the lack of textual traces, however, it has been common knowledge among the media and publishers that homosexuality-related reports, literary works, television programs, and films are sensitive topics that will cause problems.36

Ambiguity also engenders uncertainty about homosexuality. Such uncertainty serves to confine gay men to a legal limbo, putting them in the constant position of guessing what the political authorities’ attitudes might be. When in the position of surmising, everything one does could be wrong; everything that has passed without punishment might have passed merely because of the mercy or neglect of the authorities, and their very being is suspended between lawful and unlawful. In such a Kafkaesque situation, an asymmetric relationship is built between the one who wonders and the one who gives answers. Thus by keeping its stance unclear, the

Party maintains an absolute authority over homosexuality, and homosexuality is marginalized and pinned in an ambiguous position. Under this active negative ambiguity, homosexuality is

35 The original regulation in Chinese read “淫亵性地具体描写同性恋的性行为或者其它性变态行为，或者具体描写与性变态有关的暴力、虐待、侮辱行为。” 36 There was no documentation of the Department of Propaganda’s prohibition of topics on homosexuality until very recent, but many journalists and editors have testified on the great pressure they face when publishing homosexual-related new reports. Wei Hongling (魏宏岭), an editor from the magazine Renzhichu (,Inchoate) has a detailed account on how his magazine received coercion from the Department of Propaganda. See Wei Hongling (魏宏岭), “Fayan” (发言, speech), PYTX, Vols. 19&20, 2001.

less than a crime; it is a shame, whose improbability is beyond the range of the language and the law and should be reduced to the invisible and the unspeakable.

Yet the ambiguity cannot be entirely impenetrable. At times and in places, when opportunities appeared, men could leverage that cloud of ambiguity to form an episode of the unspeakable desire. Even those stories, however, could seldom be told or circulated in the decades before Reform and Opening, and thus were deprived of their currency to their contemporaries. It was in the mass media in Deng’s era that men would start to recount or reconstruct a past by telling their stories.

1.5 Post-1949 Homosexual Signification: Graffitiing

Under the cloud of ambiguity, there was not a shared field of story for men desiring men, nor a shared history. Instead, there was a field of signification whose reach was always short and ephemeral, leaving most men desiring men out. This secion turns to sketching this scattered and incoherent field, although one must keep in mind how few men desiring men participated in this signification.

Entering the Mao era, the linguistic foreclosure arising from ambiguity was further intensified by China’s Leninist literature and art production system. Homosexuality was not even a taboo topic. Worse than the villains in revolutionary romanticist realist classics, homosexuals were linguistically impossible. Sang finds that the three decades from 1949 to

1979 were marked by a complete dearth of literary and artistic representation of homosexuality.

The only appearance of the word “tongxing lian’ai” (同性恋爱, homosexual love) found by

Sang is in the 1973 edition of Xiandai hanyu cidian (Modern Chinese Dictionary, 现代汉语词典

), in which the word was listed as an entry.37

My own research in the period confirmes Sang’s conclusion. Before more materials emerge, our position is that a queer perspective is needed to find hidden homosexual signification during this period. A few instances might provide examples of how homosexual signification in Mao’s era managed to leave marks on the heavily censored legitimate print surfaces in extremely precarious political and social settings. One of the instances was the reprinting of Guo Moruo’s My Childhood. A banner figure of the leftist camp, Guo became Vice

Prime Minister of the Communist regime. His autobiography, My Childhood, first published in

1927, was reprinted in 1958. Guo’s position certainly granted him the prerogative to revise his works to fit his political status. Indeed, many parts of My Childhood, as Hee Wai Siam reveals, had undergone rewriting;38 intriguingly, the parts with homosexuality, however, were not erased.

Although My Childhood was written before 1949, reprinting it under the Communist regime was likely a deliberate choice not without significance in the stringent discursive and political circumstances, considering the potential political risks it might bring about. My Childhood became the only literary work explicitly carrying the word “tongxinglian’ai” during the whole of

Mao’s era.

37 Sang, Emerging Lesbian, 26. 38 Hee Wai Siam (許維賢), “Cong ‘Tongxinglian’ai’ Dao ‘Zouxiang Geming’: yu Guo Moruo Rihou de ‘Ziwo Gaizao’” (從「同性戀愛」到「走向革命」：〈我的童年〉與郭沫若日後的「自我改造」, From “same-sex love” to “revolutionary”: “My Childhood” and self-reform in Guo Moruo’s later years), Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (台灣社會研究季刊, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies) 94 (2014), 51- 106.

Another example of homosexual signification during Mao’s era was the poetry of Walt

Whitman, a preeminent foreign literary figure whose work had a great influence on modern

Chinese writers and poets. An inspiration for almost every left-wing poet, including preeminent writers such as Lu Xun (鲁迅), Guo Moruo, and Ai Qing (艾青), Whitman’s influence survived the 1949 transformation, as his works were officially interpreted as proletarian literature.

Homoeroticism in Whitman’s poetry, however, was silently left out of the discussion. Writers and poets referred to Whitman frequently when they expressed their passion for the newly founded nation. His homoerotic imageries, in the meantime, were carried into the socialist literature as a model of proletarian brotherhood. An ode celebrating the foundation of the

Communist regime by Gong Mu (公木), whose poems extensively drew from Whitman, read:

“On this auspicious day which only comes once in ten thousand years/ I wave to everyone/ And everyone nods to me/ I want to embrace and kiss everyone/ Every man and woman walking towards me.” 39 This allusion to homoeroticism in the disguise of political rapture at a glorious historical moment, if a queer viewpoint is allowed, only heralded the beginning of silence on homosexuality.

There might be many other instances where homosexual signification can be discerned.

Super-masculine male figures in propaganda posters, or friendship between heroes in officially promulgated literature, for instance, might contain hidden signs of an erotic gaze, despite the official compulsory heterosexual readings. Moreover, diaries written by men desiring men are usually a source to discover the experience of men desiring men. In Mao’s China, however,

39 The original poem in Chinese read: “千载难逢、万古流芳的开国的吉日良辰…/ 我向每个人招手，/每个人

向我点头，/我想向每个人拥抱亲吻，/向迎面走来的每个男人和女人。”

confiscation of private property was common and social surveillance ubiquitous, thus even writing down homosexual thoughts to oneself in a diary was dangerous. In addition, writing homosexual desire had become linguistically difficult. As a result, no diaries by men desiring men have been made available as of today. Tong Ge (童戈), an important writer whose work we will discuss later, for instance, recalls having a diary that “was full of self-blame I wrote down after going to the ‘spots’”. He even boldly shared his diary with a colleague at the work unit who was also attracted to men. Still, he burnt the diary later, out of fear of being found out.40

Together, these images were but one or two dots on the canvas of a stringent era. Besides the hidden signs on legitimate surfaces, the most important homoerotic signification in the dark decades, perhaps, were graffiti on marginalized surfaces, especially in public bathrooms. But since the traces or recounting of graffiti before Deng’s era are not available today, our trail only goes back to the 1980s.

Graffiti in toilets appeared as doggerel, brief stories, riddles, sexually explicit expressions, or pornographic illustrations. They appeared at the very low end of the culture— side by side with excretion—where even censorship or social surveillance are embarrassed to fully present themselves. A part of everyday experience in the 1980s and 1990s, when private toilets was not common in collective socialist housing, toilet graffiti was honoured as “cesuo wenxue“ (toilet literature, 厕所文学) in slang. Associated with the odour and the activities of urination and defecation, toilet literature did not have the privilege of being preserved, or, for

40 Tong Ge (童戈), “Kaifang womende xintai: zai dalian nannan xingjiechuzhe AIDS ganyu peixunban de yanjiang (开放我们的心态：在大连男男性接触者 AIDS 干预培训班的演讲, Opening up out mind: a speech at training class AIDS intervention in men who have sex with men in Dalian), PYTX Vol. 44, 2005.

that matter, being censored. Subject to frequent erasure, they were nevertheless recalcitrant in making their reappearance. My research has not found copies or pictures of same-sex graffiti in the 1980s or 1990s. But in the recounting of men desiring men, toilet literature forms an important part.

Heterosexuals certainly made and read sexual graffiti, but for men desiring men, they meant a lot more as they burrowed through the only loophole in the otherwise perfect ambiguity against homosexuality. It was no accident that where the ambiguity was dispelled, real life opportunities arose, and with the appropriate conditions, some of the signs led to encounters and more. A-Qing (阿清), a frequenter of Beijing’s homosexual venues who “became a member of

Beijing’s tongzhi circle in the 1980s,” analyzed the importance of homosexual graffiti as the anchor of same-sex venues:

As to how public toilets became tongzhi venues, it was mostly because of toilet literature. In those years when tongzhi wanted to publish personal messages, there was no internet, and one could not advertise it on newspaper or radio. The only place one could write was on the board of the Public Toilet News. Even today, many “WC”s still carry messages such as “homosexuals play at 10 p.m.” In time, as characters on the board grew, so did the men visiting. If the transportation was convenient or there were woods to make the environment covered, the climate would slowly form and the place would become a regular venue. Those venues can be found in all the cities in the world. They all formed in the same way, not just “Made in China.” There is no exception, whether today or the past, in China or abroad. The most popular venues in Beijing included Tian’anmen, Baijiazhuang, Liupukang, Xiyuan, and so on. There were also steady and low-key small venues. They were not busy, but never idle. These small places are tenacious; they could exist for decades. As long as they are not laid flat by bulldozers, there will always be men.41

41 A-Qing, “Shiyunian qinli Beijing tongzhi changsuo bianqian” (十余年亲历北京同志场所变迁, First-hand experience of the changes of Beijing tongzhi avenues), PYTX, vol. 42, 2004.

A-Qing attributes even more to “toilet literature”. In A-Qing’s theorization, toilet literature was the major, or perhaps only, means to articulate homosexual desire in the times when the formal discourse was saturated by the ambiguity. It was probably the only hidden thread of homosexual signification running through the “dark age”, extending to a secret past and a future that existed in the imagination of men desiring men who read it.

The importance of toilet literature remained even into the 1990s, when new means of individual communication could afford men more privacy. Cui Zi’en’s novella, “A Platinum

Treasury of the Public Toilet” (gongce baijin baodian, 公厕白金宝典, 1998), also recounts toilet stories in a post-modernist tone. In another case, an anonymous reader of Pengyou Tongxin, who started a hotline for men desiring men, considered the public toilet an efficient channel to promulgate his service in 1997:

I ran a consultation and AIDS hotline [for men]. I didn’t know how to make it known, so I posted [the message] in toilets. … But people would tear it away. It has been torn three times. It’s funny that those little posters for making fake diplomas were well-protected. Besides it there was a piece of nude “art” portraying organ worshipping [graphic depiction of genitals or intercourse] drawn by a sex-craving tongzhi. There were also many doggerels written by heterosexuals that would make you either laugh loudly or spit.42

If considered as a paradigm of signification, graffiti is not limited to writings and drawings in public toilets; rather, it is a much more general means of signifying secret desires that were forbidden in legitimate writing. Any writing illegitimately mounted on an institutionalized surface is a piece of graffiti in the broader sense. Jottings on the books

42 Anonymous, “naxie buweirenzhi de shengyin” (那些不为人知的声音, Those unheard voices), PYTX, vol. 48,

2006.

borrowed from a public library, for example, are graffiti, the appropriated surface in this case being the margin of the printed paper. The secret desire it carries reaches others together with circulation of the book. Coded personal ads in a mainstream magazine meant only for other men desiring men, too, are graffitiing, and the surface, in this case, is the personal ads section itself, meant only for making socially sanctioned connections.

All these forms of graffitiing are remarkably different from high literature. They are published and read anonymously in a space where social and political powers are relegated to bystanders. They are short, fragmented, incoherent, and spontaneous exhibitionistic outlets of desire that find ease in the vernacular. The cyberspace that was yet to arrive, by affording anonymity and distance from institutional censorship, and unmediated interaction between the author and the readers, also hosts a writing and reading mode akin to graffitiing, only on a much greater scale. It was not by accident, as we will see in later chapters, that the cyber-narratives would continue the mode of graffitiing in recounting, speculating, and living out same-sex desire and finally engendering a new identity based on homosexual desire.

1.6 Post-Cultural Revolution Homosexual Signification in High Literature

After Mao’s rule ended, a shift to a more liberal attitude also occurred in literature, echoing the same trend in scientific discourses and the mass media. The realm of literature, however, is more sensitive than other discourse fields. The greatest difficulty of writing homosexuality came first from linguistic foreclosure. Furthermore, while scholarly studies and journalistic reports on homosexuality could defend themselves with solid boundaries between the observer and the object, merely writing about the topic in literature, even in a derogatory tone, would be inevitably transferred to the writer’s own sexual proclivity. In addition, literary

representations engage readers’ imagination, a dangerous practice that would involve readers’ visualization of homosexual activities that might lead to their antipathy. The result of such a situation is that in the whole of the 1980s, no mainstream literary work from the PRC mentioned

“tongxinglian,” even given scientific discourses and mass media that had already started to cover the topic of homosexuality. With sensitivity, however, one can still discern weak traces of homosexuality in the works of some writers. An example is A-Cheng (阿城), whose three novellas, Qiwang (King of Chess, 棋王, 1984), Shuwang (King of the Trees, 树王, 1985), and

Haiziwang (King of the Children, 孩子王, 1985) all depict a world of male zhiqing (知青, educated youth) that is completely devoid of heterosexual romance or sex. Such a negative rejection of prevailing sex norms was able to pass completely without attracting critics’ attention.

Only very bold private readers would discern its silent and remote reference to homosexuality.

In fact, A-Cheng himself later revealed, in an interview with Hong Kong Radio, that his “King of

Chess” had already included “obscure traces of homosexuality” before it was possible for

Chinese literature.43

The introduction of male homosexuality into the field of mainstream literary discourses in the 1980s took the entire decade. It had to first come by the route of translating canonical

Western literary works with homoeroticism, as the literary merit of the world-renowned writers was itself able to fend off possible attack. Later on, a few female writers’ audacious writings on female homosexuality also paved the way for their male counterparts. The other effort was the

43 Ma Kafai (馬家輝), “A-Cheng, again” (阿城，again), interview with A-Cheng at Hong Kong Radio, 1996, accessed on July 11, 2013, http://makafai.blogspot.ca/2006/11/again_10.html.

avant-garde movement that partly divorced literature from politics. By the mid-1990s, some mainstream writers could afford to incorporate homosexuality in their works. Yet as we will see, these works were greatly limited by the writers’ statuses in the literary system.

The very first testing of the waters in the post-Mao era in the realm of literature again started with Whitman. In the wake of a new era in 1977, Jinri shijie chubanshe (今日世界出版

社, World Today Publishing House) printed Huiteman de shi (惠特曼的诗, Whitman’s Poems), compiled by Li Dasan (李达三) and Tan Deyi (谈德义). One year later, the prestigious renmin wenxue chubanshe (People’s Literature Publishing House, 人民文学出版社) reprinted its 1955 edition of Caoyeji xuan (草叶集选, Selection from Leaves of Grass), translated by Chu Tunan (

楚图南). These new printings of Whitman, however, mentioned nothing about his homoeroticism. Chu’s states in the postscript to the translation that “Today Whitman’s poetry still has a certain positive significance for the struggle against imperialist, hegemonic, and racist oppression, and it is still a source of inspiration for the people who are fighting for national liberation and social progress.”44 In the preface to Zhang Yujiu’s (张禹九) translation of

Whitman’s essays, Huiteman sanwen xuan (Selection of Whitman’s Essays, 惠特曼散文选,

1986), Zhao Luorui (赵萝蕤), a renowned scholar and translator of Whitman, remotely mentioned Whitman’s attitude towards sex and the body, in a vague tone, “He also talks about

‘sex’ and ‘romantic love,’ insisting on writing about the whole person, including his soul as well

44 Chu Tunan 楚图南, trans., Caoyeji xuan 草叶集选 [Selection from leaves of grass], (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe 人民文学出版社, 1977), 324.

as his body.”45 For mainstream readers under the influence of the naturalistic view of sex, however, such an indistinguishable reference could hardly point to Whitman’s homosexuality.

Another preeminent figure, Oscar Wilde, was published soon after the Cultural

Revolution. Two translations of Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in 1982 and 1983. The translator, Rong Rude (荣如德), in the preface of the 1982 publication, reintroduced Wilde to

Chinese readers, who had been estranged from Western literature for a good few decades:

However, Wilde went too far in his spontaneous resistance against capitalist moralities. Swaggering through the streets in outlandish clothes, delivering paradoxical theories and absurd arguments, advocating hedonism unscrupulously, and all these could not satisfy him. In the end he slipped from contempt of philistines to the wrong way of denying all social rules and going against basic ethics. In 1895, Wilde lost his lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry, and he was imprisoned for gross indecency. The two years he served his sentence in Pentonville Prison were a turning point in his thoughts and writing. It was there, for the first time, that he saw the tragedy of human life under capitalist reality. It was in prison that he wrote a unique confession, De Profundis.46

Readers in the early 1980s, who were still living with the effects of the Cultural

Revolution, however, needed to be reminded of what exactly Wilde’s “hedonism” was, what

“social rules” and “basic ethics” he was against, the focus of the lawsuit, or what made his confession “unique”—something once familiar to Chinese readers in the first half of the twentieth-century, when Wilde was a great inspiration for Chinese intellectuals. With no word explicitly mentioning the nature of Wilde’s “wrong way,” Wilde’s homosexuality was left in

45 Zhao Luorui 赵萝蕤, Introduction to Huiteman sanwen xuan 惠特曼散文选 [Selection from Whitman: Prose],

trans., Zhang Yujiu 张禹九, (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe 湖南人民出版社, 1986), 6. 46 Rong Rude 荣如德, trans., Taolian gelei de huaxiang 道连·格雷的画像 [Picture of Dorian Gray], (Beijing: Waiguo wenxue chubanshe 外国文学出版社, 1982), iv.

ambiguity, and the word “homosexuality” escaped the mention of the translator. The other translations in the 1980s also mentioned nothing about Wilde’s sexuality.

Some other translations were even more unduly reticent on the writer’s personal life and the homosexuality in the work. Gide’s Les faux-monnayeurs (Weibi zhizaozhe, 伪币制造者), for example, was published in 1983 as a bare translation, with no introduction or afterword from the translator, Sheng Chenghua (盛澄华). Sheng, however, was a scholar and translator dedicated to

Gide, who also happened to be a correspondent of Gide himself from the time of Sheng’s studies in Paris in the 1930s.

Translations of works with homoeroticism continued to increase. By the mid-1990s,

Joyce, Proust, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, and

Yukio Mishima were translated or retranslated into Chinese. Very often the critics and introducers remotely commented on homosexuality in these works, and readers were warned against the corrupting foreign lifestyle of the writers. However, such gestures should also be read as addressing the authorities, in order to protect the translators themselves or justify the publication. By employing ambiguous tactics to thaw the negative ambiguity, these works desensitized the discursive field of literature. Accumulated, they provided precedents to dispel the linguistic impossibility of writing about homosexuality for native writers. By the mid-1990s, as more and more homoerotic works were translated into Chinese, the topic of homosexuality became less sensitive. Introductions to new translations or reprints in 1990s no longer left the sexuality and homoeroticism of these works unmentioned. The personal lives of Whitman,

Wilde and Gide, were now mentioned in the introduction to their work or discussed in public, and the homosexuality in their works was no longer covered up.

A telling case was the publication of Pai Hsien-yung’s (白先勇, 1938-) Niezi (孽子,

Prodigal Sons).47 Serialized in the Taiwanese periodical Modern Literature (現代文學, Xiandai wenxue) from 1977 to 1978, Crystal Boys is probably the most influential homoeroticism- themed novel written in Chinese after May Fourth. The novel’s first publication in the People’s

Republic was in 1987 by Beifang wenyi chubanshe (北方文艺出版社, Northern Literature and

Arts Publication House). One year later, it was published again by Renmin wenxue chubanshe (

人民文学出版社, People’s Literature Publishing House). The novel was received silently, with no comments from literary critics, perhaps due to the sensitivity of the topic. Yet the influence of Crystal Boys was immeasurable: many men read the book, and when the internet arrived,

Crystal Boys, as we will discuss in later chapters, became a great inspiration for many online gay narratives.

Mainstream literature, however, remained silent on the topic. It was a few pioneering female writers who first challenged the resounding silence on homosexuality. Lin Bai (林白) and Chen Ran (陈染) are the most provocative female writers to convey female homoeroticism in narratives. Lin Bai’s One Person’s War (yigeren de zhanzheng, 一个人的战争, 1991) and

Chen Ran’s Private Life (siren shenghuo, 私人生活, 1996) are both autobiographical, with direct depictions of homoeroticism. Homoeroticism also has a consistent presence in both Lin and

Chen’s early works. Lin and Chen attracted both moralist censure as well as welcoming

47 English transation of the book is titled “Crystal Boys,” referring to the slang for men who have sex with men, “boli” (玻璃, glass). A literary translation of the title, however, would be “Sinful Sons,” or “Prodigal Sons.” For the English translation, see Howard Goldblatt, trans, Crystal Boys: A Novel, (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989).

comments. Critics in China, however, as Sang points out, shunned the lesbianism in Lin and

Chen’s works by treating it arrogantly as “female consciousness,” or protectively, as

“sisterhood.” While Chen and Lin’s works are remarkably different in their unique ways of representing and constructing lesbianism and criticizing hierarchical gender norms, they both opened up discursive space for female homosexuality, at least for private readers. 48

Another factor that helped bring homosexuality into mainstream literature was the rise of avant-garde fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A departure from the ideology-ridden mainstream literature extending from Mao’s era, avant-garde fiction experimented with new narrative techniques, unconventional themes and marginal characters that were alien to the dogmas prescribed by China’s literary production system. In addition, avant-garde literature also redefined, at least partly, the relations of the author, the critic, and the reader. It distanced the author from the work, the works from the interpretation, and by unsettling the readers from conventional literary language and narrative technologies, it also stretched the readers away from their familiar discursive background. After avant-garde fiction made mainstream literature seem outdated and unsettled literary normalcy, homosexuality became less sensitive for literary language. Homosexuality could enter literature as a constituent of the abnormal.

These three major factors, the introduction of foreign homosexual literature, female writers’ breach of taboos on the topic, and the avant-garde literature, helped desensitize the theme of homosexuality in mainstream Chinese literature. The introduction of academic works also helped to advance discourse on homosexuality. In the 1990s, a handful of established male

48 Sang, Emerging Lesbian, 27, 175-222.

mainstream writers, once secured in their status in the officially sponsored literary system, could afford to incorporate homoerotic themes in their works.

The first and, perhaps, also the most influential mainland Chinese male homoerotic work is “East Palace, West Palace” (东宫西宫, donggong xigong, 1992) by Wang Xiaobo, one of the writers of Their World. “East Palace, West Palace” is a sadomasochistic story of the relationship between a policeman, Xiao Shi, and a homosexual man, Ah-Lan. The main story, however, is intermingled with Ah-Lan’s confession of his past in which he recounts his wife’s story and his own homosexual experiences. To make the novella even more complex, the main story is paralleled by a story in a book written by Ah-Lan. In the parallel story, which is set in an unspecified ancient time, a female thief is arrested by a policeman, who rapes her and abuses her as a slave.

Notwithstanding its pioneering significance, “East Palace, West Palace” is a story told from the perspective of a heterosexual male and the construction of homosexuality in the story is an operation of heterosexual concepts of masculinity and femininity. Ah-Lan is conceived as a combination of a female spirit and a male body, a stereotypical heterosexual conceptualization of homosexuality. Xiao Shi’s final yielding to Ah-Lan, in the meantime, is more like the operation of the traditional Chinese heterosexual concept of jiannanzuonü (将男作女, use the man as a woman). In addition, the writer seems to need the embedded heterosexual story as a drive to complete the main story.

Soon after Wang Xiaobo’s breakthrough, other mainstream writers started to touch on the theme of homosexuality, such as Zhou Daxin’s (周大新) novella, Yinshi (Silver Jewelry, 银饰,

1993). Set in a prefectural city in the last years of dynastic China, the main story is a tragic romance between a gentlewoman, Yulan, and a young silver jeweller that lead to their death in the hands of patriarchal authority. Yulan’s husband, Wu, strongly desires to become a woman and is attracted to men. He finds sexual gratification from wearing his wife’s jewelry and blackmails her to visit the jeweller’s store to make more silver jewelry. At the end of the story,

Wu is found dead in front of Yulan’s tomb, fully dressed as a woman and adorned with all the jewellery he collected. Zhou perhaps did not intend to write a homoerotic story at all, but his story seems to be an exemplary of mainstream male writers’ rendition of male homosexual figures: they must remain secondary, and their story must appear only in negativity. In addition, affirming Wang Xiaobo’s approach, there must be a safe distance to keep the author from the homosexual characters.

A more important writer is Su Tong (苏童), who shows a persistent interest in homoerotic themes. A member of the avant-garde literary scene, Su Tong is known for his new historical style. He interweaves homoerotic romance into many of his major works such as Qiqie chengqun (Raise the Red Lantern,妻妾成群, 1989), Mi (Rice, 米, 1991), Wode diwang shengya

(My Life as Emperor, 我的帝王生涯, 1992), and Suiwa (Broken Tiles, 碎瓦, 1998). Though homoeroticism has been persistent in Su Tong’s fiction, it seems that his long engagement with the topic leads him to distance himself even further than Wang and Zhou: The characters with homosexual proclivities are secondary to the main plot, or if they are a major character, homosexuality is marginalized as an insignificant component of their personality. In addition, these characters are all deeply flawed, being presented as morally degenerate or mentally handicapped, to prevent sympathy from the reader. Homosexual genital sex has never been

directly presented in his fiction. Furthermore, Su Tong’s homoerotic stories are typically set in an unspecific past, and his novels are usually narrated by an enlarged voice standing in between the author and the reader, keeping the author away from the story. Su himself has so far avoided speaking about the homosexuality in his works.49 All these elements, plus the critics and the media’s deliberate evasion of the sensitive topic mean that discussion of homosexuality in Su

Tong’s works up to this date has been oblique among critics and readers.

Other mainstream writers who have published tangential works on the topic of homosexuality include Yu Hua (余华) and Han Shaogong (韩少功). In Cries in the Drizzle (zai xiyu zhong fuhan, 在细雨中呼喊, 1990), Yu Hua writes about a deep attachment between two teenage friends that is almost romantic and physical. Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao

(maqiao cidian, 马桥词典) includes an anecdote about two villagers in the village of Maqiao, whose close relationship attracts villagers’ attention and turns out to be sexual. Another mainstream writer, Beicun (北村), published a homoerotic novel entitled boli (Glass, 玻璃,

2003), which is an unequivocal reference to the Chinese slang for homosexuals, yet the complicated friendship between the two protagonists never consummates with genital sex, and the protagonists seem to struggle between homoeroticism and close friendship, leaving the whole novel dubious.

49 In a rare case, Su Tong was asked about homosexuality in his work by a reader: “Mr. Su Tong, in many fantastic works such as “Nazhongren” (那种人, That kind of man), and “Siyang gongji de ren” (饲养公鸡的人, The man who raises cocks), you vaguely depicted or alluded to homosexuality. What’s your opinion on homosexuality?” Su Tong answered: “I think it’s alright. It’s a matter of sexual orientation” (这个看法可能没什么，这是一个性取向的问题, zhege kanfa keneng meishenme, zheshi yige xingquxiang de wenti). “zhuming zuojia Su Tong liaotian shilu”, (著名作家苏童聊天实录, Record of a chat with well-known writer Su Tong), July 23, 2003, http://channel.eastday.com/epublish/gb/paper279/13/class027900015/hwz1207659.htm, accessed July 11, 2013.

In sum, homosexuality in male mainstream writers’ works has been marginalized as tangential to heterosexuality. The characters with same-sex desire are kept secondary and their stories only appear as anti-stories. Avant-garde narrative techniques and language, in addition, are very often employed as a device to keep the author at a safe distance from homosexuality.

After the inclusion of homoeroticism in the 1990s, narratives of male homosexuality in mainstream literature have seemed to reach a plateau. No direct and sincere representation of homosexuality has been written, let alone one that challenges existing male sexuality, like Lin

Bai and Chen Ran boldly did with female sexuality.

Thus mainstream male writers’ representation of homosexuality is paradoxical: on the one hand, they brought the topic of homosexuality into the visibility of the literary discourse field and converted it from non-story to negative story; on the other hand, the heterosexual perspective they adopted also reproduces and reinforces stereotypes about homosexuality and at the same time reinforces heterosexuality. Reading from a lenient queer perspective might exalt the tactics these mainstream writers used to breach the heavily censored discursive field. But simultaneously, mainstream male writers’ deliberate shunning of authenticity and sincerity on the topic of homosexuality should be read as homophobia.

Besides the mainstream writers mentioned above, the only two other self-identified gay male writers, Cui Zi’en (崔子恩) and Tong Ge (童戈) also published explicit gay male narratives in 1997 in Hong Kong, on the eve of the rise of gay narratives online in PRC. These two writers, however, heralded and participated in cyber gay writing as they found most of their readers in

China via the internet, and they remained active online. Tong Ge’s works, especially, address

the major themes shared by gay narratives, and thus we will discuss his works in Chapter 5, where we examine themes of gay narratives.

1.7 Narratives and Lives before the Reform and Opening

The third mode of gay signification is the positive accommodation of homosexuality in same-sex friendly academic work, social surveys, and magazines. This mode, appearing sporadically in the 1980s, was boosted by Li Yinhe and Wang Xiaobo’s pioneer survey, Their

World: A Probe into Male Homosexual Colonies (tamende shijie: tongxinglian qunluo toushi, 他

们的世界：男同性恋群落透视, 1992). Due to the limits of the survey’s methodology, the work’s academic value is, as Sang contends, difficult to assess. The value of the survey, however, lies in its social value as an articulation of homosexuality in China in a positive voice against a seemingly impenetrable ambiguity, despite the employment of a defensive othering gesture. The inclusion of stories in the survey, probably not unintentionally, reflected the urge to tell stories discussed previously.

A few bodies of writing are especially important sources of ordinary people’s lives:

Pengyou Tongxin (Friends correspondence, 朋友通信, generally referred to as PYTX in this work) was a semi-official bimonthly magazine founded by Zhang Beichuan (张北川). Posted to readers free of charge from 1997 to 2008, it also had an online edition on its now defunct website. PYTX was the most influential platform shared by China’s homosexual activists and ordinary readers in China’s history. Its components were consistent: the section “shengming”

(life, 生命) carried writings by tongzhi writers invited by Zhang’s editorial team, and the section

“duzhe laixin” (letters from readers, 读者来信) posted ordinary reader’s letters sent to the

editors. Contents in these two sections provided direct resources for tongzhi life in China.

Another magazine, Taohong Man Tianxia (A World Suffused with Pink, 桃红满天下, thereafter

TMT in this thesis), was an online biweekly magazine edited by an overseas Chinese gay and lesbian organization, Beimei huaren xingbie yu xingqingxiang yanjiuhui (北美华人性别与性倾

向研究会, Chinese Society for the Study of Sexual Minorities, CSSSM). Circulated from 1997 to 2000, TMT focused on introducing Western academic studies on homosexuality to men in

China. Its sections Duzhe laixin (Readers’ letters, 读者来信) and Tongren bilin (Forest of

Tongzhi Pens, 同人笔林) also carried writings from ordinary men desiring men and invited writers.

From these materials, we will survey homosexual life and narratives before the internet.

The purposes of doing so: First, we will examine if there was a gay identity in pre-internet

China, and if so, its reach and condition. Second, by examining the narratives of this period, we will reconstruct something of the field of story that was taking shape around a small number of men desiring men. We must bear in mind, however, that the memories of the subculture we will be delineating come only from a few men. Most men desiring men, we need to repeatedly emphasize, were living under a cloud of ambiguity with little connection with other men. The stories we quoted at the beginning of this chapter were most like lived by most men of the time.

Interviews with older men who experienced the first thirty years of the Communist regime by Tong Ge reveal a dark age when the ambiguity was intensified. Before 1966, the year

Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, although political circumstances became increasingly stringent, sexual issues, including extramarital sexual relations and same- sex relations, were generally treated as shenghuo zuofen wenti (生活作风问题, “problems of

lifestyle”). Most men desiring men had already restrained their same-sex conduct under the new regime, and “almost no one talked about male-male sexual relations.”50 Still, punishment of sodomy was severe, ranging from years of imprisonment to death. 51 Under increasing fear, connection with other men on a larger scale was impossible. Same-sex sexual relations, if possible at all, “became secret sexual relations between individuals.” 52 Instead of meeting men out in society, the few men who still engaged in same-sex relations had to find sex partners by fazan (recruiting, 发展) men within their proximity:

The sexual partners they recruited were mostly from close classmates, colleagues, fellow soldiers, neighbours, relatives, or even cousins. Some men were themselves recruited by men around themselves, for example, one’s boss or teacher. In this process, some might make connections with men recruited by others.53

It is difficult to determine what proportion of men could engage in sexual relations in this way, given the scantiness of records. Almost all men, on the other hand, had to live up to “the single uniform sexuality” coming only with heterosexual marriage, as Harriet Evans calls it. 54

Once the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, according to Tong Ge, the harshness against same- sex behaviours culminated, and even secret individual liaisons became impossible, since the great risk of exposure isolated men, at least sexually, into an atomized status. Even the few men who were active before the Cultural Revolution “almost completely abstained from

50 Tong Ge 童戈, “Tongzhi shequ: xingcheng beijing ji duozhong xingshi huodong de fazhan” [同志社区：形成背景及多种形式活动的发展 [The Gay Community: The Background of Its Foundation and the Development of Various Forms of Activities], in Zhongguo tongzhi renqun shengtai baogao 中国同志人群生态报告 [An Ecological Report on the Chinese Homosexual Population], Vol. I, ed., Tong Ge et al, (Beijing: Beijing ji’ande zixun zhongxin 北京纪安德咨询中心, 2008), 82. 51 Ibid.

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 82-83. 54 Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 112, 218.

[homo]sexual activities.” 55 Under extreme policing, social surveillance, and internalized terror, stories about homosexuality were rarely heard by common people; if they still managed to surface, however, they would directly invoke the utmost harshness, and the punishment ranged from extreme humiliation to death. Li Yinhe describes the cruelty against homosexuals during this period:

Even people with no problem would be persecuted without needing a reason, not to mention a sexual orientation that was not understood by ordinary people. During that period, all exposed homosexuals would receive cruel treatment. Light punishment included denunciation and criminal sentencing. Harsh punishment could be being beaten to death.56

The memories of men who lived through the Cultural Revolution interviewed by Tong

Ge present a bleak picture. In one case in Beijing, a middle school art teacher turned in for male- male sexual conduct was publically humiliated and beaten by the red guards, who then filled his mouth with excrement and urine. The art teacher committed suicide the night after the humiliation. In another case in Tianjin, a barber was exposed. After public humiliation, he was tied up naked and confined in a display window for three days and two nights. The man soon killed himself. In yet another case in Tianjin, a man whose same-sex sexual conduct was made known was denounced as a “hooligan and instigator advocating bourgeois lifestyle.” He was forced to parade through the street wearing rabbit ears and with a rabbit tail tied to underwear, since tuzi (rabbit, 兔子) is slang in north China for men who have sex with men, while being

55 Tong Ge, “Tongzhi shequ: xingcheng beijing ji duozhong xingshi huodong de fazhan” [同志社区：形成背景及多种形式活动的发展 [The Gay Community: The Background of Its Foundation and the Development of Various Forms of Activities], 84. 56 Li Yinhe 李银河, Tongxinglian yawenhua 同性恋亚文化[Homosexual Subculture], (Beijing: Jinri zhongguo

chubanshe 今日中国出版社, 1998), 381-82.

beaten and publicly humiliated by the red guards and bystanders. After the parade, this man ended his life.57

Li Yinhe also recorded some stories remembering that time. One was told by Y, a promising youth during the Cultural Revolution, who lived an unfortunate life after his sexual proclivities were made known. Y’s experience can testify how the ambiguity against homosexuality, if provoked, would reveal its animosity and was capable of mobilizing all social, political, cultural, and mental means that were linked within an invisible web:

The meeting for the trial went with one [speaker] after another. Within and without the party, in my group, and workshop, wise old masters enjoined me with principles, and informed me of the severe consequences; the comrades of my age usually had the harshest words; among them was my best friend, who would not even eat lunch with me at the same table in order to prove their own innocence. From then on, I had to do the hardiest and dirtiest jobs for the group. I really wanted to die at that time. My self- criticism was regularly posted in the workshop. Every behaviour of mine, as trivial as a joke I made, would be known to the whole workshop. There was always someone to report me. 58

Yet Y still felt fortunate when he compared himself to a friend, who “was the secretary of the Youth League of his factory, a model worker, but just because one of his friends confessed his name after being caught, he was expelled by his factory and got five years in prison.” 59

Most men desiring men took great care not to be in Y’s position, but virtually every one of them might have experienced something of the ordeals of Y. Many who grew up in these dark decades had to spend their childhood and youth in an almost total void of knowledge of

57 Tong Ge, “Tongzhi shequ: xingcheng beijing ji duozhong xingshi huodong de fazhan” [同志社区：形成背景及多种形式活动的发展 [The Gay Community: The Background of Its Foundation and the Development of Various Forms of Activities], 84. 58 Li Yinhe, Tongxinglian yawenhua 同性恋亚文化[Homosexual Subculture], 399. 59 Ibid. pp. 401-402.

homosexuality, an epistemological factor derived from the ambiguity. One of them, A man categorized as homosexual (Yige bei naru tongxinglian de ren, 一个被纳入同性恋的人,), recounts his youth during the Cultural Revolution in a letter to Pengyou Tongxin (Friend

Correspondence):

I was in my twenties during the Cultural Revolution. I often read words such as “jijianfan” (bugger, 鸡奸犯), “xijingfan” (semen sucker, 吸精犯), “weixie ertong” (child molester, 猥亵儿童), and so on, on the bulletin board of the Public Security Bureau. Later on I gradually learnt that those words referred to homosexuals. Of course, I also realized that I myself also belonged to this type of people. My confusion became hopeless. 60

His experience was by no means a unique case. GS, an older man who was born in

1946,61 thus spending the entirety of his youth in the dark age, also wrote to Pengyou Tongxin to recount a life filled with great agony:

I’m 58 this year. In the last few decades, I have lived my life in solitude and loneliness. There was no person around to whom I could speak words from the bottom of my heart. I have had to live my life under a masquerade, always repressing my own unhealthy thoughts… After so many years, I have developed hypertension and depression. [I feel] intangible agony, sadness, endless helpless, lost, and disconsolate. There is no smile on my face. I have lived a life of a walking death. What is the meaning of living such a miserable life? 62

Some men might be able to manage a life with less agony than GS. Zhang Guowei (张国

威), for example, a retired colonel and military doctor who chose to publish his memoir in

Pengyou Tongxin under his real name, lived his life with less pain by repressing his desire for men and fulfilling social obligations like a model citizen. His life story was told largely in the

60 Yige bei naru tongxinglian de ren 一个被纳入同性恋的人 [A man categorized as homosexual], in “Naxie bu weirenzhi de shengyin” 那些不为人知的声音 [Those unheard voices], PYTX Vol. 48, 2005.

61 GS states that he was 58 when he wrote the following letter to PYTX in 2001. 62 GS, “Pengyou shiwo gaibian” 朋友使我改变 [Friend changed me], PYTX, vol. 19&20, 2001.

Party’s language: “[I was] born into the old society, grew up under the red flag together with the

People’s Republic, experienced Mao Zedong’s era, Deng Xiaoping’s era of reform and opening, and now I’m stepping into the most splendid times of history.”63 A loyal Party member, a model worker, hard-working, attentive to housework, and kind to children, he was almost a model husband, except for his romantic life with his wife, which, luckily, was not a great problem for him thanks to the family visiting system in the military that granted him 15 days per year to visit his family and spend time with his wife.

As to the sexual life with my wife, I didn’t like it. However, in order to fulfill my obligation as a husband, I always tried my best to satisfy my wife’s sexual needs. There was sexual arousal and orgasm when we came together, but there had never been the passion of love. Deep in my heart, I longed to make love with men I was attracted to. Whenever I saw a man I liked, I had the impulse of embracing and kissing him. … I had very little intimacy [with men], and only occasionally masturbated for other men, but the love for men was never quenched.”64

The lives of Y, “A man categorized as homosexual,” GS, and Zhang likely reflect the experience of most men during these dark years. The actual or potential costs of fulfilment of same-sex desire were simply too great to risk. As a result, many had little or no chance to actualize their desire. Their life, if told, would be like that of most men, an unfolding of the script of childhood, school, work, marriage, birth of children, and in the end, retirement and old age. Desire for men, coming along with unspeakable fear, would have been remote and vague impulses that found no narrative, associated only with an inextricable and formless melancholy.

63 Zhang Guowei 张国威, “Wode tongxing’ai yu qixing’ai shenghuo qinli yu fansi” 我的同性爱与异性爱生活亲历与反思 [My homosexual and heterosexual life experiences and reflection], PYTX, vol. 39 (2003).

64 Ibid.

The general austerity against homosexuality could not maintain its totality at all times and all places, however. Even during the darkest time, political surveillance and the application of the law were uneven, and not all men repressed their desire for men. At times, circumstances might arise so that sexual contact with other men could be possible, or even permissible. In some cases, social mobility inadvertently created by great political movements generated chances for men to free themselves from the constraints limiting their desire. The Great Linkup

(da chualian, 大串联) during the Cultural Revolution, by providing young men chances to travel to other cities to attend revolutionary struggles for free, also generated anonymity for men to have sexual encounters with other men without endangering one’s political standing. The movement of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Village (shangshan xiaxiang,上山下乡) mobilized youth in the city to go to the countryside and concentrated them in collective same-sex living situations. Far away from well-organized surveillance in the city, young men found more opportunity to engage with others. As Tong Ge recalls:

After I went down to the countryside, I not only had sexual relationship with three or four very good partners, but also came across quite a few casual encounters in which the man straightforwardly asked for anal penetration. In 1974, I went to Great Xing’an Range with peasant workers to build a defence road as a doctor. There were 200 peasant workers living in a big tent, and they were all lads around 25. There was a lot of homosexual activity. 65

In the countryside, a folk culture at a distance from the urban political whirlpools sometimes allowed men to engage with each other sexually. In Han Shaogong’s novel, A

Dictionary of Maqiao, there is an anecdote about two villagers during the Cultural Revolution,

65 Tong Ge (童戈), “Kaifang womende xintai: zai dalian nannan xingjiechuzhe AIDS ganyu peixunban de yanjiang (开放我们的心态：在大连男男性接触者 AIDS 干预培训班的演讲, Opening up out mind: a speech at training class AIDS intervention in men who have sex with men in Dalian), PYTX Vol. 44, 2005.

whose intimate relationship turns out to have involved “sticking each other’s bottoms.” One of these two men, “Luo Bo” (uncle Luo, 罗伯), is a “honghua diedie” (red-flower daddy, 红花爹爹

), a term the local Hunan folklore uses to call men who stay unmarried throughout their life and only engage in sexual acts with men. “Maqiao people didn’t concern themselves too much about such things. There were some men in Zhangjia District, and also some red-flower daddies and red-flower uncles in neighboring village who got up to similar stuff—it wasn’t that uncommon.”

Yet it must be noted: all these stories that appeared in print were told by only a few men after the publication of Li and Wang’s Their World. As narratives, they were told, read, and circulated after the 1990s. When these experiences were lived, they were lived without the telling of the story. Thus while these stories project back to their times, those times were themselves concealed in an ambiguity, with little or no stories for the men living in them. Future studies, supported by new materials, might come up with more details or even a different picture, but at the moment, it seems that lives in those decades were most likely lived without

“simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity of the other self’s consciousness with my own,” or a scorching sense of the lack of it.

1.8 Post-Cultural Revolution Same-Sex Subculture: Fisheries and Legitimate Bachelors

Encounters in the countryside like Tong Ge’s, however, were contingent on many factors and probably came with a great deal of happenstance. Frequent connection more likely

66 Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, trans. Julia Lovell, (New York: Columbia University Press, Dial Press, 2003), 212.

happened in the city when conditions arose. After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the dark age for men desiring men came to a close. In the wake of the market economy, some men started to go out to encounter each other. By the late 1980s, urban public venues such as public toilets, bathhouses, and parks were appropriated for social and sexual encounters. From these venues, as Li Yinhe and Wang Xiaobo suggests, a “homosexual subculture” started to take form in metropolitan centres such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Nanjing, where large population ensured a sufficient number of active men desiring men.67 Li and Wang’s survey, based on 83 cases gathered from Beijing, however, must be taken with qualification. The survey likely reflects a subculture participated in by only a very small number of men. While the groundbreaking nature of the study cannot be denied, a wider view came with new surveys and materials emerging from Pengyou Tongxin and, later, the internet. Here the purpose of discussing this subculture is to evaluate its influence, or in terms of the focus of this work, whether it led to the formation of a gay identity and collectivity.

This subculture was to a great degree attached to the venues where men met, hence the term “‘fishery’ subculture”. The venues appropriated from public space had various names in men’s slang: for example, they were called “jidi” (基地, the base), “waimian” (外面,the outside), or “dian” (点, the spot) by gay men in Beijing and “gongsi” (公司, the company) in Shanghai.

Most commonly, they were called “yuchang” (渔场, the fishery), following the Hong Kong slang

67 Li Yinhe 李银河 and Wang Xiaobo 王小波, Tamende shijie: tongxinglian qunluo toushi 他们的世界：男同性恋群落透视 [Their World: A Probe into Male Homosexual Colonies], (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe 山西人民出版社, 1992), 151.

imported in the 1990s.68 Subject to police raids, changes in urban planning or social vicissitudes, many venues could only survive for a period of time. Yet some venues withstood these rough decades and maintained a continuous homosexual subculture, especially after the 1980s. An older man in his 70s recalled in 2005, for example, that “there is a green strip in the centre of

Shanghai. Homosexuals called it ‘Little Garden,’ and the locale’s history as a homosexual venue can be traced back to the years before the 1950s.” 69 In Beijing, such venues also existed after

1949. Even during the Cultural Revolution, a few venues remained active.70

According to Daniu (大牛), a man who frequented these venues in Beijing in the 1990s, a few characteristics would help to make a public space a venue: “Jidi must be located in thickly populated districts, for only in these districts would tongzhi show up in big numbers… [Bases] must have woods (so it has good blockage), be relatively out of the main way (so it has some safety), and have a toilet (easy to do the business, or put out feelers).” 71 A-Qing (阿清), a passionate advocator of the “fisheries” who later founded a website, “Splendid is Tonight’s Star”

(jinye xingguang canlan, 今夜星光灿烂), hosting the most detailed firsthand guide to Beijing’s venues, offers a detailed accounts about how two types of public space favoured by men were converted into venues for same-sex encounters:

There were two types: the bathhouse and the public toilet.

68 Da Niu 大牛, “Mizhilin, jidi, shijibing” 密枝林·基地·世纪病 [Thick bush, base, and sickness of the century], PYTX 42, 2004. 69 Lanse Shuijin 蓝色水晶, “Lun fuzao: guanyu tongxinglian renqun de xinli tezheng” 论浮躁——关于同性恋人群的心理特征 [On impetuousness: a psychological characteristic of homosexual people], PYTX, vol. 44, 2005. 70 A-Qing, “Shiyunian qinli Beijing tongzhi changsuo bianqian” (十余年亲历北京同志场所变迁, First-hand experience of the changes of Beijing tongzhi avenues), PYTX, vol. 42, 2004.

71 Da Niu 大牛, “Mizhilin, jidi, shijibing” 密枝林·基地·世纪病 [Thick bush, base, and sickness of the century].

Why did tongzhi venues form in those two types of places?

At that time most bathhouses had a big pool for bathing. If you sat in the pool, the water went up to your neck. The water was not clear because of the disinfectant and tonic added to it. This gave some guys opportunities to manipulate under the water. Men of the kind would masturbate or “footbate” each other. Some past master could even have anal intercourse under the water without turning an eyelash. If one was not sure if a customer was tongzhi, one might probe or make a pass with the hand or the foot. Many tongzhi discovered the venue with these underwater movements (this was the case for myself). In time, some bathhouses with convenient transportation and an agreeable environment, such as Xingjiekou Bathhouse, Xisi Bathhouse, Xidan Bathhouse, and Qinghua Pool in Wangfujing, and so on, became regular tongzhi venue, and tongzhi increased there. These bathhouses have been there for ages. Their history could easily be more than a hundred years. Perhaps the first tongzhi soldiers who messed about with each other there had queues. 72

A-Qing continues to offer a guide to public toilets, quoted earlier when we discussed toilet literature. He also lists several locations under that category. According to him, fisheries have been prosperous since the mid-1980s and have expanded since then. Li Yinhe counted 55 venues in Beijing, when Their World was expanded and published under the title Homosexual

Subculture in 1997. Many big cities, according to some of Li’s interviewees, also hosted a number of venues. 73 Tong Ge also describes same-sex venues in Tianjin. 74 As the size and number of fisheries grew, a same-sex subculture centred around “fisheries” also took shape in the 1980s and 1990s.

Men’s accounts gathered in Pengyou Tongxin and websites added more details to a same- sex subculture centred on the “fisheries” in the city. Men visited fisheries to find sex partners

72 A-Qing, “Shiyunian qinli Beijing tongzhi changsuo bianqian” (十余年亲历北京同志场所变迁, First-hand experience of the changes of Beijing tongzhi avenues). 73 Li Yinhe, Homosexual Subculture. p. 253. 74 Tong Ge, “Tongzhi shequ: xingcheng beijing ji duozhong xingshi huodong de fazhan” [同志社区：形成背景及多种形式活动的发展 [The Gay Community: The Background of Its Foundation and the Development of Various Forms of Activities], 84.

and have sex there. Many men, however, frequented “fisheries” for more than sexual purposes.

They went there to socialize, update information and knowledge in the circle, exchange stories, or just be among one’s own kind, and by doing so, they affixed these venues with same-sex desire. Circulated knowledge also connected various “fisheries” to form a larger network, either within a city, or even nationwide. For men visiting from other cities, a “fishery” was also a convenient place to gather knowledge about the new city. Once one “fishery” in the city was found, local men would provide an oral map for the many others the city had to offer. In many senses, “fisheries” were the carriers of the male same-sex subculture.

Encounter with a “fishery” would be a life-changing event for a man in the 1980s and

1990s. A-Qing’s visit to a famous Beijing venue, Xiyuan, happening by sheer luck in the early

1980s, took him to a whole new world, and with it, a new self:

I still remember how shocked I was when I saw Xiyuan for the first time. In the wood, some guys were meandering alone, some chatting in couples, some chatting and laughing in a circle. All of these made up another world in the darkness in Beijing. A sidewalk separated two worlds. On the other side were hurried pedestrians, for whom the night represented the end of the day and they were going home in weariness. On this side, this was a hot land. For us, the night was the beginning of a happy day. We went out with our longings, and we came together to enjoy our life.

I told myself: “This is the place I will come to forever. I will remember this place, this starry night, forever.” 75

After that, A-Qing passionately devoted his nights to Beijing’s fisheries and led a life centred around sex. Starting from one place, A-Qing extended his map to the whole city. From public toilets and bathhouses, that map extended to parks, bars, saunas, street gardens, and

75 A-Qing, “Shiyunian qinli Beijing tongzhi changsuo bianqian” (十余年亲历北京同志场所变迁, First-hand experience of the changes of Beijing tongzhi avenues).

pedestrian bridges. Various fisheries formed a network of desire. A whole city like Beijing became a great erotic venue that mapped men’s desire. This was, indeed, how A-Qing, viewed

Beijing:

Ever since, I was a frequent visitor to Xiyuan. In Xiyuan I was also informed of Liupukang, Dongdan, Baishiqiao, Baijiazhuang, and many other outdoor venues. I went to bathhouses and parks in turn. Back then I was young and strong, my desire was at its strongest time. Every day I was anticipating sunset. During that period, Beijing for me was a busy metropolis during the day. At night, Beijing was a huge great gay venue, its various parts connected by roads.76

Such a map of desire was not limited within the city. On a much wider scale, fisheries throughout the whole country could reach each other to form a national network, at least for a very few. A man, J, tells of an unusual adventure he had around 1991.77 J’s tour took two months to finish, included a dozen cities of different sizes along a main railway, from provincial capital cities, to prefectural cities, to county cities, and he found men at same-sex venues with no difficulty in most of the cities he visited. 78

Li Yinhe confirms the existence of a homosexual subculture in China in the 1990s:

“There are homosexual social groups in many cities nationwide. …Communication between homosexuals not only exists, but exists on a considerable scale.” 79 This is an assertion begging for qualification for its range, influence, and participation. We will discuss Li Yinhe’s and

76 Ibid. 77 Li Yinhe did not specify the date of J’s tour, but since the same chapter appeared in Their World, and Li and Wang’s research was conducted between 1989 and 1991 (Tongxinglian yawenhua, p. 24), we can then deduce that J’s tour happened around 1991. 78 Li Yinhe, Tongxinglian yawenhua, 285-302.

79 Ibid., 301.

others’ collective existence together at the end of this section. For now I will keep to discussion of the fishery subculture on an urban scale.

The stories gathered in PYTX, sociological surveys, and social reports have confirmed a pattern of homosexual life based on the fishery subculture that emerged in cities in the 1980s and stabilized later. Men came to share a set of behavioural patterns, beliefs, signification of sexuality, lifestyles, and narratives. One characteristic of the fishery homosexual subculture is that it was incorporated into a universal heterosexual lifestyle. Despite more sexual encounters and even romantic engagements offered by the newly gained social space, social demands for heterosexual marriage in the 1980s and the 1990s had not alleviated significantly compared to earlier times. Under great social pressure, almost all men would eventually form a heterosexual family.80 Once encumbered by heterosexual marriage, increased social obligations and surveillance would leave little room for one to live a homosexual lifestyle. The fishery circle, in addition, also held prejudices against married and aged men. If these men went out at all, they would take a marginalized position and be subject to derision or ignorance.

Under this pattern, the freedom of living out one’s homosexual desire, by and large, was relegated to bachelorhood. Once mature enough to claim independence from one’s parents, some men could stash away a private life outside of the parental family. The freedom and

80 For example, see Li Yinhe, Tongxinglian yawenhua, Lisa Rofel, Desiring China, Chou Wah-shan, Tongzhi, Xiaomingxiong, Zhongguo tongxing’ai shilu, Wan Yanhai. “Becoming a gay activist in China.” For sociological surveys of the rate of marriage among men identifying themselves as homosexual or gay, Zhang Beichuan’s survey conducted in 1998 shows that 70-80% of homosexual/bisexual men would get married (Zhang Beichuan et al, “Dui nan-nan xingjiechuzhe de aizibing ganyu,” 对男男性接触者的艾滋病干预 [Intervention AIDS transmission among male-male sexual contactors], in PYTX, vol. 17. Liu Dalin and Lu Longguan’s survey, conducted in 1994, shows that 90% of men desiring men would marry a women (Liu and Lu: Zhongguo tongxinglian yanjiu, 145).

independence granted to young adult men were meant for heterosexual courtship or building a social or professional background; one could, however, appropriate them for frequenting fisheries or spending time with men. This time of “playing around,” however, could not last forever. Men were expected to get married in their mid- or late 20s. Even though the age of marriage had been increasing since the 1980s, the age of 30 was still significant as it was when social pressure increased greatly and one could start to feel stigma if remained unmarried. If one was still single by one’s mid- or late 30s, social pressure increased to an unbearable level.

Serious heterosexual courtship or marriage usually meant the end of one’s homosexual lifestyle.

After getting married, one would stop or greatly reduce contact with other men, because of domestic and social encumbrances, as well as rejection from the fishery circle, or decrease of attraction as one aged. As a result, unmarried young men constituted the core of the active same- sex population.

I call the window period between the beginning of adulthood and marriage for men desiring men to pursue their homosexual desire legitimate bachelorhood. This window defined individual lifestyle as well as the fishery subculture. Same-sex desire, embedded in legitimate bachelorhood, was lived out as a transitional stage of one’s life cycle. Fishery subculture, in the meantime, to adapt to this life cycle, dispensed a pragmatic mindset to men. Sexual pleasure was the pursuit; emotional investment, on the other hand, could be troublesome and if possible, should be avoided or at least downplayed with the understanding that it would give way to a heterosexual relationship. Men prolonged their bachelor years as much as they could. Some would court women for a possible marriage while still in the fishery circle or involved with another man. One was, however, expected to close that window and start a marriage, sometimes almost voluntarily, before the age of thirty, with perhaps a small extension.

This life pattern was narrated in stories, of course, and the fishery was itself a field of story for the legitimate bachelors. Many were legendary and fun, “See that boy from Tianjin?...

Last year, he got on a train with 50 cents in his pocket. Back from a round trip of fun all over the country, he got off the train with 75 cents left in his pocket.”81 Many were violent: “In the 90s, there was an Old Jin who liked strong lads who were not in the circle… One day he took three lads home from the park, and was found dead and tied in bed. As a result, the authorities arrested many homosexuals.”82

A-Qing’s story, as he related in “I’m Happy, and That’s Enough,” an essay he wrote for his website Starry Is Tonight’s Sky (Jinye xingguang canlan, 今夜星光灿烂), is one about the self:

It’s been more than ten years since I started to go out to now. This lifestyle is of course poles apart from the mainstream. But this is my lifestyle. I like it, I’m happy, I’m willing, and that’s enough. How others live their life does not concern me. If there is an afterlife, I will still be living it the same way. In China, not so many people can say this.83

This story is one of desire, the allure of the fishery. But A-Qing is unique, as he knows well, in that he embraces it without self-denial. It took a whole set of conditions, however, to live out a life of desire in 1980s and 1990s China. A-Qing had to be a Beijing resident to be at home in the many venues afforded by the capital of same-sex love. He was an engineer, living in

81 A-Qing, “Huaxu wupian, wu” 花絮五篇·五 [Five Anecdotes, IV], last archived May 5, 2002 by Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20020823035404/http://mystar.vip.sina.com, accessed Feb 12, 2012. 82 Mu Yang 牧羊, “Ai zai yuchang, hen zai yuchang (爱在渔场，恨在渔场 [Loving in the fishery, hating in the fishery], PYTX Vol. 42, 2004. 83 A-Qing, “kuaile, jiugoule” 快乐，就够了[ I’m Happy, and That’s Enough], Starry Is Tonight’s Sky (Jinye xingguang canlan 今夜星光灿烂, http://mystar.vip.sina.com last archived May 5, 2002 by Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20020823035404/http://mystar.vip.sina.com, accessed Feb 12, 2012.

a spare apartment (with a video recorder—in the 1980s) of his parents in a city where most people did not even have their own bedroom at the time.84 He had swift wit at critical moments when facing police to head off danger, and social sophistication to cope with the pressure that came from living the fishery lifestyle beyond his legitimate bachelorhood. In addition, his highly individualist philosophy of life, while coming at a time of free market expansion, has a great share that can only be attributed to his innate gifts, which also shows in the creativity of his fishery stories and unique perspective.

However, and perhaps most importantly, A-Qing’s lack of interest in permanent romantic relationships has kept him away from the dark fairy tale that is the more typical synopsis of any attempts at fishery love:

That day, when he was jogging in the garden, … Uncle L met the love of his life, M. ... They stuck together for many years. M was forced to get married later. …On the night of M’s wedding, Uncle L sat outside of M’s window all night. He was icily chilled and peaceful. His heart was like dead water. And he walked away when the morning came. 85

A story in Their World about two men’s brief encounter, after they meet at a fishery and go to one man’s high-ranked intellectual parents’ spare apartment, can also summarize the typical fishery narrative:

He kept asking me: “Am I good?” “You are good.” I replied. “What part of me is good?” “Every part is good.” “Do you like me?” “…I don’t know.”

84 A-Qing, “yinchayangcuo” 阴差阳错 [Freaky Fate], last archived May 5, 2002 by Wayback Machine,

web.archive.org/web/20020823035404/http://mystar.vip.sina.com, accessed Feb 12, 2012. 85 Ainan 艾男, “jidi suigan size” 基地随感四则 [Four Random Thoughts about Base], PYTX Vol. 42, 2004.

“What’s the reason?” “No reason. It won’t work. It won’t last between people like you and me. So don’t you fall in love with anyone, you got it?” He held me tightly in his arms, for a long, long time, and neither of us said a word. But I could feel his tears hitting my neck and shoulder, one after another. We stayed in bed until the next noon. His mother had been calling in to ask him to come back for lunch. I, too, had to go back. When I was leaving, he stopped me. “Are you leaving like this?” I knew what he meant. I walked to him, circled him in my arms, and touched his hair. He buried his head in my chest. My heart started palpitating. Still, I didn’t dare to play with fire. I was afraid of falling in love. … This story happened one month ago. After that, neither of us looked for the other. Just like many homosexual partners, we saw each other once or twice, after that there was no story.86

These two men were luckier than most, since they had a private place, and thus could extend beyond anonymity just enough to weave emotions that were usually repressed in the impersonal sex from fishery stories of desire. Still, the parents’ presence was prominent, symbolized by the mother’s calls for lunch, at which they are just two boys playing a game within the sight of parents. Romance is just behind their lips, but Uncle L’s story, a cautionary tale, is taking charge—“I was afraid of falling in love.” Despite both men’s individual struggles towards expressions of romance, it is from beginning understood that it will lead only to a game, sentimental at most.

1.9 Beyond the Fishery

The fisheries could only be taken advantage of by men in large urban centres. For a much larger number of men desiring men, however, the signs of homosexuality reached them via the newly commercialized mass media. A few magazines and newspapers had been particularly

86 Li Yinhe, Tongxinglian yawenhua. p. 285-86.

friendly to homosexuality-related topics. Inchoate (rezhichu, 人之初), Hope (Xiwang, 希望),

Popular Medicine (Dazhong Yixue, 大众医学), and Hand to Hand (shoudishou, 手递手), for example, carried homosexuality-related topics more frequently than others, likely on purpose.

From time to time, a magazine might address the topic of homosexuality by inviting experts in sexology or psychology to introduce the topic. Many magazines had Q & A sections where readers’ questions were answered by experts. Some men sent their inquiries, though more, it seemed, for the sake of speaking about homosexuality in a sympathetic place than for seeking experts’ answers. Even though the discussions in the 1980s and 1990s had an undertone of discouragement, men had no problems perceiving the underlying sympathy simply from the fact that the issue of homosexuality was dealt with despite its sensitivity. Together, these discussions about homosexuality provided men with an awareness of the existence of others in similar situations. For men who could not go to fisheries, these magazines might have been critical sources of information about other men desiring men.

Some men who had no knowledge of fisheries learned to appropriate the media as a means of seeking their own kind. A common way was to post ads in the personals section of a homosexual-friendly magazine or newspaper. Such a move might have seemed to have little chance to reach other men, but the 1980s and the early 1990s were the golden age of magazines in China, with many magazines boasting millions of subscribers, and the large number of subscribers might convert into some unlikely encounters. For some men who were more sensitive and adept at reading the signs, the homosexuality-related essays, the Q & A columns, as well as similar ads in the personals section certainly carried hints about the make-up of the readership of the magazine. Contemporary Youth (dangdai qingnian, 当代青年), a popular

magazine, for example, was used by men as a convenient medium for finding their kind in the years before the internet. Zhuzi (柱子) is one of the men whose life was changed by a personal ad in a mainstream magazine:

[Contemporary Youth] carried tongzhi friend-making messages. Those messages were not barefaced, but insiders would know immediately. For example, there were messages like “I’m in my 30s and I’m looking for genuine brotherly love.” 87

For men who lived in smaller cities and the countryside, where no fisheries were within their reach, such a means could be their only hope to meet a partner before they passed their legitimate bachelorhood.

The development of the consumerist economy and popular culture by the 1990s also created new venues for the homosexual subculture. Many recreational venues—bars, nightclubs, and, later, karaoke clubs—were added to the city scene. The first gay bars, however, were created out of regular bars by strategic frequenting of men desiring men. This was how, indeed,

Half and Half (哈佛) in Beijing went from a small unnoticeable bar to a gay venue in 1996. He

Xiaopei (何小培), a female activist who organized gatherings for lesbians and gay men at the time, recalls a meeting at Half and Half in memoral to Stonewall, and her story is worth quoting at some length:

Beijing in 1996 did not have a gay bar. For several years, Wu Chunsheng (吴春生) had wanted to organize an event to commemorate Stonewall, but each time he was threatened by the police and had to cancel it. This time lessons had been learned; we informed all the people we knew to [go to] a very quiet small bar in an alley. We told people that they were attending “a birthday party.” We even bought a birthday cake and little gifts. Sixty people went to the event; among them were eight women. That was the first time we had

87 Daniu 大牛, “Pingliang laide Zhuzi” 平凉来的柱子 [Zhuzi from Pingliang], PYTX, vol. 40, 2004.

so many nütong (female homosexuals) attend a gathering like this. Wu Chunsheng told me in whispers that there were plainclothes in the bar. We managed to get rid of the plainclothes.

We sang a birthday song first, and then divided the cake. After that I asked people to guess whose birthday it was and tell me in my ear. The right answer got gifts—condoms and candies in a pack. People started to ask each other. The ones who knew the Stonewall story told the ones who did not know. And then they told me in whispers. So people came to me one by one and told me in my ear: “Today is the anniversary of the American Stonewall Gay Movement.” A nantong (male homosexual), after hearing the story, rushed to me and told me in my ear: “I know! I know! Today is the birthday of all of us!” I was very touched by his words. There was an amazement in my heart. So I passed his words “birthday of all of us” to others in whisper. I think this is the significance of the meeting. We consolidated with each other. We had a birthday for all of us. Since that day, that bar, “Half and Half,” became the first gay bar in Beijing.88

This one is a coming out story, a new narrative pattern to add to the field of story surrounding men desiring men in China right at the moment when the internet was a few months old in China—most of these women and men would have been unaware of the development. In so many ways, this story unfolds itself twists and turns indicative of China. It is a coming out story that comes out in secret, in whispers, within the earshot of the authorities. In the height of excitement, in addition, the individualist story is told as collective, each of its member anonymous.

Half and Half was soon followed by other bars and nightclubs specializing in serving men desiring men. Many of these bars and nightclubs were run by same-sex attracted men or women. New bathhouses exclusively for men desiring men, too, appeared. In these venues, engagement between men were not as easily interrupted by weather, passersby, and the police, and men could more likely extend their engagement beyond the impersonal level that most

88 He Xiaopei 何小培, “1990 niandai de zhongguo nutong zuzhi,” 1990 年代的中国女同组织[Chinese Lesbian Organizations in the 1990s], PYTX, vol. 64, 2008.

fisheries could offer. In addition, men could assume that these venues were friendly, and they could feel free to be themselves. Information, too, was easier to spread. Furthermore, the middle-class background of the customer base meant, for many, more desirable sex partners.

The appearance of Westerners, or overseas Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or North

America, too, added appeal. A-Bo (阿波), once an owner of a bar, describes his bar with pride:

On the Shanghai-Nanjing [railway] line, my bar had a good reputation. The effect of the sound level in the bar was extraordinary. And the bar had a dance floor. People frequenting the bar included government officials, media anchors, company managers, and the ordinary working class. Every weekend, customers came from adjacent cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuxi, and the bar was full. All the people danced and sang together unrestrainedly. Many customers were gifted. They performed their specialty for everyone. They created a cheerful atmosphere.89

The status of these venues, however, remained half-underground. They needed a license to operate; yet the authorities never licensed them for serving men desiring men. They were easy targets for police raids, blackmailing, or even shutdowns. A-Bo himself was blackmailed by police. In August 1999, the police summoned him. Informing him of their knowledge of the appearance of homosexuals in his bar, they “threatened to charge me with crimes, and they fined me 3,000 yuan without providing an invoice.”90 Costumers, too, were not free from the menace of the authorities.

1.10 Was There a Gay Identity or Collectivity Before?

While bars, nightclubs and bathhouses were expanding, general commercial spaces such as restaurants and department stores, newly afforded by the market economy, also provided men

89 Abo (阿波), “Jiuba—tongxing’aizhe de qixidi” 酒吧—同性爱者的栖息地[The bar—a shelter for homosexuals”, PYTX, vol. 19&20, 2001.

90 Ibid.

more room to manoeuvre. By the mid-1990s, the homosexual subculture reached a considerable scale. As Lisa Rofel observed in 1999:

In the past five years in China, for example, cosmopolitan cities have witnessed a veritable explosion of people who call themselves gay. Semipublic spaces marked gay have proliferated. Beijing has at least five gay bars; weekly salon discussions; a national hotline; books, magazine, and videos from abroad; conferences; and informal gatherings in people’s homes.91

Rofel then turns to the discussion of the specific manifestations of gay identity in China, assuming it had become a fact in the mid-1990s. Other studies, too, follow the same track. Lo suggests the primacy of globalization in the articulation of this urban same-sex identity through the more Western style discourse.92 Wu notes the deletion of the crime of hooliganism from

Criminal Law, and the depathologizing of homosexuality by the Chinese Psychiatric Association in 2001. Travis Kong further adds “the advancement of new communication and information technologies, from mobile phones to internet chat rooms” to this list. 93

But would these features, minus Kong’s items, be sufficient to give rise to a gay identity and collectivity and sustain them in an authoritarian nation with heavy underlying traditional negativity against homosexuality, despite its rapid advancement in an economy encumbered by social control? In contrast, extensive studies on the emergence of gay identity and community in the U. S. and other Western countries have found a set of necessary conditions. Individualism,

91 Rofel, Desiring China, 86. Rofel’s theory has been accepted by many others, such as Chris Berry, Wan Yanhai, and Loretta Lo. See Berry, “Asian values, family values: Film, video, and lesbian and gay identities,” in Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity, Community, ed. Gerard Sullivan and Peter Jackson, 211-3. Wan Yanhai’s “Becoming a gay activist in contemporary China” attributes a large share of the changing same-sex landscape in China to newly emerging gay activists. Lo in Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China also observes an expanding landscape of gay subculture in 2004 but attributes it to the expansion of globalization. 92 Lo, Loretta Wing Wah Ho, Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 124-125. 93 Kong, Travis, Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi, and Golden Boy, (Abington: Routledge, 2011), 172.

gay communities, gay ghettoes, public media, and a democratic political system, among other things, contributed to the rise of a gay identity and community. The emergence of a gay identity and collectivity from a different set of conditions and without a noticeable social movement, even in the current age of neoliberalism and globalization, would be of great academic and practical interest.

Individualism in China, as Yan Yunxiang’s careful study reveals, is a particular “ultra- utilitarian individualism” conditioned by “traditional culture, the legacy of radical socialism, and global capitalism” in which “the development of individual identity and subjectivity has been confined mostly to the private sphere and has evolved into a kind of egotism. Consequently, the individual feels fewer obligations and duties toward the community and other individuals and thus has lost much of his or her civility.” 94 This version of individualism might not resort to open challenge to authorities or stand up to social pressure.

In addition, gay ghettoes in Western cities serve crucial functions in sustaining gay community and individual identity, as Martin Levine and others observe, by affording a concentration of gay institutions, commercial avenues, cruising areas and residents to form a small gay world where being gay is safe and even predominant.95 No city in China in the late

1990s or 2010s has allowed the development of a gay ghetto. The emerging homosexual commercial venues were operated on an ambiguous basis, usually avoiding any political or overtly (homo)sexual association. Geographically, not only were their numbers too small, they

94 Yan Yunxiang, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949- 1999, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 233-235. 95 Martin Levine, “Gay Ghetto,” Journal of Homosexuality 4:4 (1979), 363-377.

also were dispersed all over the city and could hardly form an enclave distinctive enough to maintain sovereignty. In the meantime, the establishments were subject to the constant and capricious harassment of the government, and as a result had very unpredictable, if not ephemeral, lifespans.

We also have repeatedly examined the mass media’s relationship to the authoritarian nation-state. The ambiguity against homosexuality, even in the 1990s, was not dispelled but remained dominant, as our survey reveals. The mainstream literary representation of homosexuality, in addition, was paradigmatically incompatible with lived homosexuality, and will be left behind in our study from now on.

The conclusion I draw, at the end of this survey, is that if there were some men who lived up to what we could qualify as a gay identity in the early days of the internet around 1995, this would have required very unique conditions. Also, under China’s urban, social, and political composition, there certainly did not exist a national gay community, nor institutions, to anchor individual identity.

Missing this primary question, subsequent discussions might become, to a degree, irrelevant. Lisa Rofel’s study concludes that the gay identity of urban middle-class men in China derived from a conjugate process of identification: on the one side, identification with a global gay identity, and on the other, differentiating themselves from gay men from rural areas by rejecting the latter as of low quality, and these two joined to acquire a cultural belonging—that they too could be good citizens. This formula of gay identity, if it did exist, should be limited to a very, very small number of men and women within the range of the observation. The two men

who wrote to PYTX at the beginning of this chapter, echoed by many on PYTX and even more online at that very moment in 1999, would have found this story difficult to relate to.

One of the “new communication and information technologies,” the internet, listed but largely overlooked by many, is the focus of this study. But this will not be at the cost of the other items in the list, rather, this study will be about how all these elements converged and interacted in a new environment, at the point of encounter between the legitimate bachelors and the internet, that eventually give rise to a gay identity and collectivity in the very ambiguous context of China.

At the time leading up to and overlapping with the advent of the internet in 1995 in

China, as the horizon for a new lifestyle expanded, the legitimate bachelors who were positioned at the very front of this trend found that they had already come to a historical juncture where their desire for men had a more direct confrontation with the world in which they lived. The nation, the law, the censorship, the urban space, the work unit, the neighbourhood, the family, the parents, the men one desired, and finally, oneself, constituted a matrix in which one’s desire for men was tangled. The ambiguity against homosexuality, on the other hand, still permeated every aspect of homosexual existence. Yet the new possibilities opened up by the market economy, individualism, and Western gay lifestyle were looming. Each of these components, at that time, tells its own story in a field of story. When these stories told themselves on a new space opened up by the advent of the internet, they gave birth to an epic.

Chapter 2 When Legitimate Bachelors Met the Internet: The Rise of Gay Identity and Collectivity on the Early Chinese Internet 2 «»

[Being lovesick] day after day, it is better to walk through the trails of red dust; straying in the world, thereafter to see the colourful clouds shoulder by shoulder. 96

The above is a motto on the homepage of the most popular website among men desiring men before it ceased to exist in 2003, Reddust (http://www.tzlove.net). “Reddust” is a translation of the website’s name in Chinese, huazui hongchen (花醉红尘). The Buddhist term

“hongchen” (红尘) is a metaphor for worldly life, especially lust, which cannot last but must decay into red dust despite its beauty and joy (the dust being red because of such associations, however). “Huazui” (花醉) refers to a flower, here a metaphor for homosexual love, intoxicated with its own life and beauty. These two images are paradoxical: according to Buddhism, it is degenerate to take pleasure in the red dust for it blinds one’s sight to real salvation; the intoxicating flower, on the other hand, seems to suggest a resolve to pursue carnal desire regardless of its worldliness.

Paradoxical as it is, this motto speaks of a different story than the self-conscious anti- romance of fishery narratives. In Reddust, love between men was now aestheticized and romanticized in the imagery of two men watching colourful sunset clouds, shoulder by shoulder.

The world at large, in the meantime, is seen as the red dust—sentimental as the view might be, it

96 Reddust (www.touchv.com), last update December 4, 2000, archived April 5, 2001 by Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20010405075305/http://www.touchv.com/, accessed August 10, 2013.

required an epistemological distance that allowed one to see the world from the outside. In traditional China, Buddhism had served as an alternative worldview to the Chinese life of the world most strongly expressed in Confucianism, as well as a place outside of the world, as the term chujia (出家)—to abandon worldly life to become a Buddhist monk or nun—indicates.

Perhaps the Buddhist imagery was cited in Reddust because of this cultural sentiment. If the fishery narratives both accommodated homosexual desire and negated it within the window period of legitimate bachelorhood, Reddust’s motto, and the sentiment conveyed on this website—one of the very first—heralded an adherence to homosexuality and new ways to view, experience, and narrate erotic life in the age of the internet.

From the fishery stories to the imagery of watching colourful sunset clouds shoulder by shoulder, websites like Reddust bridged two eras of media—from that of the “old” media to that of the “new” represented by the internet; two eras of homosexual signification—from graffitiing and fishery narratives to cyber narratives, and, perhaps not by chance, two eras of homosexual life—from one in which homosexuality was confined to the window period of legitimate bachelorhood to one in which same-sex desire became the centre of both individual and collective identity that also sought to be the centre of a new lifestyle.

The first task of this chapter is to offer a historical delineation of how the internet changed the life of men desiring men in China—the ways they met and interacted with each other and the ways they referred to their homosexual desire to themselves and to others. To do so, the internet should not be seen as a transparent medium passively carrying messages, nor as a magical power that brought about changes by itself; rather, it should be considered both as an extra dimension to the existing topology of discursive deployment, as well as a catalyst that was

capable of causing fundamental transformation. It was the human agency, however, of a group of legitimate bachelors that agilely grasped the opportunities and liberty of the early internet to advance with their forbidden desire in an otherwise unviable China. The historical delineation of the internet leads to one of this chapter’s, and this study’s, central arguments: I argue for the primacy of the encounter of legitimate bachelors with the internet in bringing forth a gay identity and a gay China, and I argue that such an identity and collectivity are bound to the internet.

These arguments are made in this chapter without an essential element: the emergence of online narratives, for I choose to deal with them in the following chapters. These arguments, therefore, will be continued and developed in subsequent chapters.

Before beginning my analysis I will give some accounting of my methodology. The internet itself in general, and early same-sex websites especially, have experienced constant transitions. The evolution of the internet, the upgrading of the Chinese government’s internet censorship, the fading of the early enthusiasm of pioneering website builders, and other socioeconomic factors, have resulted in the disappearance of many early websites, or great difference from their earlier versions, if they continue to exist. The anonymity afforded by the internet, in addition, also allowed many men active on the early internet to withdraw from the web, or at least from their early web identities, without leaving any trace of their identity in the real world. To overcome this ephemerality, I use various means to track the traces of the early web.

Wayback Machine (http://web.archive.org) is an internet archiving websites that takes and saves snapshots of major sites on the World Wide Web. Thanks to their exceptionally large flow of visitors, many male same-sex website in China, reached Wayback’s benchmark to be

archived, thus leaving us primary materials on their original appearance. Yet Wayback does not snapshot every update of a website, and it snapshots subordinate pages of a website less frequently. Its archiving is usually far from thorough and leaves great areas and deep levels of a website blank. In addition, many files developed for Web 1.0 are no longer displayable on the browser designed for Web 2.0, due to the incompatibility of both hardware and software.

Besides retrieving primary pages from the Wayback Machine, I also acquired web traces of a site, an article or a person in various ways. If a website archives itself, or at least does not erase outdated files but leave them unlinked to its current site structure, I search its early articles for pertinent information. If an article found on a website is no longer in its original format or position, its contents and date are carefully checked to make sure of its authenticity. BBS threads and personal blogs are also followed. In addition, I have also visited a few major same- sex websites, including boysky.com, gztz.org and the BBS “Companion” (yilu tongxing,一路同

行, tongzhi company along the way) on tianya.cn, and participated in forum discussions on a regular basis, usually twice a week, from 2000 to the time of writing this dissertation. Despite these methods to ensure breadth and accuracy, however, I am aware of the possibility that some of the data collected might not be precise, and some important information might have been lost and become untraceable.

2.1 The Internet in China

The concepts and prototypes of the internet can be traced back to the computer network

Arpanet built by the U.S. Department of Defense and a few universities, dating back to the

1960s. The World Wide Web emerged in 1989, out of Usenet and other pre-web “bulletin board”/BBS technologies, with the concept conceived by the English computer scientist Timothy

Berners-Lee. With the development of HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML) and web browser technology, the internet expanded from an almost exclusively academic network to a worldwide network. 97 In 1992, the internet was first opened to the public.

In China, the predecessor of the internet dates back to 1986, when a Chinese research team at Beijing Applied Computing Institute initiated the Chinese Academic Network and established connection with a West German university, Karlsruhe University. The earliest computer network users in China, like elsewhere, were limited to research institutes and defense departments. The first email was sent from Tsinghua University in 1987. In April 1994, the

Sino-American Federation of Scientific and Technological Cooperation meeting granted China’s appeal to connect to the internet.98 The Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese

Academy of Sciences set up the first World Wide Web server and built the first home page in

China in May 1994. The first internet-based bulletin board system (BBS) was launched by

Tsinghua University in August 1995. In November 1995, China Educational Network

(CERNET) was made available to a small group of faculty members and students in higher education. In 1995, China Telecom became an internet service provider and started commercialization of the internet in the country. In January 1995, China Public Computer

Internet (ChinaNet), built by the Ministry of Post & Telecommunications to rent bandwidth to internet service providers (ISP) such as China Telecom, was opened to the public.99 With its

97 Steven Jones, Introduction to Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publication, 1998), xi-xviii. 98 Liu Fengshu, Urban Youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the Self, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 3. 99 Tan Zixiang, “Regulating China’s Internet: Convergence toward a Coherent Regulatory Regime,” Telecommunictions Policy 23 (1999), 270-72.

nationwide telephone network, China Telecom provided accessible connection to the internet.

By dialling 163 or 169 through a modem to a telephone landline, any computer could acquire access to the internet. China Telecom also opened internet cafés nationwide in its branches.

Before people within China could access the internet, however, overseas Chinese students and scientists already had access the internet and its previous versions. This group built the very first Chinese online settlements before China was connected to the internet. One of these early North American Chinese online pioneers, Electronic Newsletter for Chinese Students

(zhongguo xuesheng dianxun, 中国学生电讯), was founded in 1988. The year 1989 saw the birth of a few newsletters as overseas students were eager to learn about the development of the situation that led to Tiananmen and its aftermaths. On March 6, 1989, two students in Canada and two in America founded News Digest (xinwen wenzhai, 新闻文摘), an online newsletter.

Later in the same year, Electronic Newsletter for Chinese Students and another newsletter group,

China News Group, amalgamated with News Digest to form China News Digest (zhongguo diannao wangluo xinwen, 中国电脑网络新闻). On April 5, 1991, China News Digest sent out the first newsletter in Chinese characters, The Huaxia Digest (huaxia wenzhai, 华夏文摘).100

Because of technological limits with regard to input and uniform depiction of Chinese characters across computers, the early newsletter groups founded by Chinese students were in English. The first newsgroup in the Chinese language, alt.Chinese.text (ACT), was founded on June 28, 1992, on USENET by a Chinese student, Wei Yagui (魏亚桂), at the University of Indiana. The

100 Lu Bingfu 鲁冰夫, “Zhongwen diannao zazhi Huaxia Wenzhai” (中文电脑杂志《华夏文摘》) [Chinese computer magazine the Huaxia Digest], The Huaxia Digest (华夏文摘增刊), zk9404a, April 5, 1994, http://www.cnd.org/HXWZ/ZK94/zk34.hz8.html#2, accessed on August 10, 2013.

Huaxia Digest was subsequently changed to Chinese and posted on ACT. Soon, many other newsletter groups were founded, among them the most influential ones such as Chinese Maple

Garden (Fenghua Yuan 枫华园), in September 1993 in Canada, and North Aurora Polaris (Beiji

Guang 北极光), in October 1993 in Sweden. ACT became the most popular newsgroup from

1993-1994, with fifty thousand subscribers.101 The prime of the earliest newsletter groups, however, only lasted for about two years. In 1994, another group of Chinese newsletters, more culturally oriented, appeared in the form of HTML pages, forming the second wave of Chinese internet communities in North America. Among these websites were Xin Yusi (新语丝, The New

Threads of Words), founded in February, 1994, and Ganlan Shu (橄榄树, Olive Tree), founded in March, 1995. A central project of these websites was digitalizing Chinese books. Classic

Chinese literary and philosophical works, as well as foreign works translated into Chinese were added to their collection. The literature section of these websites also published poetry or fiction written by overseas students, most of them majoring in science or engineering.

While the visitors to the early overseas websites were increasing, the number of people who had early access to the internet inside China was limited, as in March 1995, only about

3,000 people could use the internet. Despite rapid increase, that number remained small compared to the country’s large population in the first few years. In July 1995, internet users

101 Shi Yu 施雨, “Beimei wangluo wenxue: quanqiu shoujia zhongwen BBS—ACT” 北美网络文学:全球首家中文 BBS—ACT [Cyber literature in North America: The first Chinese BBS—ACT], The China Press (侨报, Qiaobao), December 5, 2007. Lu Bingfu (鲁冰夫), “Zhongwen diannao zazhi Huaxia Wenzhai” (中文电脑杂志《华夏文摘》) [Chinese computer magazine the Huaxia Digest].

were fewer than 8,400 and by the end of 1996, 80,000.102 That number, however, has been increasing exponentially ever since. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a semi-governmental organization, has published semi-annual reports on the status of the internet in the country since 1997. In 2008, CNNIC published its 22nd report on the internet in China, announcing that China had surpassed the U.S. to become the country with the greatest number of users in the world.103

Over the years, moreover, the internet has become China’s cultural and political frontier.

In July 2013, the CNNIC reported 591 million users, or 44.1% of the Chinese population, and of these, 464 million of them had access to the internet on mobile phone. 104 Ordinary Chinese people have incorporated the internet as part of their everyday life. Traditional media such as newspapers and TV remain the outlet of formal discourse, but the vernacular culture based on the internet has become the dominant new “cultural form,” as Yang Guobin visualized.105 While the internet has not brought democracy, as many have fantasized since China connected itself to the virtual world, 106 ordinary Chinese, by creatively appropriating the internet as a means of participation have, following the motto, “by standing in a circle they will change China,”

102 Tan, Zixiang, “Regulating China’s Internet: Convergence toward a Coherent Regulatory Regime,” 261-76, 263. 103 CNNIC, Di 22 ci Zhongguo hulian wangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao 第二十二次中国互联网络发展状况统计报告 [The 22nd Report on the Status of Development of Internet in China] (July 2008), accessed on August 10, 2013. 104 CNNIC: Di 32 ci Zhongguo hulian wangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao 第三十二次中国互联网络发展状况统计报告 [The 32nd Report on the Status of Development of Internet in China] (July 2013), accessed on August 10, 2013. 105 Yang Guobing, “Internet as Cultural Form: Technology and the Human Condition in China,” Know Techn Pol (2009) 22: 109-115. 106 For an example of early optimistic prediction of the internet’s impact on politics in China, see Michale S. Chase and James C. Mulvenon, You’ve Got Dissent! Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing’s Counter- Strategies, Santa Monica: RAND, 2002, http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1543.html, accessed on August 10, 2013.

(weiguan gaibian zhongguo, 围观改变中国), influenced political and cultural life more than ever. 107 At some moments, it has seemed that with the help of the internet, the political equilibrium the CCP tries so hard to keep was in peril.

The CCP, on the other hand, has been highly vigilant over the internet and assiduously upgrading its cyber control from the very beginning. This effort reached its height in 2004, the year the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership launched a campaign of “further strengthening and improving the ideological and moral construction of minors,”108 and by 2005, it had developed

“the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world”, 109 with continuous upgrading of its measures since to maintain a pervasive online censorship.110 Though the early optimistic prediction that the internet would bring an end to authoritarianism in China has proven to be naïve technological determinism, the internet has undoubtedly changed cultural and political settings in China, and it is certainly a venue where a great share of China’s future will unfold.

The internet has been in a state of constant evolution. Besides technological improvements and cultural adaptations, the Party’s ever-advancing restraints on the internet and the netizens’ counter measures have induced a co-evolution that marks it as one “with Chinese

107 Xiaoshu (笑蜀), “guanzhu jiushi liliang, weiguan gaibian zhongguo” 关注就是力量，围观改变中国 [Concerning Is Power, and Speculating in Circle Changes China], Southern Weekly, January 14, 2010. 108 CPC Central Committee and State Council, “Zhonggong zhongyang guowuyuan guanyu jinyibu jiaqing he gaijin weichengnianren sixiang daode jianshe d ruogan yijian” 中共中央国务院关于进一步加强和改进未成年人思想道德建设的若干意见 [CPC Central Committee and State Council on Further Strengthening and Improving Suggestions of Ideological and Moral Construction of Minors], People’s Daily, March 23, 2004. 109 OpenNet Initiative, “Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study,” https://opennet.net/studies/chin#toc5, accessed on August 10, 2013. 110 OpenNet Initiative, “China, 2006-2007,” “China, 2009,” “China, 2012.” https://opennet.net/reasech/proviles/china, accessed on August 10, 2013.

characteristics.” As a result, the early internet and its meaning in China are remarkably different

from what they are today. I mark 2005 as a dividing year between the early phase and later

phases of the internet in the country. The homosexual subculture by that time also demonstrated

distinct features from its earlier versions, as will be discussed later in this chapter.

Four notable characteristics define the early internet in China. The first of these is that it

was limited to a small portion of the population with distinct specificities. These early users

were typically male, young, unmarried, with college or higher education and higher income, IT-

savvy, and living in large urban centres, especially Beijing (BJ), Shanghai (SH), Tianjin (TJ),

and Guangdong province (GD), as shown in the following table:

Table 1 Demographical comparison: early internet users vis-à-vis average Chinese

Number of monthly % with % male % age % % internet income college between from unmarried users (US$)/** education 18-30 BJ, TJ, (million) SH, & GD Oct. 1997 0.6 116/51.9 N/A 88 79* 54 N/A Jul. 1998 1.1 177/54.6 N/A 93 79* 47 N/A Jan. 1999 2.1 152/58.9 89 86 69* 51 64 Jul. 1999 4.0 183/58.9 86 85 67* 44 63 Jan. 2000 8.9 221/63.2 84/10*** 79 76 48 64 Jul. 2000 16.9 211/63.2 85 75 76 45 67 Jan. 2001 22.5 176/69.0 70 70 60 34 63 Jul. 2001 26.5 146/69.0 62 61 53 N/A 59 Jan. 2002 33.7 158/77.5 60 60 53 32 57 Jul. 2002 45.8 133/77.5 58 61 54 N/A 59 Jan. 2003 59.1 134/85.3 56 59 54 26 58 Jul. 2003 68.0 148.6/85.3 55 60 56 N/A 60 Jan. 2004 79.5 163.2/94.8 51 60 41 24 57 Jul. 2004 87.0 245.2/94.8 57 59 53 N/A 60 Jan. 2005 94.0 170.2/106.8 58/12*** 61 53 24 57 Jul. 2005 103 172.3/106.8 55 60 55 N/A 59 Jan. 2006 111 228.7/123 54 59 54 24 58 Jul. 2006 123 194.8/123.0 50 59 57 N/A 55

Sources: CNNIC Survey Reports on China’s Internet Development (October 1997-July 2006); China Statistical Yearbook (1997-2006), China National Bureau of Statistics111 * age between 21-30; ** Per Capita Monthly Disposable Income of Urban Households; *** Percentage with college education among urban residents, 2000; **** Percentage with college education among urban residents, 2005.

A second characteristic of the early internet is its cultural significance. For the general public still behind the “digital divide,”112 the computer and the early internet were mysterious, sophisticated and distant from everyday life. They were related to “high technology” and found little relevance to everyday mundane life. The difficulties of remediating the Chinese language to the electronic media had resulted in the limited content in Chinese as the Chinese characters could not be encoded by ASCII codes.113 The input methods for Chinese characters, in addition, were complicated and hard to learn for the average Chinese person, who came into touch with computers directly from pen and paper, as opposed to their Western counterparts, who had been used to the typewriter long before the computer.

These characteristics together comprised a sense for the early Chinese internet user that cyberspace was a discrete world independent of the real world—its third characteristic. Online

111 This table is expanded from Qiu’s table, in Jack Linchuan Qiu, “The Internet in China: Data and Issues,” (Working Paper Prepared for Annenberg Research Seminar on International Communication), 5. 112 A few writers have suggested that the “digital divide” has become less relevant than “digital inclusion,” as the former emphasizes only a categorical difference of being on the digital side or not, whereas the latter not only considers whether one is on the digital side, but also the levels of participation as well as the capacity of self- empowerment from such inclusion. I believe digital divide is a more useful term for the early internet in China, as the access to the internet was significantly more important than the degree of digital participation. For discussions of digital inclusion, see Mark Warschauer, Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide, (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), also Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, “Dismantling the Digital Divide: Rethinking the Dynamics of Participation and Exclusion,” in Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 113 Wei Yagui 魏亚桂, “Mantan zhongwen bianma” 漫谈中文编码 [Chatting about Chinese Encoding], China News Digest, vol. 101, March 5, 1993.

experience was detached from everyday life, giving a sense of freedom for the early users from both political and traditional authorities. As a result, internet users in the early Chinese cyberspace were more self-conscious, with a sense of being exceptional, and a sense of being in the frontline of a new era.

The fourth characteristic is the Chinese government’s relatively relaxed attitude towards the early internet. China’s fall at the end of the Qing Dynasty in conflicts with Western powers and the attribution of that defeat to its backwardness in science and technology have been an ever-refreshing memory that demonstrated itself in Chinese politicians’ prioritization of technological advancement, from Sun Yat-sen’s national railway project to Mao’s Great Leap

Forward, to Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up. The former president Jiang Zemin, also a former Minister of the Electronics Industry, was an advocate of information technology, believing it was a crucial factor in the project of national rejuvenation. 114 In addition, the early internet was viewed as an “ultimate symbol of modernity” by Communist bureaucrats, many of them with no training in science or technology, but who nevertheless abstractly regarded it as a necessity. As the political implications of the internet were still to play out in the coming years, and coherent attitudes and strategies were yet to be worked out, the CCP had a relative “laissez- faire” attitude, leaving the early internet a space largely free from the CCP’s surveillance. 115

114 Jack Linchuan Qiu, “The Internet in China: Data and Issues,” (Working Paper Prepared for Annenberg Research Seminar on International Communication), p. 14; also in Zhou Yongming, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006). 115 Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, Introduction to Chinese Cyberspaces: Technological Change and Political Effects, ed. Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, (London: Routledge, 2006), 3.

The CCP’s “laissez-faire” attitude, however, did not mean that it did not try to control it; quite the opposite, one of the most important factors that defined different stages of the internet in China was the CCP’s ever-tightening internet control. Before 1998, the CCP’s regulation of the internet was “fragmented,” and its coherent regulations and rules were yet to be formulated.

116 However, the sense of freedom felt in the early stage has been diminishing since day one in

China. The State Council since the blueprint stage had decided that exclusive state possession of network infrastructure was necessary. Strict government licensing of Internet Service Providers

(ISPs) and registration of all early internet users with the local public security bureau were required, albeit not always implemented.117 Moreover, the physical gateways to the international internet were and are under the government’s control.118 All these measures have joined together to transform the internet in China into a “state intranet” under concerted domestic control with limited access to the global internet. 119 The CCP’s attitude toward the internet and measures taken to control it, however, needed time to take shape. The founding of the Ministry of

Information Industry (MII) in 1998 marked the CCP regime’s institutional convergence on internet regulation. As Tan notes, “China’s regulation of the internet has evolved into a highly coordinated and balanced structure parallel to the institutional convergence” and he suggests that such trends will continue in the future.120 Even after the foundation of the MII, however, as

116 Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, “Government Policy and Political Control Over China’s Internet,” Chinese Cyberspaces: Technological Change and Political Effects, ed. Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, (London: Routledge, 2006), 26. 117 Tan Zixiang, “Regulating China’s Internet: Convergence toward a Coherent Regulatory Regime,” 265. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 272-73. 120 Tan, Zixiang. “Regulating China’s Internet: Convergence toward a coherent regulatory regime,” Telecommunications Policy 23 (3), 261-276; also see J. Zittrain and B. Edelman, “Empirical analysis of Internet filtering in China,” March 20, 2003, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu./files/2003-02.pdf/, accessed August 10, 2013;

Harwit and Clark observe, control of content online remained “schizophrenic”. Despite the

CCP’s desire to eliminate possible threats from cyberspace, overpolicing websites would impair the internet’s profitability, and alongside this came realization of the impossibility of total control of the internet, especially content originating from outside of China.121

The Internet after 2005 also demonstrated characteristics different from its first decade in

China. The demographic features of internet users show that the internet has been expanding to cover a larger proportion of the country’s population. With the popularization of the internet, as shown in Table 1, the proportion of female users, older users, and users with lower income has been increasing. By the end of 2005, total internet users had reached 111 million, with female users at 41.3%, users under the age of 30 at 71%, and users with education levels lower than high school at 46.4%. 122 The internet was no longer dominated by a small group of privileged young urban males.

All these factors joined together, and as a result, the meaning of the internet for ordinary

Chinese people had changed greatly ten years after China connected to it. On the one hand, the air of mystery faded, and the internet was domesticated by a greater percentage of common people in their everyday life making use of it somehow—the “diannao” (electronic brain) was

and G. Walton, “China’s golden shield,” International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2001, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/582542/posts, accessed on August 10, 2013. 121 Eric Harwit and Duncan Clark, “Shaping the Internet in China: Evolution of Political Control over Network Infrastructure and Content,” Asian Survey 41:3 (May/June 2001), 377–408. 122 CNNIC, Di 17 ci Zhongguo hulian wangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao 第十七次次中国互联网络发展状况统计报告 [The 17th Report on the Status of Development of Internet in China] (January 2006), accessed on August 30, 2013.

for “dazi” (typing characters); or for those who could not use it properly, it became a piece of mundane electronic furniture like a TV set or refrigerator—but without their pragmatic uses.

Consumerism, in the meantime, had offset the internet’s political or social potential by intensifying the use of the computer and the internet as “fashionable entertainment, as ‘surfing,’ an imported (and therefore pricey) pastime.” 123 Traditional media—the CCTV (China Central

TV, 中央电视台), the People’s Daily, to name but a few—had also entered the internet, bringing the resilience of “old” media into cyberspace, and together with it, the familiarity of the offline world.124 In addition, the younger generation growing up with the internet in its first decade, the generation of the 80 hou (八零后, post-80s), had started to go to wangba (网吧, Internet café).

Under great pressure to perform well in high school to secure a future in an ever-changing society where the sense of social security was plunging, this generation of Chinese netizens used the internet as an outlet of pressure, mainly for entertainment purposes such as gaming or online socializing. The general public, accordingly, had developed a moral judgment of the internet in viewing its distracting and destructive effects on youth as a “uniquely Chinese phenomenon.”125

Such an attitude is catered to by the CCP, which has planted a great share of its legitimacy in playing the role of moral guardian of society, and has cited protection of the youth and social morality to justify its purge of the Internet, as suggested by the slogan of the 2004 campaign that aimed at “protecting the youth.”

123 Jack Linchuan Qiu, “The Internet in China: Data and Issues,” 14. 124 Des Freeman, “‘Old’ media resilience in the ‘new’ media revolution,” in Media and Culture Theory, ed, James Curren and David Morley, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Guobin Yang, “The Internet as a Cultural Form: Technology and the Human Condition in China,” in Know Techn Pol (2009) 22: 109-15. 125 Liu Fengshu, Urban Youth in China, 188.

A string of cases by 2004 had demonstrated to the CCP that the internet could potentially jeopardize its regime. Dissident documents were within the reach of common internet users.

Derogatory jokes or parodies about political leaders became abundant online. The Falun Gong movement’s anti-government resistance derived a great share of its power from online organization, as shown by a mass demonstration in April 1999, right in front of the CCP’s headquarters. 126 The 2003 SARS crisis disclosed the exponential growth of internet rumours, 127 and a female blogger, Mu Zimei (木子美), stirred public debate with her sexual adventures, with authorities eventually banning her blog and aborting the publication of her book in 2003.

Another prominent figure was that of Jiao Guobiao (焦国标), a Peking University professor whose open criticism of the Department of Propaganda was excitedly circulated online in 2004.

128 The internet had also become a means of mobilizing large scale popular protests that at times were out of the control of the CCP, as demonstrated in cases from national protest against the

1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO to the 2005 protest against Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.129 This list could go on and on.

While believing the internet indispensable for developing the economy, the CCP swiftly took measures to bridle it.130 By 2004, the Party had developed a set of concerted techniques to

126 Gudrun Wacker, “The Internet and Censorship in China,” 58-82. 127 Duncan Clark, “From the web to wireless,” (paper presented at “A global Interdisciplinary conference: China and the Internet: Technology, Economy, & and Society in Transition,” Los Angeles, 2003). 128 Kristof, Nicholas, “Death by a Thousand Blogs,” New York Times, May 24, 2005. 129 Liu Shih-Diing, “Networking Anti-Japanese Protests: Popular Sovereignty Reassured since 2005,” in Online Chinese Nationalism and China’s Bilateral Relations, ed. Simon Shen and Shaun Breslin, (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2010), 73-89. 130 A. Golub and K. Lingley, “Just like the Qing empire: Internet addiction, MMOGs, and moral crisis in contemporary China.” Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media 3 (1) (2008): 59-75. Guobing Yang,

control it. Besides the measures mentioned above, other measures were added: removal of sensitive search results by search engines, editing or deletion of blogs containing politically- offensive keywords, registration of ordinary users who use net cafés, blocking certain URLs, a whole network of government provisions and legislation, and extra-legal controls. All of these, together with exemplary cases set by punishing figures such as Mu Zimei and Jiao Guobiao, also induced self-censorship. 131

As mentioned above, in March 2004, the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership launched a campaign to “further strengthen ideological and moral construction of minors,”132 signifying the convergence of the CCP internet control policy, its real target. The CCP Central Committee and

State Council’s Suggestions decreed that “all kinds of internet websites should fully realize their social responsibility, actively spread advanced culture, and advocate a civilized and healthy cyber culture.”133 According to People’s Daily, a campaign to crackdown on internet pornography was purported to come from President Hu Jintao and to be executed by the Bureau of the Internet under the News Office of the State Council and the semi-official CNNIC with the

Department of Propaganda not being mentioned at all.134 Most websites considered politically dubious by the CCP were shut down and many websites carrying pornographic content also

“The Internet and civil society in China: A preliminary assessment,” Journal of Contemporary China 12 (36) (2003): 453-75. 131 OpenNet Initiative, “Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study,” https://opennet.net/studies/chin#toc5. Accessed Augest 10, 2013. 132 CPC Central Committee and State Council, “CPC Central Committee and State Council on Further Strengthening and Improving Suggestions of Ideological and Moral Construction of Minors,” People’s Daily, March 23, 2004. 133 Ibid. 134 People’s Daily, July 21, 2004.

disappeared. A large section of gay websites also ceased to exist thereafter, as we will discuss later. After 2004, the CCP had formed what OpenNet Initiative calls “the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world.” 135

Chinese netizens, in the meantime, have developed new means to counter the Party’s control, by using anti-censorship technologies such as proxies to access censored contents, and developing a rich online vernacular. It seems that at some point a new equilibrium between the

CCP’s regulation of the internet and the new possibilities created by Chinese netizens and new technologies has been reached.136 The internet, unlike the traditional media that were subject to tight authoritarian control, will be a place for co-evolution between control and countermeasures.

This study focuses on the first decade of the internet in China, from the establishment of

Chinese websites outside the country in the early 1990s to 2005. Chinese online gay subculture and cyber writing, too, have demonstrated different features than the first decade of the internet after 2004, as I will show later in this chapter, for online gay culture, and in the next two chapters, for online gay narratives. This division, however, like any other, is sketchy and meant to provide more of a conceptual than temporal division, for there are cases appearing after 2005 that still demonstrate features of the early Chinese internet. The focus of this study is thus the gay subculture and narratives within the features of the early internet. Periodization will be kept in a loose way, allowing some exceptions that do not fit neatly into that period.

135 OpenNet Initiative, “Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study,” https://opennet.net/studies/chin#toc5. Accessed Augest 10, 2013. 136 Yang Guobin, “The Co-evolution of the Internet and Civil Society in China,” Asian Survey Vol. XLIII, No. 3 (2003): 405-422.

2.2 Building an Online Gay China

Dramatic social changes and historically eventful times can contribute to a sharp sense of one’s generation and can divide relatively close age groups into distinct generations with remarkably different life experiences.137 In the case of China, where things have been changing at a dazzling speed for more than a century, this statement has become only too obvious. As Liu

Fengshu observes, “[as] a result of the spectacular social transformation in the reform era, every decade, even every few years, may represent a dramatically different context for young people in their formative years.”138 For men desiring men, the sense of a passing youth was yet more acute, as the years one could steal for same-sex engagement, if any, would be terminated by a switch to a heterosexual lifestyle. In the late 1990s, however, encountering the internet set that particular group even further apart from other generations, as that juncture, converging with a set of social-economic conditions, would provide an unprecedented time to redefine the meaning and practice of same-sex desire, hence a new self and collectivity.

Coming of age right before or slightly later in the inchoate years of the internet in China, the pioneering cohort of this generation of legitimate bachelors certainly carried the characteristics of early users: typically born in the 1970s, most of them were in their twenties in the second half of the 1990s; they were urban residents in well-developed metropolitan centres such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong province, or overseas students in North America or

Europe; they were well-educated, generally with college or higher education or were studying or

137 June Edmunds and Bryan Turner, Generations, Culture, and Society, (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002). 138 Liu Fengshu, Urban Youth in China, 128.

working abroad; they were in the higher spectrum of the population in terms of income, usually working for research institutes, foreign companies, or the government, or were studying at a university. The periphery of this group, however, could be extended to those who encountered the internet in their early thirties or the late teenage years, who were born the late 1960s or the early 1980s, and those who lived in the smaller cities or those who were less socially, economically or educationally advanced. In some individual cases, special personal traits might be more important than the age in defining their legitimate bachelorhood—for example, unusual resistance to marriage in years much beyond the socially legitimate bachelorhood or single men with past marriages.

Homosexual existence at the dawn of the internet, as reflected in the inchoate field of story for men desiring men at that time, as our survey in last chapter revealed, were confined by the fishery stories about the transitional, fragile and ephemeral nature of male-male love. Even though stories of desire, romantic love, and coming out were starting to circulate, the possibilities of realizing these stories remained weak. Had China not opened to the internet, this generation of men desiring men would have followed their forerunners to end their legitimate bachelorhood, likely with greater struggles, since they could see the new but faint outlines on the horizon and yet, these possibilities might have just slipped away from between their fingers.

The advent of the internet, however, posed a sudden opportunity for the legitimate bachelors that had not been imagined by the earlier generations. As the authorities still fell behind the digital divide, and censorship had yet to snake into cyberspace, a gap appeared, separating the virtual world from the real world. Before that gap narrowed, the early internet was a wonderland for those who crossed it first. Once online, one suddenly merged into a world

where geographic, cultural and political boundaries were rendered virtual. At a distance afforded by the screening effect of the digital gap, the ambiguity against homosexuality lost a great share of its potency, and an epistemological space arose to allowed men to develop a meta-sense about life. In this new space, life was no longer what was given but became readable and writable.

Thus, two different worlds and two different lives crashed head to head at the advent of the internet in China: on the one side, it was a world charged with oppressive silence against homosexual desire; on the other, an open and inchoate world where the pressure from the authorities was light, and homosexual desire could be realized. Living in both worlds at the same time, these men desiring men entering cyberspace became the generation placed at the moment of crossing from print media to the internet, from a life for others to a life for oneself, from the fishery subculture to a yet to emerge gay subculture. The possibilities looming only at the margins of the market economy became clearer in cyberspace. The window period in which homosexual desire was embedded could for the first time lead to a world other than heterosexual marriage.

Encounters with the internet and being the first ones to domesticate it, of course, was an experience not limited to homosexual legitimate bachelors. Other members of the same generation with similar backgrounds also found the newly opened online space thrilling. For others with prestigious positions in the real world, the internet was a tool for productivity, a thrilling toy, a fashionable activity; nevertheless it was for advancing their position in the real

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world. 139 If to an extent the internet was a more thrilling extension of the real world to their contemporaries, it was a new dimension leading to new experiences for men desiring men.

Furthermore, what the internet meant to an individual or a group, and how they would integrate it in their life were also generational. 140 The majority of the generations before that of the ‘70s tended to be less computer- and internet-savvy, as age and late integration of computer and English education were factors contributing to their shyness towards computers and the internet.141 Research also found a generational tendency to “take comfort in conformity”— meaning more passive usage patterns—among older Chinese. 142 The younger generations born in the late 1980s and 1990s, on the other hand, are “internet natives” who grew up “in” or with the internet. 143 An already popularized internet for these “natives” is not particularly revolutionary, nor an exciting novelty, but a mundane necessity. 144 In the case of China, in addition, the younger generations tend to use the internet as a means of entertainment rather than a research tool.145 Even for men desiring men before and after the generation of the 70s, history did not place them at a moment of crossing two different eras. The ones before them had

139 Jung, Qiu and Kim, “Internet Connectedness and inequality: Beyond the ‘digital divide.’” Communication Research 28 (2) (2001): 507-535. 140 Ibid. 141 Bo Xie and Paul Jaeger, “Older adults and political participation on the Internet: a cross-cultural comparison of the United States and China.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 23 (1) (2008): 1-15. Also Jung, Qiu and Kim, “Internet Connectedness and inequality: Beyond the ‘digital divide.’”. 142 Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing: pleasure, sovereignty, and self-cultivation in China’s capital.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (3) (2005): 303-327, and Bo Xie and Paul Jaeger, “Older adults and political participation on the Internet: a cross-cultural comparison of the United States and China.” 143 China Daily, for example, reported a 2010 survey conducted in Guangdong province that “found 80 percent of the 1,000 primary and high school students polled started surfing the Internet before they turned 10.” China Daily, July 8, 2010. 144 Sally McMillan and Margaret Morrison, “Coming of age with the Internet: A qualitative exploration of how the Internet has become an integral part of young people’s lives,” New Media & Society 8 (1) (2006): 78-95. 145 Liu Fengshu, Urban Youth in China: Modernity.

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withdrawn to heterosexual lifestyle; the coming generations of gay men would grow up in a gay subculture that was about to emerge online and offline.

As a contrast, the peculiar position of crossing two realms and ages prompted the legitimate bachelors who encountered the internet to take advantage of it as a liberating force.

The greater their confinement and suffering in the real world, the greater their desire to bring aout change; hence the greater agency in expressing oneself and reaching out to one’s own kind when new opportunities appeared. The internet was both a catalyst to generate great agency, a free space to accommodate an otherwise unviable desire, and a new field of story where the new stories would come to narrate themselves. With great agency matched by few others, this generation of legitimate bachelors’ encounter with the early internet fostered a new gay identity and lifestyle to breach the political and traditional authorities’ ambiguity and prohibitive silence against homosexuality.

The early online world for men desiring men in China, while relatively free, was also one with a great vacuum to fill. There were abundant gay websites in other languages, especially in

English. Like the Chinese online world at large, the building of the Chinese gay cyber world also started outside the borders of China, but only a few months or one year earlier than the foundation of their domestic counterparts. The diasporic Chinese students were the first ones to come into touch with the urban gay culture in North America and Europe, and later, the English gay newsletters and websites. Many of the first gay websites in Chinese came into being from the earliest gay groups’ newsletters in North America. The most popular among them was perhaps gaychina.com (founded in 1996), a website famous for its personal ads before 2000. In

1997, a conference was held by the Chinese Society for the Study of Sexual Minorities (CSSSM,

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华人同志研究会) in Los Angeles; one of its resolutions was to found a Chinese electronic magazine about homosexuality. Taohong Man Tianxia (桃红满天下, A World Suffused with

Pink, hence TMT), a magazine aiming to introduce intellectual engagement with homosexuality published its first issue on September 5, 1997.146

The most important mission of these earliest gay websites was to reach into China. Er

Yan (二言), one of the founders of TMT, recalls how they tried to attract attention from visitors from home:

After publishing a few issues, we started to consider how to spread the news back to China. So we just copied some email addresses on Gaychina, and “delivered” a few issues of TMT to them. … After this step, we not only made the greatest progress in spreading TMT to readers in China, but also started to receive submissions from China.147

Shortly after the foundation of the first Chinese gay websites in North America and

Europe, a few gay websites soon appeared in Hong Kong and Taiwan. By the time China Public

Computer Internet launched commercial service in January 1996, an online Chinese gay world had started to grow outside of the borders of China.

When the gate to the internet opened, the first men desiring men to surf the internet in

China suddenly found that they were just a few clicks away from this gay world. The very first ones visited English portal sites—www.yahoo.com was one of them—to access this world.

Later on Yahoo! Hong Kong (yahoo.com.hk) and Yahoo! China (yahoo.com.cn), then Netease

(yeah.net), Sina (sina.com.cn), or Sohu (sohu.com) became available. A few more clicks from

146 “The editors’ forewords”, in Taohong man tianxia 桃红满天下 [a world suffused with pink, hence TMT] vol. 1, September 5, 1997. 147 Er Yan 二言, “Danqiu goutong” 但求沟通 [All I wanted was communication], TMT vol. 32, October 26, 1998.

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the home page of these sites and one reached a whole new online gay world where hundreds of gay websites, in Chinese, English or other languages and based in various countries, were available on the screen. On the home page of Yahoo! China, the most popular portal site before

1999, for example, one clicked on the category of “shehui yu wenhua” (社会与文化, society and culture), which led to a subcatalogue including “xingbie” (性别, gender or sex). With one more click, one arrived at a sub-sub-catalogue under which “aiqing” (爱情, love), “lianwupi” (恋物癖, fetishes), “xingfanzui” (性犯罪, sexual crimes), “bianxing” (变性, transsexuals), “tongxinglian yu shuangxinglian zhe”( 同性恋与双性恋者, homosexuals and bisexuals), “xingjiaoyu” (性教育

, sex education), “jiaoyou lianyi” (交友联谊, personals), and “xingbing” (性病, sexually transmitted disease) were listed. Clicking on “tongxinglian yu shuangxinglian zhe,” one reached a page where gay websites were listed, in English, Chinese, and other languages. From there, a gay world comprised of gay-related news from the world as well as from China, personals, pornography, chat rooms, and gay literature would unfold itself. To men who were seeking cues from toilet literature in the public toilet, entering this world from an ambiguous China was surely a life-changing experience that set them on a different route in life.

Coming into touch with the online gay world outside of China immediately prompted a few pioneers to build websites of their own. Setting up a website in 1999, according to Jiang

Hui, a webmaster of Whitepaper of Love (gaychinese.net), required “no big expenditures or considerable technical knowledge,” and one could “construct an independent website by

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adopting ready-made programs.”148 The cost to cover fees of a virtual server and an independent domain name was 30 to 50 US dollars. 149 This was not out of the reach of one with a well-paid job, as the average monthly income in China in 1998 was 177 US dollars.150 Many major websites at that time, in addition, provided free space and subordinate domain names to host personal homepages. The obstacles were, rather, possession of a computer or at least access to one, basic computer skill, some knowledge of English, but most of all, the great courage to construct an online settlement to host others, since ordinary people were educated, so to speak, only to be guests.

Ruo Zhe (若哲) was a 24-year old English major university graduate working in

Guangzhou in 1998. He goes by the Chinese transliteration of “Roger”. His encounter with the online gay world was, in a sense, fate:

Once it suddenly occurred to me to check out information about “tongzhi.” This was a secret buried in my heart for many years. So late at night when no one was around, after a while, I found some news [about tongzhi], in English. At that time, there were no advanced search engines available [like] today, or if there were, I wasn’t aware of them. With great care, I read the letters in newsletters. From those letters I found out that there were many, many people like me. I was extremely excited, and also had an indescribable feeling of being wronged [before].151

148 Jiang Hui, “ICCGL: Cultural communication via the Internet and GLBT community building in China,” (Paper presented at Sexualities, Genders and Rights in Asia: 1st International Conference of Asian Queer Studies. Bangkok, Thailand: AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Mahidol University; Australian National University), 3. 149 Ibid., 6. 150 China National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical Yearbook (1998), http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/information/nj98n/index98.htm, accessed August 10, 2013. 151 Ruo Zhe, quoted in Tong Ge, “Tongzhi wangzhan: tongzhi shequ de zifa jiangou” “‘同志网站’: ‘同志社区’的自发建构 [“‘Gay Websites’: The ‘Gay Communities’ Self Construction”], in Zhongguo tongzhi renqun shengtai baogao 中国同志人群生态报告 [An Ecological Report on the Chinese Homosexual Population], Vol. I, ed., Tong Ge et al, (Beijing: Beijing ji’ande zixun zhongxin 北京纪安德咨询中心, 2008), 180.

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After discovering the online gay world, Ruo Zhe started to change the personal home page that he founded in March 1998, and devoted it to tongzhi-related contents. The new home page was renamed “Guangzhou Tongzhi” (广州同志). For Ruo Zhe, this new website meant a great deal both for himself and for men of his kind that were still to emerge:

At that time, [I had] two clear purposes [for founding the website] in my mind: The first one was to vent. I wanted to tell the whole world that I was a tongzhi, even though I was only able to do that on the web, yet it could release the oppression put on me. The second one was to summon up [other men], to tell those who had similar painful experience that their fellows were here.152

This demonstrates what was mentioned earlier, the epistemological moments. When one comes to see that one’s individual sufferings are shared by others, that sympathy—the sickness they share is nothing but love—opens the door to great motivation. To tell stories at those moments led to a completely new story.

Gangzhou Tongzhi was one of the earliest websites to appear in China that remains influential today. Another influential website, Whitepaper of Love (Aiqing baipishu, 爱情白皮

书), was founded by two lovers to commemorate their love. The story of how these two men met has become a gay legend widely told by the founders and, later on, the team who took over the management of the website from the couple. The two young men, who go by their English names Keinng and Kevin (K & K), both lived in one of the first cities to be affected by the

“opening up,” Xiamen. Keinng was an engineer who “luckily had free access to the internet” and thus came across a Chinese tongzhi website, where he found the personals section and sent out an email responding to a message. Kevin, who posted the message, was a student in college

152 Ibid.

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who had a computer at home—“my father would fight with me for the computer.”153 After a few emails, some in English, they established a relationship with each other in 1998. Keinng, being in the last years of his bachelorship, was expected by his parents to get married soon. During a visit for Chinese New Year in 1998, he revealed his sexual orientation, an unusual act encouraged by his relationship with Kevin, but which only caused his parents to worry greatly.

Returning to Kevin in Xiamen, the two men discussed building a website while Keinng dealt with his family’s worries. The website came as a surprise from Kevin on March 27, 1999, as

Keinng recalls:

Soon I had been back [from the Chinese New Year visit] for more than one month. With great effort from both Kevin and myself, I gradually stepped out of the shadow [of that visit]. In the meantime, Kevin was talking to me about building a website hosted by the two of us. At the beginning, I was not sure if we could succeed. A few days later, however, Kevin came to my dormitory. He looked weary, but with excitement, he told me that our home page has been launched. I went online in a hurry to type “kk77.163.net”, whitepaper of love; indeed, our website had been launched. Reading the humorous opening written by Kevin, I suddenly understood something. It turned out that Kevin built this website all for my sake. He wanted to use the chance of building this site to encourage me, support me and distract me from thinking of those unhappy things! From our home page, I heard a familiar song—my favourite—“If Only Lovers Can be Together Forever.” Tears wet my eyes. Now I also devoted myself to the construction of our website and started to build and manage many sections. At this moment Kevin and I have the same wish: it is our hope that our efforts could serve and help more tongzhi friends. … This is the story, my life has found a place in another world along with the establishment of this website, and Kevin and I are closer to each other because of this website.154

153 Keinng, “Keining de huiyi” Keinng 的回忆 [Keinng’s memory]. Kevin, “Kevin de huiyi” Kevin 的回忆 [Kevin’s memory], in http://www.gaychinese.net, last updated October 15, 2000, archived June 8, 2000 by Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20000510043416/http://www.gaychinese.net/index1.htm. Accessed August 10, 2013. 154 Keinng, “Coming Out” [title originally in English], in http://www.gaychinese.net, last updated October 15, 2000, archived June 8, 2000 by Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20000510043416/http://www.gaychinese.net/index1.htm. Accessed August 10, 2013.

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To their happiness, Keinng’s parents later accepted their relationship, and so did Kevin’s parents. The website subsequently became a demonstration that true love between two men was possible.

In another case, A-Qing, an engineer from Beijing whose story we have mentioned in

Chapter One, built a website in 1999, Splendid is Tonight’s Starlight (jinye xingguang canlan, 今

夜星光灿烂), to promote the “outdoor activities” he unapologetically lived out in his own life.

The focus of the website was to provide detailed information about Beijing’s gay venues, most of them visited by A-Qing himself to provide first-hand information:

Now that I had completed sublimation from thinking with my lower body to thinking with my upper body, I was not satisfied with just playing around every day. I wanted to reclaim a place where I had a right to speech, where I could promote my thoughts, propagate my theory, disseminate my ideas, and carry forward my sub-subculture. Hence the website Splendid is Tonight’s Starlight.155

Ruo Zhe, K & K and A-Qing were all typical of the privileged legitimate bachelors in terms of their economic, social, and educational levels. But in some extraordinary cases, encounter with the internet could provide great impetus to young men who found themselves in less favourable conditions. Yue Liang (岳亮), a young man from a small city in the interior of

Henan province who had experienced great pain dealing with his sexual orientation since the age of16, also single-handedly founded a website by overcoming tremendous difficulties. A high school graduate who worked in a work unit in a small city, Yue Liang did not have the social, economic, or geographic advantages shared by other early gay site founders, yet he perhaps

155 A-Qing, “Shinian pengyou, shifen qinqie” 十年朋友，十分亲切 [ten years of friendship, ten times more endearment], PYTX, Vol. 63 (2008).

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better demonstrated how the extraordinary agency of a legitimate bachelor at that crucial moment could overcome tremendous difficulties to contribute to building a new online Chinese gay world. In 1998, when the computer was still new to ordinary Chinese, and the internet had just been available commercially for one year, Yue Liang mastered computer skills and authored one of the first personal websites in China. Yue Liang tells the course he went through from an isolated man in a small city to a founder of a gay website at a conference held by Pengyou

Tongxin:

After graduating from high school, I isolated myself from the world. I attempted suicide. And for 7 or 8 years, I could not even tell my story to anyone. I saw no future.

In 1995 I corresponded with someone who posted a personal ad in a magazine. That was the first time I had contact with homosexual society as a homosexual (tongxingai zhe). In 1996 I posted my personal ad in a film magazine … I was not isolated after that anymore. In two or three years, I corresponded with more than 100 homosexuals around the country, and the number of letters came to be more than 600. In the meantime I started to collect materials about homosexuality, including fiction, biographies, sexological studies, articles in newspapers and magazines and video tapes and VCDs, and I made notes of more than 100,000 characters about these materials. Later on I called the Beijing AIDS hotline, and made connection with Qingdao’s Dr. Zhang Beichuan. Through letters, phone calls and the internet I made contact with dozens of homosexuals and introduced Pengyou Tongxin to them. In August 1998, I attended a conference for homosexuals in Beijing and in December of that year my personal website, Moonboy (月亮男孩), launched on the internet. As an owner of a homosexual website, I attended a discussion program on BBC Chinese. I had a dream: to found a gay magazine. Several years of material collection and the advent of the internet made my dream true—I founded my personal website. My site focuses on introducing homosexuality-related figures, literature, arts, and films and representing homosexual culture. At present there are more than 200 daily visitors to my site, and the number of visitors has surpassed 100,000 since it was founded. 156

With great devotion, Yue Liang’s website, as well as most of these early gay websites were maintained on a volunteer basis. Managing a website required enormous time, energy, and

156 Yue Liang 岳亮, “Women de weilai” 我们的未来 [Our future], PYTX Vol. 19&20 (2001).

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money that were much higher than the initial fees. As most of the founders were not connected to others at the beginning of the foundation of their websites, they had to undertake the task all by themselves. For those with no professional background, resolving technological problems must have been a weary task. To gather information and keep the website updated required a long time spent on the internet. The extravagantly high internet fees the ISPs charged at the time, in addition, were onerous for those who had to pay their own internet fee. To keep his website running, Yue Liang spent “the amount of money of a monthly salary on books, video disks, stamps, phone calls, and the internet,” and “nights in front of the computer” to update his website.157

Despite these difficulties, the early internet was also relatively open. Portal websites such as the early Netease (网易 www.yeah.net) provided free space to accommodate personal homepages, making it easy to found one’s website without worrying about logistical issues.

Censorship against contents on the internet was still inchoate.

Once men like Ruo Zhe in China realized that they, too, could build websites on their own, a wave of newly-created websites appeared starting in 1998, a clear result of these men’s great passion that was not matched by many others. These first gay websites, most of them aiming at a national population of men desiring men, included the most popular sites like

Reddust (花醉红尘, huazui hongchen, china.reddust.net, 1998), huadie (化蝶, “Butterfly

Incarnation,” butterflyer.yeah.net, 1998), Guangzhou tongzhi (广州同志, “Guangzhou

157 Ibid.

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Comrade,” www.gztz.org, 1998), Aiqing baipishu (爱情白皮书, “Whitepaper of Love,” www.gaychinese.net, later, www.aibai.com, 1999), Pengyou bieku (朋友别哭, “Don’t cry, my friend,” notearsky.easthome.net, 1999), Women a women (我们啊我们, “we and we,” weandwe.com, 1999) and Gongtongde yangguang (共同的阳光, “Shared Sunlight,” commonsunlight.yeah.net, 1998), which was later amalgamated with two other websites and renamed to Yangguang didai (阳光地带, “Sunny Zone,” sunlightzone.yeah.net, 1999).158

Stories shared by builders of other early websites are similar to those of Ruo Zhe, K&K,

A-Qing and Yue Liang. At the moment when they encountered the internet, experiences in the old world—the sufferings, confinements, sentiments, and desperations related to being men desiring men in the real world—formed a great contrast with the freedom and possibilities promised by the new digital world. This steep contrast between the two worlds was sublimated into extraordinary courage, motivation, and creativity, reified and realized in building websites in a new world. Constructing a website, while a private and individualistic expression and outcry, was simultaneously an enterprise undertaken for all of one’s own kind.

Slightly after the first gay websites established their position as national portal websites, the chat room, and later on, QQ (the Chinese equivalent of MSN) became popular around 1999.

Real time interactive messaging systems provided men with a direct chance of finding and meeting men in the same city. The personals section, featured in the earliest websites, was still popular, but became secondary to live chat. A second wave of building local and more content-

158 After their establishment, all these websites have since changed their domain names, or in some cases, ceased to exist, due to various reasons I will turn to in the last section of this chapter.

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specialized websites soon followed. By 2004, all provinces and municipalities, even the most remote ones, had gay websites for local men, usually named after the province’s or city’s name.

Some provinces had more than one local gay websites. Some even had sites at the prefectural level. Among these websites were Guizhou’s Qianshan Yuan (黔山缘, “Guizhou Karma,” qsy.cn, 2000), Guangxi’s Qiuzhou Wuyu (旧州物语，壮族同志, gxfcghhww.xiloo.com, 2001), and Chongqing’s Chongqing Tongzhi (花样年华，重庆同志, “Abloom Years,” 1999), to name but a few.

As the number of websites grew, a network connecting these websites also rapidly expanded. Many websites provided links to fellow gay websites. For the newly founded sites, links on more popular sites were crucial in gaining popularity. In one case, when few mainstream portal websites were willing to list Whitepaper of Love, K & K’s desperate requests for help were responded to warmheartedly by founders of the other gay websites, who immediately created links to Whitepaper as well as providing technical support.159 Whitepaper, too, provided links to support other fellow sites. As this fellowship developed, many of these sites became interconnected to each other.

By October 2000, a survey by Ai Dehua (艾德华) found 318 Chinese websites featuring homosexual content listed by a mainstream portal site, sohu.com, by entering “tongxinglian” (同

159 Kevin: “Nuli: aibai jianwang manyue huixiang” 努力：爱白建网满月回想 [Endeavours—Some Reflections upon One Month of the Foundation of Whitepaper of Love], in http://www.gaychinese.net, last updated October 15, 2000, archived June 8, 2000 by Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20000510043416/http://www.gaychinese.net/index1.htm. Accessed August 10, 2013.

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性恋, homosexuality) in sohu’s search engine.160 In 2002, according to a survey conducted by

Zhang Xiaojin (张小金), 268 websites were listed under Sina’s category of “homosexuality and bisexuality.”161 In 2005, Jiang Hui (江晖) estimated that there were 300 to 400 Chinese websites serving China’s homosexual population.162 My retrieval of Boysky.com’s section dedicated to introducing same-sex websites, captured by Wayback Machine on October 3, 2002, found 525 websites. As the discrepancy of these figures suggests, the exact number of gay websites in

China has been evasive, since the websites have been in flux all this time. But these websites, with their large number and interconnection, both on the national and local level, and with extensions to gay websites worldwide, had formed a transnational online world for men in and outside China.

2.3 Reddust as an Example of an Early Gay Website

What did these early gay websites convey and what did they mean to their visitors? What did they look like in the eyes of that generation of men who had just come across the internet?

What did they mean at that juncture when a new medium emerged in a nation dominated by political and traditional authorities? What did they provide to those crossing the worlds on and off the screen? While each tried to demonstrate distinct characteristics, the layout and content of many of these first gay websites also shared similarities. This section will take Reddust (huazui

160 Ai Dehua (艾德华), “Zhongwen tongxing’ai wangzhan ji aizibing yufang” 中文同性恋网站及艾滋病预防 [Chinese gay websites and HIV-prevention], PYTX Vol 19&20 (2001). 161 Zhang Xiaojin (张小金), “Wangluo shidai de nannan xingjiechu he aizibing ganyu” 网络时代的男男性接触和艾滋病干预 [Male-male sexual contacts and AIDS-prevention in the age of the internet], PYTX Vol 32 (2003). 162 Jiang Hui, “ICCGL: Cultural Communication via the Internet and GLBT Community Building in China,” 2.

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hongchen, 花醉红尘), by far the most popular gay website between 1998 and 2000, as a primary example to conduct an analysis of the early gay Chinese websites.

Built and launched by Jwind by June 18, 1998, Reddust almost immediately became the most popular website among gay men in China from 1998 to 2000. Its click count, as shown in

Figure 2.2, reached 545,440,520 by December 4, 2000, the date it stopped updating. More than merely a website, Reddust was one of the websites many men coming across the early internet related their homosexuality to. Even ten years after its closing, men would still mention it on forums such as tianya or in their love stories, often echoed by others with nostalgia.163 Figure 1 is a snapshot of the website taken by an online archiving website, Wayback Machine

(www.archive.org), on July 20, 2001, by typing in “touchv.com” to retrieve the website’s archive.164

The name of Reddust itself, as discussed in the opening part of this chapter, incorporated a paradoxical feeling of homosexual love that was yet to be realized in an ephemeral world.

Upon entering the website, a soft and sentimental melody keeps playing while the website is open. On the top of the screen, above a picture of a gazing handsome young man, a motto reads:

“Reddust, connecting your world and mine.” To the left of the screen, under the art of Steven

Walker, is the news section, where recent headlines are listed. In the center of the screen, the following main sections are included: Suiyue hongchen (岁月红尘, Days in the red dust) is the

163 There are many threads on tianya.com and other websites such as boysky.com. 164 Reddust had stopped updating since December 12, 2000, and changed its domain name from “www.china.reddust.net” to “www.touchv.com.” The website’s last update remained December 12, 2000, until it finally ceased to operate in October 2003.

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literature section; Lianlian hongchen (恋恋红尘, Loving in the red dust) is the section for personals; Gungun hongchen ( 滚滚红尘, turmoil of the red dust) provides a “detailed map of venues for tongzhi in China,” under a miniature map of China. To the bottom of the screen are

Liaotianshi (聊天室, chat room), liuyanban (note board), and Hongchenba (红尘吧, reddust bar)—“a community forum.” Under the chatroom and reddust bar is a search bar and a web index. To the bottom of the web index is a gallery showing nude upper bodies of a few men. To the right side of the screen, space is allocated for “G Wave” (G 浪), “China’s first cyber magazine in Chinese for tongzhi,” a horoscope section, and “centre of video and audio”, where a snapshot of the film “East Palace, West Palace” was used as an icon. Underneath it is a link touting “NetDNA,” software developed by Reddust for website construction.

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Figure 1 Homepage of Reddust as captured on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

The setting and contents of the website, shown above, were that of a portal website that served a group, instead of that of a personal home page, despite the fact that the website was founded by an individual. A small picture of Jwind appears at the lower-left corner of the main page, under the rubric “Contacting the Webmaster.” However, this is the only part in the website with a personal tint. This poses a great contrast to many “homopages” founded around the same

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time by individuals in, say, the US, where sharing one’s personal life and interests was dominant.

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We might point out four special characteristics of Reddust. Above all, the website brings together materials that were once scattered or unavailable in the real world and out of them, for the first time, it created a space in Chinese that is explicitly and openly centred on homosexuality. The internet, as Manovich points out, could assemble otherwise scattered elements—videos, audios, texts, images, etc.—to form an assemblage with new meanings. 166

Such an assemblage, however, is not one comprised of homogeneous elements but rather, one that largely resembles a scrapbook harvested from the online gay world, from the literature section to the news section. Some parts were appropriated from the world at large: the icons for the chat room section and the forum section are pictures of pop music star Su Youpeng (苏有朋) and movie star Jin Chengwu (金城武, Takeshi Kaneshiro), both popular among men desiring men in China but neither confirmed as homosexual. The assemblage, by remediating heterogeneous elements in cyberspace, formed a milieu in which each element gains greater signifying space.

Reddust thus contrasted sharply with clandestine fisheries, or commercial venues like the bars, bathhouses and nightclubs. Whereas men had to look for signs of their own kind in covert

165 See Jonathan Alexander, “Homo-Pages and Queer Sites: Studying the Construction and Representation of Queer Identities on the World Wide Web,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7 (2002): 85- 106, Gregory Weight, “Closetspace in Cyberspace,” 1998, http://www.english.udel.edu/gweight/prof/web/closet/index.html, accessed September 20, 2013, and Gregory Weight, “queer wide web?” 1999, http://www.english.udel.edu/gweight/prof/web/queer/index.html, accessed August 10, 2013. 166 Lev Manovich, The Language of the New Media, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 30-32.

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languages in the margins of magazines or urban spaces, they could now find them in unequivocal words and explicit images: homoerotic pictures, videos, and texts all came as they were, without being negated, diluted, distorted, or coded by the institutional or moral interdictions of mainstream media. The convergence of these elements also intensified their power: the sheer density of these signs, positive and unseen in the offline world, has the effect of forming a milieu that was viable for each of the constituents. Furthermore, each element was organized with care, as if they were legitimate. On the other side of the screen, in front of fully opened eyes, that would be converted into a startling effect.

Second, sex, sex between men, is the dominant message conveyed by the website. The young attractive faces and bodies, the gallery, the logos, and indeed, every element in the web page are pointing to sex between men. At the same time, the representation of sex within the webpage was sharply different from that without—In the real world, it was associated with danger, moral dilemma, and guilt, and above all, hard to come by. In Reddust, however, sex is intensified, explicit, friendly, sincere, beautiful, and worthy of yearning. And compared to the fisheries where sex was impersonal, sex on this side happens in a space and time, with its specificities, as embodied by the smiling man gazing with seductiveness and friendliness, whose image merges with the blue sky and the horizon behind him. Furthermore, sex is associated with love, or precisely, a sentiment for romance. The aesthetic design, the accompanying music, and the Buddhist connotation of the website’s name, all speak of sex not as impersonal sex—like that in the fisheries, where ends at the same place, the same time—but as a beginning of true love that will lead to a life journey. The prevalent usage of “red dust” as both the name of the website and its sections, in the meantime, also suggests a sentiment that such love would become dust in a

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relentless world, yet an aesthetic sublimation that is achieved through the reassurance of the beauty of love despite its ephemerality.

Third, another set of symbols that repeatedly appears on the website is transnational inclusiveness. The personals section is a “centre for international Chinese personals messages.”

The online magazine, G Wave, is “China’s first online magazine in Chinese that … will be published across the [Taiwan] strait in three territories [China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong].” The news section, too, advertises Reddust as a transnational gay website by listing titles of transnational gay-related news: a Hong Kong director talking about his new tongzhi film, the

Chinese Psychiatric Association now considering homosexual behaviours as normal, another gay website founded, and news from the city of Shenzhen. The icon of a miniature map of China, clicking on which leads to “detailed map of gathering spots for tongzhi activities,” is a nationwide gay map symbolizing an inclusiveness that embraces every gay man looking at it. As the motto of the website states: “Reddust, connecting your world and mine,” it seems that the

Chinese identity was accentuated as a tie connecting men desiring men. Yet this accentuation is apolitical. Political statements advocating same-sex love, of any kind, are absent from the site.

No pink triangles, no rainbow color schemes, nor any other icons or slogans are used. This again presents a sharp contrast to gay home pages from Western countries, which, according to

Jonathan Alexander, extensively made use of common symbols, 167 or in my observation, even

Reddust’s Hong Kong or Taiwanese counterparts. Considering that most of the early website

167 Jonathan Alexander and others note the similarities of many queer home pages based in U.S., especially the use of pink triangles and rainbow color schemes: Jonathan Alexander, “Homo-Pages and Queer Sites: Studying the Construction and Representation of Queer Identities on the World Wide Web,” and Gregory Weight, “Closetspace in Cyberspace,” and “queer wide web?”.

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builders were familiar with English, and certainly had studied other gay websites, this seems to be not neglect but a deliberate choice.

Fourth, all these three sets of symbols—sex, love, and the Chinese nation—overlap and permeate each other, and from there arises narrativity. Perhaps not by coincidence, all the men’s icons seem to be distanced from the viewers of the website, another contrast to the American gay homepages examined by Alexander, which tend to foreground personal images to reach out to visitors. 168 The primary icon, the man looking directly into the viewer’s eyes, while suggestive, friendly and inviting, is a distance away, not reaching out to, but seducing the viewer to cross the space in between. Other images of men are all separated from the viewer by some distance: they either look into the space in between the viewer and the screen, or look into a space further into the screen, as in Steven Walker’s portrait of the two men under an umbrella. Spatial distance invites a journey to cross it. In addition, there are also symbolic distances: sex and love are both distanced away from the browser, and there are also the emotional distances between sufferings from the past and the happiness from the yet-to-become. This is especially encapsulated with the motto in the vertical bar: “[Being lovesick] day after day, it is better to walk through the trails of red dust; straying in the world, thereafter to see the colourful clouds shoulder to shoulder.” A journey is to be made through the trail of “red dust” in order to reach the romantic scene at the end.

Reddust might have been the best designed site of its kind, but other early homosexual websites also carried similar layouts. The sections featured in Reddust (homosexual-related

168 Ibid.

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news, personals, literature section, gallery, and links to other websites) also comprised the major section of other contemporary websites. Sex, sentiment, trans-China inclusiveness, narrativity, and apoliticalness were features shared by almost all the early gay websites. The major websites such as Don’t Cry, My Friend (朋友别哭, pengyou bieku, notearsky.com), Tongzhi Karma (有缘

同志, youyuan tongzhi, luckygay.com), Light Blue Memory (淡蓝色的回忆, gengle.net), and

Weandwe (我们啊我们, women a women, weandwe.com), despite their individual characteristics, shared simililarities with Reddust are obvious—as the names hint. Other sites might appear to be different in term of the sentiments they conveyed: Guangzhou Tongzhi, as its logo of “healthy, cultural, and diverse” states, set out to be a more comprehensive and informative website. Boysky (阳光男孩 sunny boy, 阳光地带 sunny zone) features a more bright and light-hearted view about homosexuality. Whitepaper of Love, on the other hand, differentiates itself as “the first tongzhi couple’s website.” But all of the four sets of symbols mentioned previously are present.

Interlinked, these early websites, each an enclave, formed a transnational establishment to shelter men desiring men from a harsh offline world. In these shelters, sex between men became positive, similar feelings formed an emotional bond, Chineseness provided cultural belonging, and narrativity unfolded a collective journey alongside same-sex love and romance.

These Chinese websites suggest also an important difference between the formation of gay identity in China and the West. Extensive studies have identified gay ghettoes appearing in metropolitan centres in the U.S. and other Western countries as a necessary condition for the rise of gay identity and, later on, the gay movement. Gay ghettoes provided space for gay men to look for sexual and romantic partners, build social networks, find accommodation, and all these

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activities were conducive to the formation of gay identity as they were the place for gay men to be gay. Gay ghettoes also served as bases for gay social and political movements, as the placees where opinions were gathered, consensuses formed, and morale mustered. As Michey Lauria and Larry Knopp contend: “Gays have done more with space than simply use it as a base for political power. They continually transform and use it in such a way as to reflect gay cultural values and serve the special needs of individual gays vis-à-vis society at large.” 169 Other venues such as public washrooms, on the other hand, can be viable for casual or impersonal sex but not for personal, communal, and political interactions.

Compared to the requirements for the validity of a gay ghetto listed by Martin Levine—

“large numbers of gay institutions and cruising places, a marked gay culture, socially isolated gay residents, and a substantial gay population,” 170 no city in China in the late 1990s could form a gay ghetto as such. In the late 1990s, despite twenty years of opening up and the implementation of capitalism, a large part of Chinese society was still encumbered by the pre- market bureaucracy and the CCP’s social control methods. As the hukou (resident registration) system still prohibited free immigration, and the danwei (work unit) still exercised a general surveillance over its employees, and with the city itself divided between various danwei, there were much smaller urban spaces for establishing gay enclaves. Along with this, the political authority kept a cautious eye on any attempts to form any sort of separate society, and the traditional authority of Confucian obligations to the family remained powerful for men. While homosexual commercial venues were emerging, as Lisa Rofel, Wang Yanhai, Ruan Fangfu, and

169 Mickey Lauria and Larry Knopp, “Towards an Analysis of the Role of Gay Community in the Urban Renaissance,” Urban Geography 6 (1985): 659. 170 Martin Levine, “Gay Ghetto,” in Journal of Homosexuality, 4:4 (1979), 363-377, pp. 374-375.

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many others have observed, these locales were limited by a number of restrictions: Most of the commercial venues operated on an ambiguous basis, usually avoiding any political or overtly

(homo)sexual association. Geographically, not only were their numbers too small (Rofel, for example, counted five gay bars in Beijing in 1999), they were also dispersed all over the city and could hardly form an enclave distinctive enough to maintain any sort of sovereignty. In the meantime, gay establishments were subject to the constant and capricious harassment of the government, and as a result, had very unpredictable, if not ephemeral, lifespans. The closing down of On and Off for hosting the abortive Homosexual Subculture Festival in 2004 was but one example. In China’s context, a gay ghetto that was particularly conducive to the affirmation of homosexuality or homosexual identity has never existed.

The appearance of homosexual websites in China’s context, then, had a paramount significance for men desiring men. Without requiring the elements involved in building gay ghettoes in the real world, the internet acted as an extra dimension in which the existing social, political, economic, and discursive system were kept away in the distance. There, with the easiness of establishing virtual settlements, an individual like Jwind could maintain an online institution for a national audience. Sites like his served as the space in which the various meanings of homosexuality could converge, circulate, affix, intensify, and gain more currency among men. The hyperlinks of the internet, in the meantime, wove these websites into a transnational network, rendering geographic, institutional, and semiotic distances merely clicks.

It is from these virtual gay ghettoes that a homosexuality, a set of concepts that embraced a way of being, an identity, a life and its narratives emerged in China. Yet the online gay ghettoes did not position “individual gays vis-à-vis society at large”, as Levine’s study of San Francesco and

Los Angeles suggests; rather, it positioned individual gays at a distance away from society at

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large. This brought qualifications to a gay identity and collectivity arising from cyberspace. I will continue to weigh these qualifications in the following chapters and the Conclusion.

2.4 When Legitimate Bachelors Encountered the Internet

While the websites were expanding and connecting, a population ready to colonize these new settlements was also emerging, and different men encountered the online gay world in different ways. Some men, before having had the chance to use the internet, had already sensed a vast gay world out there simply by employing their experience of tracking same-sex signs, and they reached out to this world by actively seeking a gateway to the internet. Some searched on the internet for information related to sexual orientation out of intuition, and that led to a mind- blowing discovery. For others, it might take some luck to come across the cyber gay world, especially in the very early days. Yet for a majority of men, the linking of the internet to same- sex desire came from other men. No matter how one came across this cyber world, being on the other side induced epiphanies. In one case a man found a self unknown to himself. This man,

Xia Dong worked in a powerful work unit with one of the first linked offices in the province:

At that time I had an account on East Netscape (dongfang wangjing 东方网景). Once I forgot to type “.cn” after the website address. Something unexpected happened. It shocked me and made me excited, as if a totally new life was startled in my body. I guess there was another self lurking inside my life, and that self was awakened by the internet inadvertently, in a transposition of time and space.

That website without “.cn” was a pornography site.

…

I suddenly felt the dead silence in the office suppressed me like a net I could not get rid of. It was irresistible and it dashed all my hopes into pieces. I wailed, almost cried my heart out and threw it back at this desperate world. My innocence and nature that had left me long, long ago woke up when I was crying. I saw myself and other kids playing by the old well near the primary school in my hometown, and my mother coming back home, carrying a hoe on her shoulder.

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If I had not glimpsed that picture accidentally, maybe this window would be nonexistent for me forever, and my wife and I would still be adjusting to each other, trying to tolerate each other, until that person whose name is “Xia Dong” was utterly disheartened with love.

But that was no longer a possibility. The window was opened.

At that time Chinese gay websites could already be found on the internet. All of a sudden, I found my own kind and I felt my sky was broadened, and my life again swelled with happiness. After I knew my real identity, I crazily browsed the internet, so that I could know as much as possible about this “self”. 171

Already married, Xiao Dong divorced his pregnant wife and “escaped” to Beijing, where he told this story to a reporter, Chen Liyong (陈礼勇), founder of “China’s first gay news website” Chinese Tongzhi News Network (gaybyte.com, 中同新闻网). In an obvious attempt to emulate An Dun’s bestseller, Absolute Privacy, Chen employs sentiment, cool narrative gesture, and exaggerated emotion, among other things, to colour Xia Dong’s story as a discovery of self, a metaphor very often offered in sexual stories. Despite all these props, however, the basic story bespeaks a convincing encounter with the internet, and if Chen is trying to tell a gay parable, his vision still holds insights. Xia Dong’s flashing back to his childhood, especially, was because of the epistemological tunnel effect we have seen among the first site builders. At the click of a mouse, a man desiring men not only experienced the acceleration of time/space compression described by David Harvey, 172 but also a shrinking of the semiotic and ideological distance that separated him from accessing his homosexual desire. The moment Xia Dong experienced is a short circuit of the most resilient attachments. One the one end it is childhood experience and

171 Chen Liyong 陈礼勇, Zhongguo tongxinglian diaocha 中国同性恋调查 [Investigation into Chinese homosexuality], (Hong Kong: Tianma chutu youxian gongsi 天馬圖書有限公司, 2003), 77-78. 172 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 1989.

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the homecoming mother, behind them the agricultural village life that symbolized the deepest cultural image of Chinese life, on the other end it is the utmost sign of modernity, the internet, carrying homosexual pornography. The sheer contrast between these two ends, compressed in a time span of minutes, was a sudden shock leaving permanent marks: There was a discovery of homosexual desire and an affirmation of it. There was a new self shedding off the old one and there was a farewell to a deep past, as symbolized by the well. The initial encounter with the internet led to more, and there would be no way back.

With increased chances of meeting other men, many applauded the ease of finding sexual partners. Sexual experience in the real world and further affirmation in virtual gay space consolidated many men’s resolve not to assume a heterosexual lifestyle and opened new life chances to them. From there, men could, perhaps for the first time, forge a new lifestyle centred on their homosexuality. For Ren Haiyong (任海勇), later an owner of a law service company, who since childhood always knew that he would not get married but had no homosexual experiences, the internet broke down the loneliness in his life and brought with it a lover:

I had always been yearning for a same-sex lover. Such a pity, that there was no internet back then, nor a suitable environment or any means by which I could find my own kind hidden in the sea of the crowd. I lived in loneliness for 30 years.

I learnt to use the internet in 2001, after graduating from university. I was surprised to find out that I could find same-sex lovers on the web. For a while, I went crazy, looking online day after day. I posted my personal ads, gave out my phone number, chatted with men, met with men.173

173 Ren Haiyong 任海勇, “Wode anquantao jiushi bu rutao” 我的安全套就是不入套, [Not Trapped and One Is Safe], PYTX Vol. 58 (2007).

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After a number of meetings, Ren found his love in July, 2001. They bought an apartment and moved in together. Ren even took his father to Shanghai, and he “treated Xiaopang [Ren’s lover] as family.” 174 K & K’s story, mentioned earlier, was another with a happy ending started off from an online personal ad. The internet played the role of catalyst in bringing the advantages men like Ren gained in the market to the fulfilment of a new lifestyle, and after that, these legitimate bachelors would not revert to their expected niche in heterosexual marriage.

Coming across the online gay world could even break the life cycle prescribed by the pre- internet pattern. Many men who married before the age of the internet, having once encountered the internet, found that they were now in a predicament that would have once been “dissolved” in heterosexual marriage. A man signing himself as “A Gay Looking for Help” [the word “gay” is in the original] wrote to Pengyou Tongxin:

I had thought that once I got married, had a child, and made advances in my career, my sexual orientation would gradually be rectified. But until now this has not happened. Last year I saw a report about lesbians in the local evening paper. That prompted me to search online. Inadvertently I found the online fiction Beijing Story and later on I was surprised to find that there were many platforms built particularly for tongzhi—tongzhi websites and chat rooms.

Ever since I grew up, I have never been able to make decisions for myself at the turning points of my life. When I graduated, the university offered to advance my education so that I could teach there later. But my father peremptorily refused to approve. I respected my parents’ advice. Likewise for my marriage. And now with responsibilities for my child, I don’t know how to deal with my feelings.

How can I resolve the dilemma between responsibilities and feelings? How can I relieve myself of despondence and sorrow? I’m really exhausted.175

174 Ren Haiyong, “Women zai yiqi, tiantian xiang guonian” 我们在一起，天天像过年 [Every day is like Chinese New Year as long as we are together], in PYTX vol. 60 (2007). 175 Letters, PYTX Vol. 59 (2007).

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In some cases, encounter with the gay world online might even shake up a well- established life, or men far off from the spectrum of legitimate bachelors. Zhang Guowei, the colonel doctor whose experience was mentioned in Chapter One, discovered the internet in 1999 at the age of 58: “The advent of the internet brought a new world to me. Soon after I learned to use the internet, I found homosexual websites. The world there was really wonderful, and the feelings I repressed for decades were finally released.” 176 In 2000, in order to meet a man he knew online, Zhang revealed his sexual orientation to his family. The result was separation from his wife and the freedom to meent men, and he comments: “I think I have been dedicated enough, and it’s time for me to enjoy freedom.” 177

As the internet gained popularity, more and more men related their homosexuality to the internet; from men in “an isolated village surrounded by mountains,” 178 to university students who “had been living in loneliness…,” 179 after crossing the threshold to the online world, men

“suddenly had a sense of belonging, as if I found my home among… tens of thousands of people like me.”180 The two stories we quoted at the beginning of Chapter One would also continue in similar ways.

176 Zhang Guowei 张国威, “Wode tongxing’ai yu qixing’ai shenghuo qinli yu fansi” 我的同性爱与异性爱生活亲历与反思 [My homosexual and heterosexual life experiences and reflection], PYTX, vol. 39 (2003). 177 Ibid. 178 “Yige jihu juewangde nanhai” 一个几乎绝望的男孩 [An almost hopeless boy], “Zuo yige tongzhi ku, zuo yige shancun tongzhi gengku 做一个“同志”苦，做一个山村穷“同志”更苦 [Hard to be a Tongzhi, even harder to be a poor one in a village], in PYTX Vol. 46 (2005). 179 Anonymous, “Fanluande xinqing you qizhi yige ‘chou’zi liaode” 烦乱的心情又岂只一个“愁”字了得 [How could a single word ‘sad’ gather up my disturbed feelings], PYTX Vol. 46 (2005). 180 Ibid.

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As the internet spread from the few pioneers to more ordinary users, a vast online gay population appeared, and the number of active visitors to these websites increased greatly. In

Zhang Xiaojin’s 2002 survey, one of the most popular websites, boysky.com, attracted as many as 70,000 visitors on September 8, 2002, and total visitors of 40,577,198 from October 12, 1998, when it was founded, to September 8, 2002.181 Reddust, as we mentioned before, boasted

545,440,520 visits by December 4, 2000. Personal ads now appeared in large numbers: Ai

Dehua’s 2000 survey counted 4,496 personal ads on Reddust and 1,136 on Weandwe.182 Zhang

Xiaojin’s survey counted 47,970 personal ads on Guangzhou Tongzhi, and 3,263 on a local homosexual website, Dalian Tongzhi. 183 With the use of e-mail addresses and aliases, anonymous love messages could now lead to meetings with men within a short distance from oneself, which once had to be avoided for fear of exposure by using one’s real postal address and name. The numerous online chat rooms on both homosexual and mainstream websites were hives full of men seeking connection to others: one of the most popular websites in Beijing featuring chat rooms at the time, Beijing Tongzhi (北京同志, bjtongzhi.com), on a ordinary week night could see as many as 391 chatters, a number probably limited by its full capacity of 400.184

Popular mainstream websites such as Sina (新浪, www.sina.com.cn), Xilu (西陆, www.xilu.com) and Biliao (碧聊, www.biliao.com) all had tongzhi chat rooms. QQ, the Chinese

181 Zhang Xiaojin (张小金), “Wangluo shidai de nannan xingjiechu he aizibing ganyu” 网络时代的男男性接触和艾滋病干预 [Male-male sexual contacts and AIDS-prevention in the age of the internet], PYTX Vol 32 (2003). 182 Ai Dehua (艾德华), “Zhongwen tongxing’ai wangzhan ji aizibing yufang” 中文同性恋网站及艾滋病预防 [Chinese gay websites and HIV-prevention], PYTX Vol 19&20 (2001). 183 Zhang Xiaojin (张小金), “Wangluo shidai de nannan xingjiechu he aizibing ganyu” 网络时代的男男性接触和艾滋病干预 [Male-male sexual contacts and AIDS-prevention in the age of the internet], PYTX Vol 32 (2003). 184 “Beijing Tongzhi,” http:/gd3.ichat.net.cn:2050/login (the host website for Beijing Tongzhi’s chat rooms), archieved July 17, 2004, Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20040804041917/http://gd3.ichat.net.cn:2050/Login, accessed August 10, 2013.

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equivalent of MSN, gained great popularity after 2000, and boasted sixty-eight million users in

2003, becoming a standard destination for early internet users.185 BBSs on mainstream websites such as Tianya (天涯, www.tianya.cn), Xici (西祠, www.xici.com), as well as those of gay websites, could boast tens of thousands of registered users. Chunai (纯爱, www.chunai.com), a gay website known for its pornographic content as well as online discussions, had 10,652 registered users on November 29, 2003.186 Before long, the internet had become a major means of men making connections with each other.

The online world also afforded footholds to reach the real world from without, and a new version of offline gay subculture, too, was taking shape. From gay news in China and other countries, gay novels, stories of other men, locations of gay venues in cities, personals, chat rooms, pornography and forums, gay websites rapidly expanded the scope of gay existence beyond the fishery and individual isolation. Men were better informed and better connected than ever before. In bigger cities, gay websites helped extend impersonal sex to friendship and interest groups, and groups merged to form a larger social network, where cities like Beijing had volleyball, badminton, and swimming teams, recruiting their members on sites like Beijing

Tongzhi. Men in smaller cities or the countryside, many of whom would have had to live their whole life without knowingly meeting a single man of their kind, could reach further to meet other men in the region or even other places through connections made online. Some men’s life

185 For a brief history and social significance of QQ, see Pamela Koch et al., “Beauty Is in the Eye of the QQ User: Instant Messaging in China,” in Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, ed. Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland, (NY and London: Routledge, 2009), 265-284. 186 Chunai (www.chuan.com), archived December 24, 2003 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20031224141023/http://www.chunai.com/ipb/, accessed August 10, 2013.

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journey to the city even started from the virtual gay world. The online gay world also contributed to the boom in homosexual venues by providing precise information about venues and tips on avoiding unwanted situations. By calling other men to meet at a certain venue, gay men also used these websites to create new fisheries, which would have needed a longer time to form organically in the years before the internet.

With the websites serving as online ghettoes for men, and with more and more men gaining access to the internet, and with the ease the internet afforded for online and offline interactions, the internet became a broad gateway to homosexuality. Men entered cyberspace to become gay and left it forever changed, and this happened on a large scale afforded only by the internet. For more and more men, homosexual desire became a desire with the power of defining one’s self and life. Interconnected more than ever, each individual was increasingly aware of others as contemporaries. A gay identity was thus emerging from the online space. The culture of the legitimate bachelor, prescribed by the pre-internet subculture, while still remaining, was no longer the only option for many. A sense of a collectivity, too, became conceivable, as once one was online, one was existing among one’s kind.

2.5 Conclusion: Individual Agency, the Internet and Gay China

The early websites, interlinked to form a national network, also linked their gay men to one another to form a national population. Upon their clicks, typing, video and audio sharing, and other actions seeking sexual or romantic partners, these first internet users were performing a national congregation of homosexuality. A sense that there were others who shared the same desire, the same feelings, and the same cultural and historical setting became conscious, and from this consciousness, a sense of a collectivity became evident. The internet’s capacity of

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granting instant access to online sites and interactivity with each other, in the meantime, enabled men to imagine a national collectivity connected by their homosexuality.187

In turn, the expanding social scope in the real world increased men’s agency in building the online world. The interaction between the online and offline worlds became an ongoing process and as a result, a much larger, more engaging, and more encouraging culture took off.

The internet not only hosted the cyber gay world, it also served as an anchoring resource shielding men from the influence of the traditional and political authorities, and providing a space where men could refresh, reflect, reassure, and draw more agency to face the authorities in the real world. From each individual who identified himself as gay, and from the online and offline erotic worlds they built, rose a transnational gay China.

This gay China existed, however, largely in cyberspace. It had connections to the territorial China, but these connections were porous, and they were secondary to hyperlinks in cyberspace. To paraphrase Fran Martin’s observation of a “Lesbian cyber-China…like a kind of electronic ghost nation, floating above the solid ground of the territorial China(s),” 188 we could say that a large part of this gay China was moored to a set of key concepts shared by these first homosexual internet pioneers: homosexuality, sentiment of past suffering, longing for love, and an identity as Chinese. This gay China, despite its virtuality—or thanks to its virtuality—could connect gay men in China across vast geographic distance, urban and rural divisions, semiotic

187 For the interactivity afforded by the internet, refer to Lister et al., New Media: A Critical Introduction, (London: Routledge, 2003), 19-23. For an earlier study on interactivity, see Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 63. 188 Fran Martin, “That Global Feeling: Sexual Subjectivities and Imagined Geographies in Chinese-Language Lesbian Cyberspaces,” in Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, ed. Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland (New York: Routledge, 2009), 285-301.

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obstructions deployed by ambiguity, institutional boundaries, familial encumbrances, naturalistic sexuality, and atomic homosexual existence.

While we have been giving primacy to the early internet in engendering a Gay China, it should not be seen as a single factor but as a peculiar juncture where and when a set of factors converged and were catalyzed. At the time of the advent of the internet, a set of social changes had appeared: coverage of the topic of homosexuality in the media, commercial print culture, represented by national magazines carrying coded personal ads, individualist quests for organic connections among men by men, urban venues such as fisheries and commercial sites in big cities, grassroots NGOs, national academic/medical icons speaking on the topic of homosexuality, an international gaze on Chinese sexuality, an individualist urge to live out homosexual desire, and behind all of these, the rise of consumerism and individualism with the market economy. All these factors, however, were checked by a vigilant Party which treated homosexuality as a symbolic breach of its imaginary boundary of moral order. The resilience of the Confucian emphasis on the heterosexual familial institution, in the meantime, still prevailed.

Under strong political authority and traditional authority, the new factors could create a few refuges in major metropolitan centres, but were not sufficient in raising up a gay China that reached the semiotic boundary of the Chinese nation and give a sense of homosexual identity that was strong enough to unify individual beings.

The potency of the internet was derived from the historical juncture at which it appeared in China. In a world ruled by heavy political and traditional authorities, a sudden mutation of the setting was able to break the historical stalemate to provide new paths. In the U.S., as Allan

Bérubé’s study shows, World War II served as a triggering opportunity for the rise of

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homosexuality as a lifestyle and an identity.189 The War enrolled young men and women and placed them in circumstances composed of their own sex, and provided opportunities for them to develop gay experiences. When the war was over, these men and women had the opportunity to stay in big cities, where they could develop a subculture based on their sexual desire for their own sex. Such a subculture fostered the formation of a homosexual identity, and in turn gave impetus to the gay rights movement in North America.190 The advent of the internet, similarly, added an alien factor that could transcend the impasse, and was itself the catalyst that was capable of converging and translating the social, cultural, and economic transformations into a critical condition that engendered a homosexual identity and a gay China.

The potency of the internet was also derived from its particularity as a new medium. In

Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the print media played a crucial role in creating modern nationalism by addressing its audience repeatedly as citizens. The vernacular used by the print media, together with the advance of printing press capitalism, as Anderson argues, functioned as a popular carrier of the messages of the imagined communities as they could reach people who were otherwise separated by dialects and geographic barriers.191 Media in this sense was indispensable in the formation of the modern nation and other imagined communities.

189 Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Woman in World War Two, (New York: First Plume Printing, 1991). 190 Ibid. 191 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition, (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

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In the Western gay movements, a central project was to challenge mainstream society’s hegemony over the media. Gays and lesbians in Western societies either had their own media, or had the opportunity to articulate their sexual desire in mainstream media. The coming out story as the predominant form of Western gay narrative is related to the need to speak in mainstream media.192

In China, traditional and political authorities had foreclosed the appearance of homosexuality in mainstream media with prohibitive ambiguity, and thus inhibited a shared identity among men desiring men. In the very first years of the internet in China, however, there was an interstice in which the authorities’ power was thin as the authorities were for a very short time impeded behind the digital divide. It was in this interstice that a few legitimate bachelors took advantage of the internet’s capacity of self-publication and free transmission of messages, to forge a means of conveying homosexuality. The internet, then, became the medium to carry the messages needed for men to imagine a shared gay identity and a gay China. The ability of the internet to engender a sense of place, in addition, enabled it to function as an (online) base for men from which to draw reference for constant reaffirmation of their identity. McLuhan’s doctrine, “the medium is the message,” once again proved to be true: for men desiring men living in the silence on homosexuality, the internet carried homosexuality within itself.

The internet, however, could not bring about changes on its own. To convert the potency of the internet into actual changes, actors were needed. It was the first internet users whose agile grasp of the opportunities brought up new lifestyles, gay identity, and a gay China. This group

192 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, (London: Routledge, 1994).

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of men, most of whom were born in the 1970s, derived their great enthusiasm from carrying the experience of living in pre-internet times into the time of the internet. On the one hand, this group suffered the hardship of living in a generally prohibitive ambiguity against homosexuality.

Their greater social, economic, and educational advancements, however, also meant a stronger demand for an individualistic lifestyle, and subsequently, an even more acute realization that their legitimate bachelorhood was slipping away. On the other hand, the advent of the internet suddenly opened them up to direct contact with the vast online gay world, where foreign imagery of gay lifestyles was teleported right in front of their eyes, and the freedom of reaching other men desiring men was within their grasp. The sharp contrast between the two poles, happened all of a sudden, producing great emotional charge, epistemological transformation and great passion to drive them to act up. The once overwhelming adversary was converted into great agency that propelled these young men to realize their forbidden desire online. Realization of personal dreams and expressions of individual feelings became the means to reach out to men with similar experiences. The desire that was once hard to come by in ambiguity became the centre of the self. The hardship that was once suffered in isolation, once shared, became a strong tie that bound men together. The websites as expressions of individuals became expressions of fellowship. From that fellowship arose a sense of connectedness. Once the strong desire of reaching one’s kind was matched by the internet’s power of disseminating and hyperlinking, this generation bridged two eras of history, and a new identity and a gay China were created.

So far I have described how the encounter between the internet and a group of internet- savvy legitimate bachelors brought about a gay collectivity and gay identity in Chinese cyberspace. At this point, this study joins earlier studies to argue for the emergence of a gay identity and collectivity in China in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. However, while the

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existing studies attributed its rise to the social, economic, and political changes brought by the market economy and globalization (Lisa Rofel, Loretta Wing Wah Ho), or made more general statements about the effects of the internet on same-sex attracted men in China (Loretta Wing

Wah Ho, Chou Wah-shan, Wang Yanhai, Travis Kong), I offer a closer examination of how exactly a gay collectivity and identity appeared through website building, online communication, and the interaction between the online and offline worlds. By doing so, I contend that while other conditions were indispensable to the emergence of gay identity in China, it was the legitimate bachelors who agilely grasped encountering the internet and translated all these conditions into a new way of homosexual existence with a new meaning and practice of homosexual desire.

The binding of homosexuality with the internet has its own implications. The particular route the emergence of individual and collective identities took—via the internet—has endorsed some congenital features of Chinese homosexuality: it floats above the territorial, political, and a great part of cultural China. Compared to Western countries, the internet served as the most critical institution of homosexuality. In a more complicated way, the contest between homosexuality and authorities happened in both cyberspace as well as in the real world, and the clash will continue to happen in similar ways. Our study of gay narratives in the next chapters will further inquire into this question.

2.6 A New Stage of Online Gay Culture

If so far my depiction of the encounter of the legitimate bachelors and the internet is somewhat romanticized, at this point I need to emphasize that the internet had never been a utopia with complete freedom. The authorities had never closed their eyes to the internet and

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gay websites. From the very beginning, gay websites were a target of cautious surveillance that sometimes led to exemplary punishments. The authorities, if for a very short time having fallen behind the digital divide, soon stepped across and started to impose prohibitions against homosexuality. In a report dated February 20, 2002, China Tongzhi News Network called for the attention of webmasters of gay websites: Five men were arrested in Hubei province for buying pornographic disks from the Chongqing-based website Boy Videos (男孩影视). Shenzhen

Friends’s (深圳交友) webmaster Xiaowu (晓无) was called by the Bureau of Public Security, and a series of gay websites were shut down, among them some with national popularity— weandwe.com, a widely popular site showing some political tendencies, for instance. In these cases, pornographic content, the author of Tongzhi News Network’s report believes, caused the problems with the state. 193 Besides interference from the government, a few other factors also contributed to the ephemerality of the early gay websites: ISPs were not willing to carry these websites on their servers, due to the sensitivity of the content; the shortage of financial, motivational, or temporal supplies, too, caused some webmasters to abandon their websites.194

In addition, mysterious hacking, “chronic, organized, with backing,” had been targeting some

193 Chu Tian 楚天, “Zhonguo tongxinglian xuyao shuli shenmeyangde xingxiang” 中国同性恋需要树立什么样的形象 [What Kind of Image Do Chinese Homosexuals Need to Set?], February 20, 2002, quoted in Cong Rong 从容, “Zunzhong duoyuan geren xuanze de shehui qushi yu zhongguo tongxinglian xingxiang” 尊重多元个人选择的社会趋势与中国同性恋形象 [Respecting the Social Trend of Pluralist Individual Choices and Image of Chinese Homosexuals], Aibai, February 25, 2002, http://www.aibai.com/infoview.php?id=3295, accessed August 10, 2013. 194 Chu Tian 楚天, “Zhonguo tongxinglian xuyao shuli shenmeyangde xingxiang” 中国同性恋需要树立什么样的形象 [What Kind of Image Do Chinese Homosexuals Need to Set?], and Jiang Hui, “ICCGL: Cultural communication via the Internet and GLBT community building in China,” 3.

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gay websites, especially the tremendously popular Reddust. 195 After stopping its updates in

2000 and moving the website to various servers and changing the domain names, Jwind announced the closing down of Reddust in an open letter in October, 2003.196

With the launch of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao campaign to “further strengthen ideological and moral construction of minors” in 2004, stringent internet surveillance swept gay websites.

All the websites were requested to register with the Public Security Bureau. The regulations that were only casually implemented before became effective. The sheer amount of bureaucratic procedure and time and labour needed to go through to comply with official regulations was onerous for any individual running a non-profit website. The government’s deliberate holding off of registration of websites with sensitive contents and exemplary shutting down of websites with pornographic contents were also used to purge the internet. As a result, most websites with dissident political claims were picked out by the regulators. Many gay websites disappeared; and the rest had to change their survival strategies. Among the ones that continued to exist,

Whitepaper of Love was taken over by a volunteer team, and rented a server in the US, and

Boysky became a commercial site crammed with commercial links. Other sites experienced reduced popularity, or had to associate themselves with an NGO.

Online gay culture itself, too, had began to show different features by 2004. The initial passion and freedom that prompted the legitimate bachelors to build this online world gradually

195 Jwind, “A letter to all friends on the web from Reddust” (花醉红尘 (touchv.com) 致广大网友的一封信), July 19, 2004, Danlan, www.danlan.com. Accessed Augues 10, 2013. The website had used quite a few domain names, including http://www.tzlove.net/, http://www.nease.net/~jwind/, http://hzhc.china.com/, http://reddust.chinaren.com/, and lastly, http://www.touchv.com. 196 Ibid.

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faded, partly due to the reasons mentioned above, partly to the shift of the first webmasters’ life cycles. Many of this generation, more than ever, chose to live on as confirmed bachelors, but some of them made recourse to heterosexual marriage. No matter what the case was, advancement in life or career no longer afforded them the leisure, freedom, or motivation to maintain their websites. The composition of internet users, too, had gradually shifted to a broader spectrum of the population. The new generation, born in the mid- or late 1980s, were more native to the internet as well as online gay culture, and they did not have the experience of crossing from one age to another. Commercialization of the internet and a stronger influence of global gay culture also brought changes to China. 197 In addition, with personal blogs becoming popular, the importance of the early gay websites also declined. By 2005, the early stage of the internet and the early stage of gay online culture had shifted to a new phase. This new phase will certainly be a topic of other future studies.

I have chosen to leave the emergence of online gay narratives and their signification out of the discussion of this chapter. One of the most spectacular phenomena brought by the internet was the explosion of gay narratives—the ones we discussed in this chapter are but a fragment of it—and these narratives are at the centre of building an identity and forming a collectivity. The rise and signification of gay narratives are the topic of the next chapters.

197 For an account of commercialization and influence of global gay culture, see Loretta Wing Wah Ho’s study of mid- and late 2000s gay and lesbian subculture, Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China.

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Chapter 3 Beijing Story and the Articulation of Gay Identity 3 « »

All of you, the living and the dead, look at me!! I will never disguise it and hide it. I will stay by his side!!! You can sing high praise of your love and embrace and kiss your lover in public and yet I am forbidden from crying for my dead love?!! 198

The above is a quotation from the most read gay narrative in China, Xiao He’s (筱禾)

1998 novel Beijing Story (beijing gushi, 北京故事). It is one of the very first articulations of homosexuality in China, made by the hero Handong mourning his his lost love, Lan Yu, who lies dead in a hospital’s morgue. The violence as well as the occasion in which this articulation was made signify the extreme difficulty of speaking out about homosexuality.

In Opening Up, James Farrer observes that by the 1990s, almost two decades after the launch of reform and opening up, the process of individualization and the market had brought significant changes to heterosexual relations that were accompanied, regulated, justified, and sometimes contradicted by stories and other forms of unofficial culture in Shanghai heterosexual youth culture. 199 Yet the same set of new factors did not change sexual culture for men desiring men to the same degree, at least in the early and mid-1990s. Before the advent of the internet,

198 Xiao He (筱禾), Beijing gushi 北京故事 [Beijing Story], Ch. 31, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=175&id=11&msg=筱禾说书. Accessed September 10, 2013. Henceforth Beijing Story. Since its publication on Chinese Boyz II Men’s Paradise in 1998, Beijing Story can be found on many websites, and there are minor differences between different versions. I choose the version posted on a BBS dedicated to Xiao He and his work, “Xiaohe shuoshu” 筱禾说书 [Xiao He’s Story-telling], where the author makes regular appearance, as the text of analysis for this study. To save space, I will not provide the website in quotation when Beijing Story is quoted in the following discussion. 199 Farrer, James, Opening Up: Youth, Sex, Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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many were still isolated in an atomized existence. The others—that is, the active ones—were still largely confined to venues such as “fisheries” or the emerging bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses sprinkling the city. The interactions among these men were categorized as wan (玩), or “playing,” meaning sexual relations without either lasting relationships between the sexual partners or collective activism on a larger scale. With the exception of the minimal fishery narratives recounted in Li Yinhe’s Homosexual Subculture or the like, the homosexual subculture was largely abstract, divorced from geographical, historical, and narrative specificities and the popular circulation that heterosexual stories enjoyed, effects of the active silence around homosexuality. By 1997, the second year when China was officially opened to the internet,

Tong Ge’s Good Man Rogo and Cui Zi’en’s Pink Lips were published in Hong Kong, yet they still needed the internet to finally reach their readers on the mainland. While heterosexual narratives, as Farrer observes, circulated in all possible sections of culture, from magazines to

TV programs to everyday gossip, significant changes to homosexual life and culture, it seemed, had to wait until a sudden change that was capable of changing the whole social, cultural, and discursive settings; such sudden change would also provide the means to break the ambiguity and circumvent the barriers in formal discourse and narrative.

The new factor that brought transformations to men desiring men in China was, as it turned out, the internet. The establishment of a national network of gay websites, as discussed in

Chapter 2, largely amplified chances of encounters with other men, and extended venues for same-sex desire beyond the “fisheries” to a much larger range of places in both the online and offline worlds. With these newly afforded opportunities, the mode by which men communicated with each other was also fundamentally changed. In accordance with the space made available by gay websites to accommodate stories that were otherwise rejected by China’s Leninist literary

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production system, new narratives heralded by Xiao He and other pioneering men also emerged, in the tens of thousands. From these websites, men could finally narrate themselves in a positive voice, as legitimate stories, and hear stories told by their own kind.

The characteristics of gay cyber culture outlined in Chapter 2 remained decisive factors for the early gay narratives. These new gay narratives, too, emerged in the process of the remediation of homosexuality from print media to new media, and they appeared rapidly within a very short time span, from about 1997 to 2005. They were authored by a group of men with distinctive generational marks, and they appeared at the particular moment when consumerist culture and individualism were gaining some currency in Chinese society.

I argued in Chapter 2 that a whole set of homosexual culture and lifestyle appeared together, and a new identity centred on homosexual desire, albeit first and foremost collective rather than individual, was formed with the advent of the internet. This chapter will continue with these topics, but concentrate on a crucial factor I left out in last chapter: the early online gay narratives emerging in the first eight years of the internet in China. Through this chapter’s examination of gay narratives, I will advance the arguments made in the previous chapter: If the gay websites provided venues for the rise of a subculture breaking from the fishery subculture, it is the narratives that first articulated this subculture’s claims for an identity and collectivity, endowed it with specific terms, and then united men with a shared understanding of a life that centred homosexual desire.

Narratives are important in the articulation of homosexuality and formation of identity and collectivity in that they form a “narrative understanding” of life and a “narrative identity”— concepts of Paul Ricoeur—that were indispensable in understanding, on the phenomenological

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or experiential level of an individual’s real life, what it meant to be gay, and how to live with desire for one’s own sex in the context of China. In a setting in which a social movement was virtually impossible, and individual challenges to the authorities were without collective support, the significance of narratives in anchoring a gay identity and collectivity is even greater.

With these ideas in mind, this chapter will first provide a general description of the emergence of gay online narratives in the first decade of the Chinese internet. Due to the great volume and number of these narratives, the complicated sites and routes of how they emerged, travelled and disappeared, and poorly archived web history, many details of this recent history have already dissolved into the deep space of the internet. To avoid entangling myself in details that are beyond an individual study, I choose to narrate the rise of Chinese gay narratives in four snapshots—the first two in this chapter and the last two in the next—instead of providing an exhaustive description. These four snapshots are 1) the emergence and spread of Beijing Story;

2) an individual writer, Jet, who started to write slightly after the publication of Beijing Story; 3) the rise and fall of an early website devoted to gay writing, Nanfeng (男风); and 4) a very popular novel, Xiaohu (小虎), posted as a BBS thread on Tianya’s (天涯, tianya.cn) forum dedicated to gay men and lesbians, “Companion” (yilu tongxing, 一路同行).

Beijing Story is chosen not only because of its unmatched popularity, but also because it carries the poetics of the moment of that historical juncture and it pioneered the avenues of gay narratives to come. Jet is chosen as a representative of the generation who encountered the internet, as his works bear the excitement and paradox of this encounter. The other two snapshots will be presented in the next Chapter: Nanfeng is chosen because it played a preeminent role in setting the genres, styles, and vernacularity for later gay narratives. And

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finally, Xiaohu is a good example of participatory writing that is fundamentally different from traditional writing or even early cyber writing. I will also provide necessary links in between these four snapshots, in the hope of providing a sketch of the development of gay narratives in general. In relation to the problems dealt with, this and next chapter’s examination of gay narratives will focuse on the experiential-sociological and extra-textual levels.200 Analysis on the textual level and semiotic and thematic discussions of the narratives will be the tasks of the last chapter.

A caveat for the methodology and sources: many gay websites, as discussed in the last chapter, have not survived the flux of the internet and censorship. Together with these sites, many early narratives have also been lost in cyberspace. Some of them, especially the less popular ones, have since disappeared and will probably be irretrievable forever. Others, again thanks to web archiving sites like Wayback Machine, can still be retrieved in discrete snapshots, albeit in a frozen and fragmented status, with most of their internal and external weblinks inactive. Many narratives, essays, and comments, as well as websites that are not available on today’s web are retrieved from Wayback Machine and my personal backups of some websites.

In addition, I also trace blogs, forum threads, and personal homepages to find pieces of information that are no longer available in the places they originally appeared.

200 The nature of hypertext calls into question the conventional differentiation of intra- and extra- levels of a text, or even the very idea of text itself. As the narratives discussed in this chapter and the more unconventional narratives discussed in the next chapter show, entanglements between hypertext narrative and real life are more complicated, more dynamic, and more influential to real life and formation of identity than those between traditional texts and real life.

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3.1 Beijing Story as a Cyber Sensation

Cyber writing in Chinese, like cyber culture in general, started outside of China. The first cyber fiction is generally believed to be a short story by Shao Jun (少君), “Striving and

Equality” (fendou yu pingdeng, 奋斗与平等), in the fourth issue of the newsletter China News

Digest (huaxia wenzhai, 华夏文摘) published on April 26, 1991. 201 A new literary mode prompted by the remediation of the Chinese character from paper to digital soon generated a wave of writing and reading among overseas Chinese students in North America and Europe.

The earliest major newsletters and websites, including ACT (alt.Chinese.text, 1992), Chinese

Maple Garden (fenghuayuan, 枫华园, 1993), and Xin Yusi (新语丝, New Threads, 1994), all established literary sections as a major component of their websites. Some later websites such as

Ganlan Shu (橄榄树, Olive Tree, 1995), Tricks (huazhao, 花招, 1996), and Airs (guofeng, 国风,

1999), in particular, specialized in the publication of literary works and digitizing the literary canon and cultural classics into electronic text, as well as facilitating online forums. These websites directly fostered the proliferation of new Chinese immigrant literature in North

America.202

201 Jiang Shaochuan 江少川, “Beimei wangluo wenxue de xianxingzhe” 北美网络文学的先行者——少君访谈录, [Pioneer Web Literature in North America—Interviews with Shao Jun], Shijie huaren zhoukan 世界华人周刊 [World Chinese Weekly], http://www.worldchineseweekly.com/a/renwu/zhuanfang/2014/0117/23878.html. Accessed on August 10, 2013. The story can also be retrieved on China News Digest 华夏文摘增刊, cm9104d, April 26, 1991, http://www.cnd.org/HXWZ/ZK94/zk34.hz8.html#2, August 10, 2013. 202 Rong Rong 融融, “Lishi xuanwozhong de beimei xinyimin wenxue—cong Yidai feihong tanqi” 历史漩涡中的北美新移民文学——从《一代飞鸿》谈起 [New North American Immigrant Literature in Historical Whirlpool—Taking from The Goose Generation], Huawen Wenxue 华文文学 [Chinese Literature], November, 2011.

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Early print homoerotic fiction, too, was suddenly made available and accessible online thanks to digital distribution largely free from expenses, bureaucratic processes, material production and censorship. Homosexual desire, for the first time since the 1930s, could be written and read in Chinese characters without the interference of the authorities, and homoerotic stories soon spawned in the open air of the early internet. A story about the relationship between a Chinese boy and a Japanese military doctor in the colonial period in Manchuria by Taiwanese writer ASK, “Qiucan” (秋残, Remnants of the Fall), was highly popular among men desiring men.203 Pai Hsien-yung’s classic Niezi (孽子, Prodigal Sons) was transcribed into electronic text. Cui Zi’en’s Pink Lips and Tong Ge’s Good Man Rogo, freshly published by Hong Kong’s

Worldson Bookstore in 1997, were both transformed into electronic text and circulated widely online. For most readers, both Cui and Tong’s works appeared first in a digital medium, and in this sense, their works are also part of the online narrative movement that would soon spread.

Among the early Chinese websites, one was especially significant for the rise of gay narratives. Yifan shuku (亦凡书库, yifan library, www.shuku.net), founded in the United States in 1997, featured a large collection of books in Chinese, a section dedicated to new writers, and a BBS system boasting the most active and contributing visitors at the time. In particular, Yifan became a breeding ground for homoerotic fiction with its magnanimous capacity and generous acceptance of amateur writers.

203 The date of the publication for “Remnants of the Fall” cannot be retrieved on the visible web. But in an essay dated as early as October 24, 1998, the author Mi Shu (米舒) mentions “Remnants of the Fall” as an example of internet homoerotic fiction written by an “amateur writer.” See Mi Shu, “yige jibu chunqing de chunqing gushi” 一个极不纯情的纯情故事 [An Immoral Innocent Story], Huazhao, Vol. 34, October 24, 1998, http://www.huazhao.org/huazhao/huazhao/9810/1.html, Accessed on September 10, 2013.

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In October 1998, Beijing Story (Beijing Gushi, 北京故事) became a sensation, not only among men desiring men, but also among general online readers. The author was “Beijing

Tongzhi” (北京同志), who later went by another pen name, Xiao He (筱禾). Despite the popularity of the novel and its cinematic adaptation, Lan Yu (蓝宇, 2001), Xiao He has carefully kept his identity private.

Beijing Story is a homoerotic tragedy taking place between the launch of the market economy and the advent of the internet. The dates in the novel are not marked, but deducing from the social happenings in the novel, it starts in 1985, when Chen Handong (陈捍东) and Lan

Yu (蓝宇), the two protagonists, first meet, and ends in 1993, when Lan Yu dies unexpectedly.

Three years later, Handong immigrates to Vancouver, where he narrates the story in 1998. The first-person narrator, Handong, is a rich businessman from a powerful family. In one of his sex exploits, he meets Lan Yu, a handsome student from a prestigious university who sells his virginity to pay tuition fees. Handong wants to keep their relationship purely business-like but gradually falls in love with Lan Yu. The latter, on the other hand, has been devotedly in love with Handong from the beginning and never denies his love. His nonchalance towards

Handong’s money and independent personality, however, often make the latter uneasy. As they get more and more involved, Handong finds himself much less immune to same-sex love.

Wanting to evade social pressure and avoid dealing with his homosexuality, Handong marries

Lin Jingping (林静平), a beautiful woman who unfortunately has to take the role of a villain.

The marriage lasts for only a short time, as Handong is unsatisfied in a heterosexual relationship.

Lin proves to be mercenary and unforgivably responsible for Lan Yu losing his job and subsequent hardship by sending faxes to his work unit imputing him to be a male prostitute. Lan

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Yu’s love, by contrast, proves to be pure: Handong later finds out that Lan Yu left intact the villa

Handong gave him as compensation when they ended their relationship. The two men reunite after running into each other by chance. Lan Yu’s love for Handong remains even when the latter is imprisoned for illegal business dealings. Thereafter they decide to live together but Lan

Yu is tragically killed in a traffic accident, leaving Handong mourning and in deep pain. Three years after Lan Yu’s death, Handong immigrates to Vancouver, where he recalls the story.

The novel was first serialized on Chinese Boyz II Men’s Paradise (zhongguo nanhai nanren de tiantang, 中国男孩男人的天堂), a website that no longer exists. The earliest

“Paradise” page hosting Beijing Story, extracted from Wayback Machine’s archiving capture made on September 9, 1999, is dated October 10, 1998. The links on the page are no longer active, indicating that the earliest posts of the novel and the comments were probably not archived.204 The novel attracted wide attention after Huazhao (花招, Tricks), an American- based electronic monthly dedicated to overseas Chinese women’s writing, carried the novel in its

34th issue (October 24, 1998).205 On November 1, 1998, “Pearl,” a frequenter of Yifan’s BBS, then the most popular literary website among overseas Chinese students with large numbers of domestic visitors, posted a thread on the BBS of Yifan to urge others to read the story—“a novel about gay ... [It] is really well written. [It is] very touching... I seriously recommend it to you

204 Domain name for Chinese Boyz II Men’s Paradise is no longer traceable. The page is retrieved by inputting the websites address “http://207.244.122.48/discussion.cgi?id=11178&article=457” in Wayback Machine’s (http://archive.org/web/) searching window. Archived September 9, 1999 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/19990909000159/http://207.244.122.48/discussion.cgi?id=11178&article=457, accessed September 10, 2013. 205 Huazhao 花招 [tricks], Vol. 34, October 24, 1998, http://www.huazhao.org/huazhao/huazhao/9810/1.html, accessed September 10, 2013.

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all.”206 A debate subsequently unfolded within the thread: many found that Beijing Story lacked literary quality, still others found it “disgusting.” A few, however, after stating that he or she was not homosexual, praised the novel for “depicting true love.” The debate went on, and as recalled by Ling’er (灵儿), then a female student in the US who later played a significant role in the writing group on Nanfeng, Yifan BBS established a section to accommodate discussions related to tongzhi literature that later expanded to become “Free Discussions of Four Seas” (sihai zongtan, 四海纵谈). A sub-section of “Free Discussions of Four Seas,” “Homo-Talk without

Scruples” (tongyang wuji, 同言无忌) became a haven for homoeroticism-themed narratives.207

The posts on “Homo-Talk without Scruples” even outnumbered general discussions on “Free

Discussions of Four Seas”, reflecting the unmatched enthusiasm for homoerotic writing. Yifan has stopped updating and its BBS system is no longer accessible, but in the earliest snapshots on the Wayback Machine, “Homo-Talk without Scruples” had 33,138 posts on January 19, 2000, for example, followed by the “Free Forum of Literature” (wenxue ziyou tan, 文学生活自由谈), which hosted 27,926 posts. 208 The numbers of the two were 40,934 and 30,912, respectively, on

March 3, 2000. 209

206 Pearl, November 1, 1998, comment on Beijing Story, “Yifanwang Beijing gushi zhi liuyanban taolun” 亦凡网《北京故事》之留言板讨论, http://www.shuku.net/novels/beijing/debate.html, accessed Feb 26, 2014. Italicized by me. The word “gay” is originally in English. 207 Linger (灵儿), “‘Sihai zongtan’ zhi jieri huaijiu”“四海纵谈”之节日怀旧) [ Free Discussions of Four Seas and Holiday Nostalgia], http://groups.tianya.cn/post-358927-2701283824285721953278927-1.shtml, Feb. 26, 2014. 208 Sihai zongtan 四海纵谈 [free discussions of Four Seas], http://www.yifanbbs.com/cgi- bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro, last update September 28, 1999, archived January 19, 2000 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20000119020951/http://yifanbbs.com/cgi- bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro, accessed September 10, 2013. 209 Sihai zongtan 四海纵谈 [free discussions of Four Seas], http://www.yifanbbs.com/cgi- bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro, last update September 28, 1999, archived March 3, 2000 by Wayback

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From Yifan, Beijing Story soon attracted a myriad of readers. Every early gay website— at the time the oldest of them, Guangzhou Tongzhi, established in June 1998, was just several months of age—was eager to post Beijing Story for their visitors. With its strong authenticity, the story was of the utmost value among the materials the websites harvested to fill their space.

Even mainstream gateway websites and mainstream literature websites posted Beijing Story in their literature sections. The comment section attached to the novel was always filled with comments by solicitous readers.

The sensation of Beijing Story extended even beyond the internet. In 2001, a cinematic adaptation of Beijing Story entitled Lan Yu, premiered in Hong Kong. The film was then illegally circulated around China despite its official ban. Thanks to the popularity of the film, even the general public was familiar with the story. Even fifteen years after its first appearance,

Beijing Story remains the most well-known gay story in China.

3.2 The Vernacular and the Internet

Why did Beijing Story gain such sensational popularity and become the herald of the myriad of gay narratives that followed? Beijing Story is a good story. Yet there is never a shortage of good stories, and only a few of them get told; even fewer can become popular. No previous narratives about men desiring men, as discussed in Chapter One, had been able to articulate homosexuality in the positive voice of men themselves. Li Yinhe and Wang Xiaobo’s

Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20000303114703/http://yifanbbs.com/cgi- bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro, accessed September 10, 2013.

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sociological survey Their World and Fang Gang’s journalistic report Homosexuality in China were the first ones to narrate the legitimate bachelor’s stories, but distanced themselves by adopting the viewpoint of mainstream society. Mainstream literary representations of homosexuality were distanced and usually negative. Western coming out stories with happy endings, too, were not unfamiliar at all for men who acquired first access to the internet, but these stories were merely fairy tales in the Chinese context. Cui Zi’en’s novels, assuming a post- modernist/queer gesture, ran the risk of rendering themselves irrelevant in an environment where homosexuality was yet to be articulated. Tong Ge’s story collection Good Man Rogo, printed in

Hong Kong in 1997, had to wait for the internet to meet its readers. “Stories have their times,” as Ken Plummer contends, and it was against a proper “backdrop to the creation of the culture of sexual story telling”210 that gave rise to many sexual stories—stories of gay men and lesbians, rape survivors, or pedophiles—and their social significance.

Appearing right together with the advent of the internet in China, Beijing Story was one of the first and certainly the most powerful articulation of the desire for gay identity of the generation of men desiring men who encountered the internet. This articulation itself was a conjunction of the story’s narrative power and its time. This chapter will elaborate the poetics of

Beijing Story at this particular juncture in its pronouncement of gay love and the power of this poetics in spurring a popular movement of narrating gay stories online. But before that we need to bring the concept of the vernacular into our sight, as I believe it is the definitive aspect of narrating homosexual desire on the Chinese web.

210 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories, 125.

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The vernacular, as Glenn Howard defines it, is related to a set of the “single local or

‘home born’ qualities of a particular human communication” that define the forms, materials, as well as experiences that are “distinct from the mass, the official, and the institutional.”211 While

Howard uses the vernacular in a broader sense, here I use the terms “the vernacular” or

“vernacularity” more specifically in relation to story-telling and: 1) the informal language used in everyday life as opposed to formal or written language, 2) the story patterns appear in informal narratives such as folklore, gossip, everyday stories, or popular romance that are usually excluded from high literature, 3) the prosaic or everyday feelings and emotional engagements among ordinary people, 4) a mode of creativity that employs the creator’s or writer’s everyday skills rather than the professionalism acquired through restrictive training or adapting to a certain set of formal regulations, 5) the circulation of these narratives takes informal channels such as oral storytelling, unregulated private publication, or later, the undomesticated internet. Stories told in the vernacular can have an amateurish or popular tint.

Howard further insists that the vernacular could only exist in an opposing relationship to the institutional—in other words, there is no absolute vernacular that is independent of the institutional, and vice versa—thus placing the vernacular and the institutional in a dialectical relationship. Or in Howard’s words, “the vernacular comes to have meaning when it is alien to some institution.”212 The dialectical counterpart of the vernacular is the institutional, whose manifestation in literary narrative employs 1) formal written or literary language to achieve

211 Glenn Howard, “Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web,” Journal of American Folklore 121 (2008): 194-95.

212 Glenn Howard, “Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web,” 194-95.

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certain effects, 2) deliberate narrative patterns and narrative devices to maximize or alter the impact of the story, 3) refined or sublimed feelings or emotional engagement among its characters, 4) restrictive formal regulations, 5) institutional channels of circulation. All of these formalities are, for one thing, to achieve an effect of defamiliarization that distances literary representation from the real life. Moreover, the formalities of institutional literature are intrinsically rooted in its claim to literariness, which always has a stated or unstated political affinity with the institutional. Even very rebellious literary trends reclaiming folklore against the established literary institutions have always had the hidden ambition to the claim of “the real literature.”

Another aspect of the vernacular is that it is an avenue of creativity. Jean Burgess, emphasizing the power of the vernacular in stimulating creativity in people who are marked as unprofessional or amateur, suggests that “the term ‘vernacular’—as with language, where it means colloquial—signifies the ways in which everyday creativity is practiced outside the cultural value systems of either high culture (art) or commercial creative practice (television).”

213 If old media have been mystifying creativity by applying strict standards to the work on the one hand, and rewarding only a very small portion of the population as the selected group with tenancy over creating works, there has always been creativity taking the avenue of the vernacular that appears in everyday story-telling, handcrafting, or make-do without the aid of specialized knowledge, monopolized tools or meticulous training. Commercial production, especially,

213 Jean Burgess, Vernacular Creativity and New Media, (PhD Diss., Queensland University of Technology, 2007), 71.

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reduces people to wage earners with zero creativity who are directed to commodities yielded by mass production on the market, including knowledge.

A clarification for the term “the vernacular” in the Chinese context is needed here. The vernacular is used to refer to the baihua (白话, “plain speech”) as oppose to the wenyan (文言, literary script) in linguistics as well as literary studies. Wenyan had maintained privileges as both the official language of bureaucracy and classical literature until the launch of New Cultural

Movement in 1917, which deposed wenyan and replaced it with baihua as the bureaucratic and literary language. As this and succeeding movements went on, the written baihua as the formal language also became institutionalized formal written language and distanced itself from everyday spoken language, especially local dialects, the CCP’s political jargon being an extreme example. The term “the vernacular” I use through this dissertation refers to the less institutionalized language; as opposed to literary language that employs rhetoric, literary imagery and literary canonical intertextuality to exalt itself above everyday speech, but this differentiation would disappear somewhere in the middle of the two poles. This dissertation also uses “the vernacular” to refer to another meaning carried by the word “the vernacular” that is usually not seen in the differentiation of baihua and wenyan: it is used to refer to the noninstitutional status of emotional modes, narrativity, and creativity, as well as the means of transmission in new media.

Due to these features, the vernacular has an intrinsic affinity to the internet. The internet is the first mass media with the capacity to cheaply store and transmit works, and because the process of storage and transmission which works can do without the license of authorities—be they moral, artistic, or political—it has engendered a space for laypeople to produce works that

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they would otherwise not even have started to produce. In addition, the internet provides spaces where the authorities’ criticism and censorship are replaced by encouragement and comments from peers. Thanks to these features, the internet cultivated a vernacular culture that, for the first time, could celebrate itself side by side with the professionalized and institutional culture.

3.3 Articulating Gay Identity in the Vernacular: Private Story in Private Language, Pornography, and Popular Romance

An effect of the ambiguity against homosexuality, as discussed in Chapter One, was that the language itself seemed to be charged with resistance. The whole system of the literary institution unstatedly exerted censorship on homosexuality: any piece of literature, by complying with the rules of heterosexuality, added a discursive impossibility for narrating homosexuality in a positive voice. If there is a censorship against writing homosexuality, there is also a censorship by writing that exemplifies what literature should be like. To articulate homosexuality, it seemed, one had to write against the language itself. In order to articulate homosexuality, Beijing Story takes the avenue of the vernacular. As the author himself confirms, there was not even a remote hope during the writing process that the novel would be published later:

It is well-known that writing tongzhi novels has nothing to do with fame or money. It is first of all writing for oneself. Thanks to the times of the internet, we were all granted a space to describe the life we yearned for, or to express our own feelings. How many people could speak out about their romantic life to their friends or relatives, or show them their tongzhi partners without misgiving? ... Cyber graffitiing is but a personal hobby, or in popular terms, pleasing oneself.214

214 Xiao He 筱禾, “Gei chengma de yifeng xin” 给骋马的一封信 [A letter to Chengma], March, 13, 2003, http://www.aibai.com/view.php?id=7145, accessed September 10, 2013.

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In calling his writing “cyber graffitiing,” Xiao He was being modest. But the metaphor does carry insights about cyber writing in general and gay cyber writing in particular in relation to the mainstream literary system: writing about a marginalized topic like homosexuality, one necessarily has to take a marginalized stance like graffiti in real world. It is by taking the avenue of the vernacular that Beijing Story and its followers could articulate homosexuality.

The first feature of the vernacular that strikes the readers of Beijing Story is that it is a private story told in private language. Starting off from three years after Lu Yu’s death, the story is told from the first person perspective of Handong:

It’s been three years... Three years ago, I dreamt of his return every day, and I always asked him, in rapture as well as surprise, “Aren’t you dead? So you didn’t die?” Today, three years after, I still dream the same dreams. The only difference is that I repeatedly tell myself in my dreams that it is just a dream, until I wake up.

... Every morning when I woke up, I felt lost and thought to myself: “Where am I?” Looking at the maple leaves swaying in the wind, and the young woman in deep sleep beside me—she was my new wife—I let out a repressed sigh and laid down again to continue with my reflection in my dream.215

The story then flashes back to the very beginning of Handong and Lan Yu’s first encounter and follows chronological order all the way back to the narrator’s presence. The novel takes care to ensure that the story is told in Handong’s restricted first-person narrative, which, on the one hand, establishes the novel as a private story told in private language, and provides a natural flow of story-telling from the beginning. As such, it is a story that tells itself, free from the interference of literary techniques and possible voices of disapproval.

215 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 1.

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First-person narrative ensures a personal perspective for Beijing Story to face society at large. It provides a detailed depiction, or imagination, of Handong’s life as a successful businessman and the playboy son of a high-ranking cadre. Handong’s trades and speculations, as well as his luxurious lifestyle filled with sex and commodities unattainable to ordinary people, are painted with care. On a larger scale, upper-level politics is woven into the background from

Handong’s viewpoint: His social circle includes other sons of high-ranking cadres. Insider politics and high-level fictional struggles are part of this group’s games. The 1989 Tiananmen

Square protests are given a detailed description. Lan Yu participates in the student movement as a peripheral member—a sign of the novel’s distance from the institutional literature system. Lan

Yu’s life as a student majoring in architecture at the prestigious “Hua Da,” an obviously disguised Tsinghua University (Qinghua Daxue, 清华大学), and later as a white-collar employee in the emerging market, are seen through the eyes of Handong.

The restricted first-person narrative makes Beijing Story remarkably different from stories in a sociological study like Li and Wang’s Their World, or the journalistic report in Fang

Gang’s Homosexuality in China, in which men confess to the reporters, representatives of the social world. The language of these interviewees is formal language, and their stories have to leave out inappropriate sexual scenes or deep homosexual feelings so as to avoid disgusting the general public. Beijing Story, however, is involuntarily told to oneself in a half dream, precluding interference from even the awake self. Handong’s full interior emotional and reflective space could then be exposed, as with his first sight of Lan Yu:

At the moment when we shook hands, he raised his eyes to look at me. The look in his eyes has since become unforgettable my whole life. His bright eyes were full of melancholy, uneasiness, and doubts. He was not smiling, not even the little ingratiating smile that was familiar to me. His complexion was not that white, but he had a clean

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face, and the configuration of his face was delicate. His nose was straight, his lips tightly closed, and there was no expression on his face. My heart suddenly beat madly. It was an impulse I haven’t had for a long time.216

This is an unapologetic exposure of one’s innermost homosexual feelings, and it is presented in a naturalistic, or shameless, way that would disgust the imagined cautious readers of

Their World. As in this case, homoerotic feelings and sensibilities throughout the novel are delivered as they appear to oneself without compromise. Not only is the tabooed story told as it is, it is also told in the language as well as sensibilities that can only belong to men desiring men.

The narrator of Beijing Story is thus telling a private story by shaping it, in Jean Burgess’ words,

“toward an aesthetic of authenticity” that is “fundamentally built around the well-established modes of communication that structure everyday storytelling.” 217 By doing away with literary devices such as “ellipsis, a refusal of closure, wit and irony,” Handong’s story is marked by

“sincerity, warmth, and humanity.” 218

The half dream status, in addition, is a device to summon a particular audience and propose a reading contract. Benveniste considers subjectivity as the effect of appropriation of language to make enunciations in the first person: “I” does not refer to a concept of a particular person; it refers to “the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I.”

“You,” on the other hand, refers to “the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance of you.” In other words, “I” is the person who says “I” and the enunciation of “I” has always already presumed a “you” who is the receiver of the enunciation.

The opposition of I and you is interchangeable as the receiver of the enunciation can take his or

216 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 2. 217 Jean Burgess, Vernacular Creativity and New Media, 241. 218 Ibid. 242.

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her turn to assume the position of speaking as I and the former enunciator in turn becomes a you, the receiver of the current enunciation.219 This opposition of the speaker as I and the receiver as you forms a monologic closure that excludes a third party him/her from the dialogic situation, a necessity when one is writing against the public or even the language. Since the receptive end of the story is Handong himself, the reader is thus configured as fully identified with Handong.

Bringing the reader inside the enclosure of the narrator and the narratee in Beijing Story constitutes a private reading mode in which the reader must substitute himself for Handong to hear Handong’s monologue.

As a private story, Beijing Story presents graphic and unapologetic depictions of sex between men, very often in close-up, and abundant enough to qualify the novel as homosexual erotica. As Xiao He himself admits, “it was heterosexual pornographic novels” that inspired him to write Beijing Story.220 From the beginning of the story, when the narrator is laying out

Handong’s background before he meets Lan Yu, after a scene presenting direct but brief sexual intercourse with a woman, Handong speaks of his first homosexual experience, in a way no male same-sex writing ever ventured to do before—not even in any mainstream heterosexual fiction, if one substituted the passive male with a female:

Good heavens! I’d never been so aroused. He awoke all my lust and feelings: love, affection, and the impulse of conquering and abusing. I pushed him into bed in haste and touched his body clumsily. That was the touching of a young male body: smooth but resilient, completely different from women’s soft bodies. He took off my pants. When

219 Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul Du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman, (London: SAGE in association with The Open Unversity, 2000), 39-43. 220 Xiao Bai 晓白, “Yu xiaohe de yixihua” 与筱禾的一席话 [A talk with Xiao He], May 2, 2007, http://www.aibai.com/view.php?id=15367, accessed on September 10, 2014.

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he tore off my underwear, my member, thick, bloodshot and ugly, jumped out. He marvelled.

“So big?” Then he worked on it up and down with his mouth.221

The scene goes on in full detail. Many other scenes like this one, only in greater detail and more provocative, take up a great portion of the novel. The major reason for presenting same-sex eroticism in such detail seems to be nothing more than provoking its readers’ sexual arousal.

Sex scenes in Beijing Story, however, are not simply served up as a duty, but are integrated into the story and the characters’ relationship to reflect the development of Handong and Lan Yu’s romance, which makes both the story and sexual descriptions more efficient for each other’s sake. In addition, sex is always accompanied by inner feelings. As Handong’s attachment to Lan Yu develops, sex merges with love, and sex becomes inseparable from romantic feelings. Handong is finally willing to play the passive sexual role in intercourse for

Lan Yu, a conduct he sees as threat to his masculinity but gives way because of his acceptance of

Lan Yu as an equal—“It’s painful! Really painful! I like it not even a bit. But I could take it.

He could take me, why couldn’t I?”222 By the time they reunite after Handong finally divorces

Lin Jingping, he has become someone who submits to love. At this point, Lan Yu’s love and sex, too, has evolved to become assertive from his passive role at the beginning of the story:

He looked at me. Tears, once again, filled his eyes. He held me in his embrace fiercely, pressing and kissing my face as if it were the last moment of his life. I could not keep standing under his fervour. I sat down on the cold floor, and he also knelt down while

221 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 1. 222 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 11.

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kissing me and ripping off my clothing. He pulled me up from the floor, dragged me to the bedroom, and pushed me down on the bed...223

In a particular case, love climaxes after Lan Yu returns to Handong from Tiananmen

Square with the blood of the victims on his shirt, in the middle of the dark night of June Fourth,

1989:

Right after we experienced relief from the terror of death, we started caressing each other. In the flesh of each other, we found that we were still alive. I stroked his sexy skin with my face. His body was still hot, still alive, and I still had him! He also stroked me, and from time to time raised his head to look at me, something he always liked to do. His pretty eyes showed that he was in utter ecstasy. He stopped and knelt down on the carpet. I walked out of the bed towards him. He grabbed my hip and sucked on my penis. I grabbed his hair, I looked at his face, and my mind had only one idea:

“I can’t lose him! I can’t! I can’t!” I almost screamed. I pushed him onto the floor and held his face with my hands. I looked into his eyes and said:

“I love you!” I was pouring out words I did not even say to women, words that would freak me out in other cases. But this time it came out naturally. That was the only language I could think of. Once again we were immersed in the passion of love.224

This is far less graphic than other parts in the novel, but the combination of a taboo political incident and taboo sex is itself an excitement. In the night, the authorities reveal their hypocrisy; in that night, sin also sublimates into salvation and true love. In a scene like this one, sex is derived from the protagonists’ feelings of love, and is placed vis-à-vis to reality, as if to affront the authorities.

Just one year before Beijing Story, Tong Ge in Good Man Rogo had started to represent same-sex love and sex from the viewpoint of men desiring men themselves. Representation of sex as direct and positive as this and many other places in Beijing Story, however, takes the

223 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 23. 224 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 9.

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homoeroticism in Tong Ge’s stories to a new level. Sex cements love, and furthermore, it defines the world at large: it is sex, homosexual sex, that constructs subjectivity, weaves a life, and looks back at the world at large. The naked homosexual desire in Beijing Story demarcates a naked “our world,” a homosexual territory that exists on its own terms, seen from the perspective of men desiring men, rather than as “their world” from outside. This sensibility marks the rise of homosexual desire to the centre of one’s consciousness.

In addition, at a time when homosexual pornography, a great drive for men desiring men to access the internet, could not be easily found, an erotica as graphic as Beijing Story certainly invited a sense of affirmation of one’s sexual identity. Sexual arousal, likely experienced by many men desiring men who read their first explicit homoerotic engagement between men like themselves, became shared and public, and further, invited a consciousness of one’s own kind.

Sex thus articulated a new identity and collectivity.

The fishery narratives, let us recall, are short and always lead to succumbing to the heterosexual lifestyle. While providing a chance for homosexual desire to surface, they are in the meantime cautionary tales warning men against the dangers of indulging oneself in same-sex relations. The homosexual self is not articulated but repressed, one is not drawn to those who are akin but estranged, and the ruthlessness of the external world crushes any possibility of building an alternative personal world in accordance with one’s sexual desire. Thus a great share of homosexual desire is banished in fishery narratives to a “pre-narrative” capacity of life, a

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darkness of life without the mediation of narrative that Paul Ricoeur refers to as a capacity in which “a life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted.”225

Beijing Story arose as a different story model going beyond the legitimate bachelor’s narratives, not as a completely new story model but as a criticism of the latter. Lan Yu is no longer a legitimate bachelor. As Lan Yu’s painful personal history reveals, he is severed from familial ties: “My mother died a few years ago, and I don’t want to go back. That woman, from my father’s second marriage, also doesn’t want me to go back.”226 It is his father’s betrayal that killed his mother, who later on “swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills.”227 After graduation from university, Lan Yu “did not keep in touch with family for almost one year.”228 Without familial ties, the pressure on Lan Yu to be a legitimate bachelor is greatly reduced. As a graduate of a prestigious university, Lan Yu finds no difficulty surviving in the market; and even

Lin Jingping’s frame-up could not destroy him. Hence, socially and financially there is no need for him to buckle under societal pressure. Freeing himself from the legitimate bachelor’s life cycle, Lan Yu’s love for Handong is unshakeable and pure. In many senses, Lan Yu is a prodigal who has no home to return to but neither is he seeking one. Lan Yu would have become one of the generation of legitimate bachelors to encounter the internet, if he had not died right before the advent of the internet; as deduced from the story, Lan Yu was born in 1969 and is 24 when he dies in 1993.

225 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in quest of narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood, (London: Routledge, 1991), 27-28. 226 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 6. 227 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 8. 228 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 19.

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Handong’s legitimate bachelorhood, on the other hand, is expiring while his relationship with Lan Yu is developing. He is ten years older than Lan Yu and his initial attitude toward homosexual engagement is typical of men of his time. 229 He wants to live out a legitimate bachelor’s life cycle by first “playing” with boys—sexually only—then find a niche in marriage.

This mindset of legitimate bachelors, discussed in Chapter One, is famously encapsulated by

Handong, as he admonishes Lan Yu when they first meet:

“It was a great karma that we got to know each other. The only thing is that you are too young and I feel a little guilty. This thing is not a big deal in the West, but here it is the crime of hooliganism. No matter what, this is just between us. Don’t tell others. And, to play with each other you both have to be willing. If we get along, we can go on; if it doesn’t feel right, we won’t have to bother.”230

A dictum of Handong’s that enjoys wide quotation by men can be seen as a summary of the sentiments involved in men having sex with men, “Actually, if two guys are too close, it would be embarrassing to keep playing with each other.”231 As one of the very first to make a fortune on the market, however, Handong has the means, as well as the discernment to register the likeliness of living out a complete gay life, no matter how remotely. Step by step, his attraction to Lan Yu transforms from sex to love, and homosexual desire from a game to a need, despite his own defiance; and with struggles, he comes to accept this fact. Privilege and wealth give him more room to manoeuvre, or at least he thinks so when love has its moments:

At that time I thought that I would be with Lan Yu forever, and that that was the destiny of my love. I never had to think about whether love between two men could have

229 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 26. 230 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 3. 231 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 3.

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society’s license. I had the money, and I could sidestep troubles and have everything under control.232

However, even with his fortune, he could not sidestep troubles. In fact, his fortune, made by converting his father’s power to money on the market, comes along with even greater social and familial obligations. At one point in the story, his mother wails at the shock of her son’s disgrace after learning his sexual proclivity: “When you raise a pet and it is hurt, you must feel pain. Letting a Mom see her son despised by others is harder for a Mom than dying. Ah, I’m terrified!”233 Love of one’s same-sex desire immediately dissolves in Mom’s tears. Caught between love and obligations, Handong is always in a violent struggle with himself over his duty to familial authorities and political authorities and his desire for gay love. Lan Yu’s sudden death, however, provides a painful but also convenient solution for Handong. He turns to heterosexual marriage again (after immigrating to Vancouver!). Despite that, Handong is no longer a legitimate bachelor who has worn out his same-sex desire and finally finds his niche in heterosexual marriage. He carries on his love for Lan Yu in the rest of his life, and Beijing Story is not an anecdote but the story of his life. The sophistication of Handong contributes a great share to the melodramas in Beijing Story, but also makes him the more convincing and realistic of the two protagonists, as Xiao Bai (晓白), an editor from Whitepaper of Love, commented in an interview with Xiao He.234

232 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 13. 233 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 18. 234 Xiao Bai, “A Conversation with Xiao He” (yu xiaohe de yixihua, 与筱禾的一席话), May 2, 2007, http://www.aibai.com/view.php?id=15367, retrieved on Feb 26, 2014.

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Thus, Beijing Story marks a departure from the legitimate bachelor’s narratives to a new mode of narrating homosexual desire in which it takes a central position in a new life course.

What happens between Lan Yu the prodigal and Handong the discontented legitimate bachelor is a romance. Homosexual desire can no longer be confined within a window for Lan Yu the prodigal, whose involuntary death was a sacrifice to this new love, nor for Handong the discontented legitimate bachelor, who is possessed by the romance thereafter. I will turn to detailed thematic and semiotic analysis of the new narrative mode of gay love later in Chapter

Five.

As a private story severed from the formal literary system, Beijing Story’s taking of the avenue of the vernacular is even more evident in assuming the framework of the trite heterosexual recipe of popular romantic erotica. Love between a rich handsome man and a weak beauty—except that Lan Yu is male in this case—creates a dramatic interplay between the protagonists that contributes to the twists of the plot. The idealization and polarization of the characters are evident. Handong’s excessive masculinity and virility, both enhanced by his privilege and wealth, reminds us of the hero in popular romance; the purity of Lan Yu’s love and his charming personality, on the other hand, makes him a gay version of Cinderella.

The death of Lan Yu, an ending the author decided before starting to write the novel,235 seems to be especially abrupt. It happens right after the obstacles between the protagonists are cleared: after Handong overcomes a setback in his life with the help of Lan Yu, who saves

Handong from a fatal attack from his enemies after his father’s death—devastating to Handong’s

235 Ibid.

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privilege—with the money he collected by selling the house Handong previously put under Lan

Yu’s name. After this accident, Handong realizes that Lan Yu is the love of his life and makes up his mind to spend his life with Lan Yu. He muses on the first night right after he is released from prison: “I was awake while he was in my arms, deep in sleep. My life, my career, my mother, and the days and nights in prison were running through my mind. I swore to myself, unless Lan Yu got tired of living with me, I would stay by his side all alone.”236 From this point on, the romance seems to take a fair wind, and the colour of the story becomes rosy, as the love scene also moves to an autumn hike, “We kissed each other, as wild as two lovers who had just found each other. That was the second time we kissed and hugged outdoors, around us was the bright sunlight and peaceful mountains.”237 But these are the only rosy moments in their romance. The next day starts with the usual good-bye kiss of the lovers. Handong even strikes a deal that would revive his fortunes. Death, however, awaits: the taxi that Lan Yu takes to work is hit by a truck.

The sudden death of Lan Yu could be seen as the death of the text, for at this point the novel cannot carry on. One option is to let Handong and Lan Yu live together, like a realized

Cinderella story, but this seems to be even less likely than the fairy tale; or let their love degenerates in the everyday grind in an environment hostile to homosexuality, as it is almost certainly will, the story circling around into futility; or let them both go to the U.S. or Canada (as

Handong does at the end of the story), yet this solution would cheapen all the weight of the protagonists’ ordeals. Death, on the contrary, is a better choice, for love will sublimate into

236 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 28. 237 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 30.

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something eternal. Hence Lan Yu must be sacrificed, both for the text and for love. This, however, is a stale solution employed in many popular romances, with its abruptness reflecting the predicament of setting gay love in the reality of China in the 1990s on the one hand, and the need of appealing to the melodramatic on the other.

The effect of setting the story in a framework of popular romance, however, has its advantages. The familiar interplay between the heroine and the hero draws readers’ attention to the story itself, rather than to the literary elements of the story—how the story is told, the language employed to achieve certain effects, etc. Stories told in this way are more likely to be considered to be straightforward and real, compared to those using the literary effects of defamiliarization; that “artistic trademark—that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author’s purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatised perception,” in Shklovsky’s words. 238 Familiar plot and straightforward language facilitate a smooth narrative flow without having to struggle with literary techniques, for someone who is writing his first novel, as well as for someone who is reading, his first gay novel set in his China. The vernacular carries crude homosexual sex and sensibility and with them Beijing Story is remarkably different from the only homoerotic works that had invitation cards to the vanity fair of China’s literary circle, Wang Xiaobo’s “East Palace, West Palace” and

Cui Zi’en’s novels, which both assume a heavy literary makeup to cover the tame homoeroticism underneath. This employment of the popular romance narrative mode, together with the private language and gay sensibility, took Beijing Story further down the avenue of the vernacular.

238 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed., Lemon Lee and Marion Reiss, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 22.

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But Lan Yu’s death has a more important function: it is a device to articulate homosexuality. Only upon Lan Yu’s death could Handong, frantic with grief, speak of love between men and the violence of his affection in the most animated language:

“Ah! Ah!...” My throat made a sound like that of a strangled man struggling before he died. I felt that someone was tugging at me, someone was saying, “Handong, calm down.” Fuck off! All of you, the living and the dead, look at me!! I will never disguise it and hide it. I will stay by his side!!! You can sing high praises of your love and embrace and kiss your lover in public, and I am forbidden from mourning for my dead love?!! I looked at his chest, oh his broad chest, which I had kissed and touched countless times.

It seemed as if someone was pulling me with more strength. Fuck off!! You want to laugh at me? Then laugh at me!! I cannot leave my lover in this way. I must hold him in my arms! He must need me! I want to grasp him and make him dissolve in my hands… He is not dead! He will wake up in a while. He asked me to take him home tonight!!! Right! He asked me to kiss him this morning. He seldom did. He must have tried to tell me something… But I only kissed him casually… How could I be so stupid!! I came close to his face. I wanted to make up that kiss on that mutilated flesh.239

Handong’s outcry of his love for Lan Yu, taking such an extremely violent form, is not only the very first time he could make such a declaration in public, but also the first articulation of homosexuality made in China. Before this, no one had ever risked revealing love between men to the world at large. Handong is thus articulating homosexuality for all men desiring men, announcing its long-denied existence and breaking the mask of the ambiguity. This articulation, however, made in Handong’s delirium in the morgue of the hospital—a space where love meets death—symbolizes the extreme hardship of articulating homosexuality. The programmed death of Lan Yu, then, is necessary for Handong’s articulation. Recalling that Handong needs Lan

Yu’s death at the edge of Tiananmen to reach a mental climax, and his own symbolic death—

239 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 31.

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loss of his privilege and imprisonment—to finally affirm his love for Lan Yu, the melodrama in the novel, with its roller coaster ups and downs, serves as a means to overcome the extreme hardship of articulating homosexuality.

To expound the power carried by Beijing Story, as manifested by its sensational popularity, we need to bring the vernacular to a hermeneutical level. By hermeneutical level I refer here to the distinction between the “linguistic” problems and “hermeneutical” problems of a literary work. In Paul Ricoeur’s sense, while the first treats a narrative as a self-sustained semiotic system as in literary studies, the second treats it as referential configuration or reconfiguration of real life.240 Due to this hermeneutical intertwining between narratives and life, a story might thus carry what Ricoeur calls “narrative understanding” of life, which synthesizes primordial and orderless events in life and grants life narrativity by giving it a past and a present that lead to a future. Narrative understanding is “much closer to the practical wisdom of moral judgement than to science, or, more generally, to the theoretical use of reason.”241 Narrative provides a phenomenological understanding of life, an understanding that no individual or collectivity could live a life as such without:

It is a mediation between man and the world, between man and man, between man and himself; the mediation between man and the world is what we call referentiality; the mediation between men, communicability, the mediation between man and himself, self- understanding. A literary work contains these three dimensions: referentiality, communicability and self-understanding. The hermeneutical problem begins, then, where linguistics leaves off. It attempts to discover new features of referentiality which are not descriptive, features of communicability which are not utilitarian, and features of reflexivity which are not narcissistic, as these are engendered by the literary work. In a

240 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 26-27. 241 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 23.

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word, hermeneutics is placed at the point of intersection of the (internal) configuration of the work and the (external) refiguration of life.242

In other words, there are scientific understandings and philosophical understandings of life, but they are reflexive to life itself. The narrative of life, however, by mediating with all three referential levels—with others (especially one’s own kind), with the self, and with the world at large—is the narrative we live by. The narrative of life is thus in the very centre of a possible life that can be lived as life itself because of its hermeneutical values in all three dimensions of referentiality, communicability and self-understanding.

With its intimate private language, authentic homosexual sensibility, vernacular style, full length, detailed engagement with the social background at large, and vivid protagonists each with personality and background, Beijing Story emerged as a touching romance between two men in the real world. Both Handong and Lan Yu are fully developed characters of flesh and blood, who refuse to sink to a nameless life but strive for sexual desire and a romance authentic to themselves, thereby living out a worthwhile story in their own life. Along with the development of the story, homosexuality moves to the very core of the personality of Handong and Lan Yu, becoming a prism through which they see the world at large, the terms of their communication, and the terms of their self-understanding. For this, Beijing Story is one of the very first narratives that we might call gay narrative, in the sense that it is written for gay men, that it is written with a gay sensibility, and that it comprises a gay worldview seen from the angle of men desiring men, as a counterpoint to the heterosexual world view, a gay life in pursuit of

242 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 27.

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homosexual desire and love lived out, and a gay self centred on homosexual desire. The curtain of a new phase of Chinese same-sex narrative had risen.

To say that Beijing Story takes the avenue of the vernacular is not to say that it is “bad,” or of low quality, in the terms of institutional literary criticism—and I will argue later in Chapter

Four, even the “bad” stories have their merit in the torrent of gay narratives. While there are many “bad” gay narratives, Beijing Story is “good,” and its vernacularity stands out only when dialectically compared with, say “East Palace, West Palace” or Cui Zi’en’s Pink Lips. By taking the venue of the vernacular, however, Beijing Story separates itself from institutional literary influence and recounts the story as the author wishes. We do not see in Beijing Story the influence of institutional literature, be it Chinese traditional homoerotic writing, nor homosexual literature in world literature, nor even the influence of Taiwanese writers like Pai Hsien-yung.

Its language is private and vernacular, almost free from allusion, innuendo, metaphors, and reference to literary canons. In many ways, it is, as Xiao He himself says, “a piece of cyber graffiti.”

In The Front and the Back: A Brief History of Tongzhi Literature in Taiwan, Chi Tai-Wei suggests that many early Taiwan tongzhi writings use the imagination of foreign, especially

American and Japanese, homosexual experiences to sustain homosexuality in Taiwan.243

Taiwanese tongzhi writing, as Chi argues, has enjoyed a much greater recognition in Taiwan,

243 Chi Ta-Wei 紀大偉, Zhengmian yu beiying: Taiwan tongzhi wenxue jianshi 正面與背影：台灣同志文學簡史 [The Front and the Back: A Brief History of Tongzhi Literature in Taiwan], (Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Wenxueguan Chubanshe 國立台灣文學館出版社, 2012), 59.

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both as high and popular literature, than in China or other Asian countries.244 Beijing Story and other Chinese cyber narratives, however, offer a different strategy to narrate homosexuality in

China’s. They set the vernacular as the avenue of homosexuality in the context of China.

3.4 The Poetics of Beijing Story

While Beijing Story’s power was derived from its undeniable charm and the narrative understanding of a gay life carried with it, it was also derived from the poetics of the very moment when a generation of men desiring men encountered the internet. During what had felt like just a moment earlier, the ambiguity against homosexuality was still ubiquitous, leaving only a little discursive space in the real world for the telling of same-sex love. At the moment of the advent of the internet in 1998, Beijing Story rose from the thin air of the legitimate bachelor stories to narrate a life with a soul-stirring romance. The great contrast between a life lived for others and a life with meaning generating formulas, patterns and mnemonics was itself a great power contributing to Beijing Story’s phenomenal appeal. Studies of homosexual cultures show that gay men and lesbians have high sensitivity to homosexual ideas and items and actively look for those ideas and items when they are scarce, as shown in the cases examined by Kaiser and

Levay and Nonas in 1970s North America.245 Reading gay stories in oppressive social conditions would invite readers to embrace them with high enthusiasm, as Bertram Cohler explains with the popularity of Andrew Tobias’s 1973 coming out story, The Best Little Boy in the World: “Being a part of this hidden world gave men an identity counter to that of the larger

244 Ibid., 281. 245 Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 1940-1996, (Boston and New York, Houghton Miffilin Company, 1997), 206-265; Simon LeVay and Elisabeth Nonas, City of Friends: A Portrait of the Gay and Lesbian Community in America, (Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press, 1995), 59-68.

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social world. Listening to stories of other men and learning what men did together sexually was an important aspect of the process of remaking the subversive life story.”246

At the very moment leading to this virgin territory, the experience of crossing the old and the new, unique to this generation of men, kept them even more highly activated and highly sensitive to new life and stories. At this moment, narratives were written and read with passion unmatched by other times, and both activities carried within themselves kinetic power. In writing and reading these narratives, in addition, one was also increasingly aware of the existence of one’s own kind. The very moments when Beijing Story and its readers embraced each other were so magical that the appeal of the novel was maximized, generating lightning capable of illuminating and enlightening those who were so far isolated in the darkness of ambiguity. Thus Beijing Story carried within itself the gay zeitgeist of the early years of the internet in China.

For many who had just crossed the line between the real and cyber worlds, the new gay narrative understanding carried by Beijing Story invited extreme reactions charged with sexual, emotional, and epistemological awakening. In the readers’ comments section of Beijing Story preserved on Guangzhou Tongzhi, for example, rapture, tears, sorrow, and a mixture of all three are expressed by the readers of the novel. In the words of a reader who signed himself as “Some

Love Is True!” (youxie ai shi zhende,有些爱是真的!): “as many people read this story, as many

246 Bertram Cohler, Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 12.

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people would shed tears; as many times as one reads the story, as many times one cries.” 247

“Lonely Boy” (孤独男孩) is but one among many who were deeply touched by the story:

I read [the story] again and again. I didn’t want to cry, but my clothes are wet from my tears. Are they real? Is the story true? I feel sorry and my heart is aching for the protagonists. I also feel sorry for myself. I have lived alone for more than twenty years. Would I keep going like this? I would like to be Lan Yu, but where is my Handong? 248

Effects like this were not that of a literary work on its silent readers who read in a rocking chair. For many in similar situations to the two men above, reading Beijing Story in these particular moments was an epiphany. The novel agitated them, unsettled them, and many experienced transformations that led them to see their same-sex desire as a definitive aspect of their life. Once they read these stories, men realized that they, too, could lead their life as a story like this one. “I’m really touched,” wrote A-Bin (abin, 阿彬), after reading Beijing Story,

“thanks to the author, thanks to the website, thanks to all of you, my tongzhi, you made me know what true love is. I hope that God will give me a chance, so that I will meet my Handong.”249

And like many others, he posted his cellphone number at the end of this message, hoping his comment would lead to a romance. Similarly, other gay men gained motivation to pursue love with men after reading gay stories. “Having Fun with Thrills” (wanerde jiushi xintiao, 玩儿的就

是心跳), obviously a married man, came to an enlightenment in his reading: “Everyone was saying that Beijing Story is good. I didn’t really care. Tonight I finished it without a break from

247 “Youxie ai shi zhende!” 有些爱是真的! [Some Love is True!], April 23, 2001, comment on Xiao He, Beijing Story, Guangzhou Tongzhi, http://www.gztz.org/cn/art/doc_432561_p20.htm, accessed September 10, 2014. 248 “Lonely Boy” (gudu nanhai, 孤独男孩), April 23, 2001, comment on Xiao He, Beijing Story, Guangzhou Tongzhi, http://www.gztz.org/cn/art/doc_432561_p23.htm, accessed September 10, 2014. 249 A-Bin (abin, 阿彬), May 20, 2002, comment on Xiao He, Beijing Story, Guangzhou Tongzhi, Guangzhou Tongzhi, http://www.gztz.org/cn/art/doc_432561_p8.htm, accessed September 10, 2014.

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dusk to dawn. I wish I could get divorced so that I could find my own Lan Yu, I’m willing to die for him.”250 “Some Love Is True!” also realized that love is the most valuable thing one cannot live without: “I’m happy for Lan Yu. At least he and Handong have real love, even though it’s love parted by death. If I am allowed to choose, I’d choose to love, then die [rather than life without love].”251 He is echoed by “niko” and many others: “There is someone in my life whom

I love. I don’t know what’s in his mind. If I had a piece of love like this, I could die with satisfaction.”252

Comments like these ran on and on throughout the early gay websites. Short as they are, each of these comments is of a piece with the narrative. A true love to die for rather than a life lived for others; this is the narrative understanding of a new life delivered by Beijing Story and echoed resoundingly in these men’s mini-narratives. Love, now an unstoppable power, demands a whole life, no longer succumbing to legitimate bachelorhood. Love is thus inherently connected with narrativitiy. A life with love, then, is necessarily one with a narrative of one’s own; or vice versa. Extending Socrates’ maxim that an unexamined life is not worth living,

Ricoeur concludes that life is “an activity and a passion in search of a narrative,” in order to overcome the “pre-narrative quality of human experience.”253 And as a corollary, quoted earlier,

250 “Having Fun with Thrilling” (waner de jiushi xintiao, 玩儿的就是心跳), January 3, 2003, comment on Xiao He, Beijing Story, Guangzhou Tongzhi, http://www.gztz.org/cn/art/doc_432561_p4.htm, accessed September 10, 2013. 251 “Some Love is True!” (youxie ai shi zhende, 有些爱是真的!), April 23, 2001, comment on Xiao He, Beijing Story, Guangzhou Tongzhi, http://www.gztz.org/cn/art/doc_432561_p20.htm, retrieved Feb 26, 2014. 252 niko, Guangzhou Tongzhi, December 25, 2000, comment on Xiao He, Beijing Story, Guangzhou Tongzhi, http://www.gztz.org/cn/art/doc_432561_p22.htm, accessed September 10, 2013. 253 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 29.

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“an examined life worth living is a life recounted.”254 The stark contrast between a life with a story and one without was thus converted into great passion for telling as well as seeking one in life.

By itself, Beijing Story may not have been able to bring effects so strong as those seen on the men we just quoted, but at that moment and on the new horizon, the will to a new life found

Beijing Story and made it a key to unlock a new life, a new self and a new collectivity. Narrating online thus was not passively telling the happenings of life; rather, it was itself the will to a new life authentic to one’s sexual desire, now manifesting itself outside the legitimate bachelor’s window, demanding men to make a choice, to reinvent themselves, and to interfere with the life decisions that were once made automatically by social conventions and authorities. Life and text were open to each other and writing each other. Many of these men would follow Beijing Story to forge a new life, a new self, a new collectivity, and a new reality, and the major means of doing so was to narrate their own stories online in an answer to Beijing Story’s hail.

Beijing Story is thus a song of it times, and a great share of its power to move men desiring men derived from those very moments, when encountering the internet opened up the extraordinary sensitivity and agency of that generation of men to rewrite their life. To state that the poetics of the times imbue Beijing Story with a power that is historically contingent is not to diminish it; rather, the story is a reification of the significance of those times. The poetics of

Beijing Story is as much that of its times as its story. Without its historical poetics, it would be impossible to comprehend the power of Beijing Story in the initial years of the internet in China

254 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 31.

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as the major voice of articulating a desire for gay identity and collectivity, as no one would ever write, or read, the same texts in the same way that generation did in that particular time.

Despite its popularity, or precisely because of it, Beijing Story did not make its way into the offline world. As the author of the most popular gay novel, Xiao He remains anonymous.

The publication of Beijing Story, and the adaptation of the novel into film in 2001, did not bring the author out to the public. Xiao He remains unknown to the public today, so far ignoring various surmises about his identity and life driven by fans’ irrepressible curiosity about the degree of autobiography in Beijing Story. Xiao He does maintain a BBS forum, “Xiao He’s

Storytelling” (xiaohe shuoshu, 筱禾说书) devoted to himself on Jinjiang (晋江, http://www.jjwxc.net), a popular commercial website hosting online fiction. One of the regulations stated as the constitution of the BBS is the deletion of “any post discussing or probing into privacy.”255 The film Lan Yu, a Hong Kong production, remains symbolically banned in China; symbolically, since anyone could acquire a copy of the film in the pirate market in the early 2000s and, later, could stream it for free online. The potential profit of

Beijing Story did lead to publications of the novel in China, but the book underwent editing.256

255 “Xiaohe shuoshu” 筱禾说书, “Xiaohe shuoshu Bangui” 筱禾说书版规 [regulations for Xiao He’s Story- Telling], December 5, 2002, Xiao He shuoshu 筱禾说书 [Xiao He’s Story-Telling], http://bbs.jjwxc.net/board.php?board=175&page=1, accessed September 10, 2014. 256 The two publications are Xiao He, Beijing gushi (北京故事), by Hualing chubanshe (华龄出版社), Beijing, 2001, and Xiao He, Beijing gushi (北京故事), Zhongguo dianying chubanshe (中国电影出版社), Beijing, 2002. There is also an unabridged version of novel, under the name Lan Yu, published by in Taiwan. See Beijing Tongzhi (北京同志), Lan Yu, Taipei, Dongfan chubanshe (東販出版社), 2002.

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After Beijing Story, Xiao He went on to a prolific writing career, producing a long list of works. 257 He was active on Yifang’s gay forum, Homo-Talk without Scruples, from 1998 to

1999, where he published another popular work, “Huizi” (辉子), which will be discussed in

Chapter Five. Since 2005, he has appeared mainly on a forum devoted to his fans on the website

Jinjiang, seeming to be satisfied with the anonymity of a cyber writer, and indifferent to publishing his works or acquiring fame, or engaging in any form of activism in the real world.

The identity politics of the most popular gay novel perhaps can perhaps be read as an allegory of other authors, as well as of homosexuality in China. This allegory, too, is part of the poetics of Beijing Story. Without the web, there would be no space to accommodate and transmit Beijing Story, not to mention its sensational popularity. But in the meantime, because

Beijing Story takes the avenue of the vernacular, its circulation was largely isolated within a cyberspace that was increasingly marginalizing gay establishments.258 The irony of Beijing

Story is that, while it is an articulation of homosexuality, this articulation is made in a private space, deprived of the possibility of dialogue with mainstream discourse and the general public, as emblematized by Handong’s solipsistic monologue over Lan Yu’s dead body. The cyber

257 Xiao He’s other works of fiction are: “Huizi” (辉子), Biography of Qinghong (Qinghong zhuan, 青宏传), Love in the Green Mountains (qingshan zhi lian, 青山之恋), The Temptation of Resistance (kangju de youhuo, 抗拒的诱惑), Walking on the Left Side, Looking to the Right Side (xiangzuozou xiangyoukan, 向左走向右看), Roommates in Tacit Agreement (moqi shiyou, 默契室友), Old Yan’s Private Life (laoyan de sishenghuo, 老严的私生活), The Neighbourhood of Colour-Painted Pottery (cuihui fang, 彩绘坊), “Rouge in Dream” (mengzhong hongfen, 梦中红粉), Chaos (hunluan, 混乱), and Beloved Girl (xinai de guniang, 心爱的姑娘). Xiao He also wrote a number of essays. 258 As we have discussed in last chapter, the web became increasingly painted by society at large and the CCP as an isolated and secondary space for entertaining, at best, and as a threat to the young generation’s perspective in the real world, or even a potential power to overturn the CCP regime. By 2004, China had developed a cohesive and sophisticated internet censorship that converged technological, political, and societal means. This process, as it happened, paralleled the decline of the initial gay websites.

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vernacular for gay men in China is thus a paradox: On the one hand, it opened a historical door for the articulation of a gay identity and collectivity that was not viable in a society pervaded by an authoritarian regime and the Confucian family. On the other hand, however, because the web could afford an anonymous gay identity and collectivity, it also offsets the necessity of an activist movement requiring open dialogue or challenging mainstream society, since such engagement was forestalled by the authorities. The door to homosexuality opened by Beijing

Story, by way of the cyber vernacular, then, also led to a digital closet, in which gay men in

China both appear and disappear. We will continue to touch upon this aspect in the next chapters.

3.5 Dashing into the Erotopia

The homosexual identity, as articulated in Beijing Story, was immediately heard and echoed by many, and an answer Beijing Story’s call was an unstoppable urge to write one’s own story. Many did so in the comments section, but many also found that their stories needed to be told at length. Among the many men who set out to write was Jet, who is the second snapshot I choose to present a representative of the popular movement of gay narratives. Jet’s works, integrating autobiographical elements and the excitement of the initial encounter with the internet, are among the best representations of a generation of men who came to living, as well as writing, a new life side by side.

A professional in the youthful city of Shenzhen, China’s frontier of capitalism with swarms of young men and women who left their hometown behind, Jet was well situated as one of the legitimate bachelors at the advent of the internet, and he captures this thrilling experience with great sentiment, not as a writer above the mob but as one right in the crowd. In a short story

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“Rushing Youth” (chunguang zhaxie, 春光乍泄), an obvious reference to Wong Kar-wai’s popular film, Happy Together, which has the same title in Chinese (1997),259 Jet best represents the sentiments of pre-internet times as a legitimate bachelor when he says “entered this circle at the age of 25.”260 Time is running out on youth, the window is closing, and it is especially so for one desiring his own sex, so Jet feels an acute urgency:

In a blink, I was twenty five. I suddenly found that youth was apt to pass, and blooming face was apt to age. Rush! Rush! Rush! Otherwise I wouldn’t catch up with it. A sense of urgency drove me dashing ahead, my dreams unresting. On the surface, I maintained my composure, but the rush was deep in my bones. Just like a flower blooming at night, my loneliness became unbearable. No more squandering my days like this, no more wasting my time like this. Rush! Rush! Rush! I urged myself.261

Via a pre-internet “hotline personal” service, Jet meets “Him”; from there he becomes a frequenter of Shenzhen’s fisheries, bars, and disco clubs, garnering sexual experience as well as realizing that there is only a bleak prospect of love between men as defined by the legitimate bachelor’s narrative. But then he encounters the internet and with it, Beijing Story:

“This is just a carefully woven romantic story. No way could it happen in the real world.” I thought to myself. “Many parts in the plot cannot bear squeezing. The ending is way too farfetched.” I know, I know everything. But a room of loneliness, a room of sorrow pressed me, entangled me, and I had nowhere to escape. “Maybe the whole story was fabricated, but that real love and that heartbreaking pain are beyond the understanding, not to say the description, of people who have never experienced the pain of death in love.262

259 The literal translation of “chunguang zha xie” (春光乍泄) is “sudden rush of spring/youth light/time.” The English title of the film does not carry its Chinese connotation. 260 Jet, 1999, “Happy Together” (chunguang zhaxie, 春光乍泄), Yifan gongyi tushuguang 亦凡公益图书馆, http://www.shuku.net:8080/novels/tongzhi/chunguang.html, accessed September 10, 2013. 261 Jet, “Happy Together.” 262 Jet, “Happy Together.”

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Like the readers on Guangzhou Tongzhi, Jet has a keen scent for the poetics carried by

Beijing Story. His susceptibility, furthermore, prompts him to open his life to reconfiguration.

Love becomes an irrepressible imperative:

I had thought that I could not fall in love with anyone anymore. I’m just one person in this metropolis, lonely, cold, snobbish, and conceited. I had thought that my heart had become unfeeling and as peaceful as dead water. But tonight, it felt. It felt pain. ... When would I meet my Lan Yu or my Handong?263

This yearning for love is, necessarily, the yearning for a narrative, as Jet is specific in demanding a romance like that of Lan Yu and Handong’s. At this moment in the narrative, Jet is unravelling the legitimate bachelor’s narrative and pursuing romance. The same desire for a love with narrative specificity and the same desire for a gay identity provoking innumerable comments motivated Jet to write more stories, some of them novella-length.

Jet’s answer to Beijing Story continued in another piece, “Dashing Madly at Midnight”

(wuye kuangben, 午夜狂奔, 1999), reflecting the thrill and uncertainty brought about by the new social horizon that came with the internet, an experience not reflected in Beijing Story. In this story, Jet recounts his life during three days in November of 1998. These three days are filled with anecdotes that are hardly coherent. In the first, Jet meets a man, A-Xin, in an online chat room. “Later on, he sent me an email in English—very touching. His English was good indeed.

263 Jet, “Happy Together.”

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Then we started phone calls, followed by long overnight calls. In the last call, he proposed meeting, almost pressingly.”264

English, the computer, and the internet in this case and many others in the year 1998 were the markers of those who were seeking gay love. At A-Xin’s repeated request, Jet agrees on a meeting. A-Xin travels from another city to see Jet, but the meeting was disappointing for Jet.

To make the weekend pass more quickly, Jet offers to guide A-Xin to Shenzhen’s gay venues and calls on his friends to join them. These men spend a trivial weekend going to “fisheries” and having flings with each other. At the end of the story, finding himself on an empty street covered by the dark night, Jet charges into the silence—behind it the immense ambiguity against homosexuality—that hangs above the city:

At midnight, the street was all deserted. I was all by myself. I lifted my legs and dashed madly alone on the open silent street.265

This is a graffiti action to release repressed desire and youthful adrenaline that many men desiring men had done: dashing is the graffiti that imposes itself onto the empty and deserted street serving as the façade. Jet’s dashing is a whole generation’s dashing, however, in that it left behind the deserted street—and the real world at large—and entered a new world where he is afforded an emerging cyber world. It is in this new cyberspace that Jet’s story can travel further to reach other men, and further inspire more men to tell their stories. Thus while sounding weak, lonely, and aimless, with this dashing, Jet crossed the immense ambiguity and entered a realm

264 Jet, April 21, 1999, “Dashing Madly at Midnight” (wuye kuangben, 午夜狂奔), Guangzhou Tongzhi (www.gztz.org), archived December 24, 2004 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20000302202715/http://www.gztz.org/, accessed September 10, 2013, Ch. 1. 265 Jet, “Dashing Madly at Midnight,” Ch. 6.

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where homosexual desire became articulated, and simultaneously, he crossed the line from legitimate bachelor to a new identity centring on homosexuality that is gay. His narratives relay

Xiao He’s explicit gay sensibility, while adding internet-mediated experiences to Beijing Story’s pre-internet setting.

After Jet unravelled the legitimate bachelor’s narrative in “Rushing Youth,” and the pursuit of love in “Dashing Madly at Midnight,” he also went on to write another novella, “Ding

Wei the Handsome” (shuaige dingwei, 帅哥丁伟). Like many gay authors, Jet’s writing and life existed side by side and the two are inseparable. Like the writers of Beijing Story and many other gay works, Jet did not consider himself a writer in the system, but someone simply writing from life. His stories, written in a naturalistic way, could not easily fit into the mainstream literary system, but they carried with them an honesty and sincerity few well-written works with the stamp of the institutional could match. His narratives walk the gay avenue of narrative opened up by Xiao He: private, vernacular, and narrating a new gay identity and collectivity, and contribute to a gay lore woven together in these narratives.

3.6 Conclusion: The Articulation of Homosexuality

This chapter focused on the first moments when the internet facilitated the articulation of homosexuality. I argued that while the newly-emerging websites, the new means of making sexual and romantic partners, and the new sexual imageries in the form of pornography or erotic pictures brought dramatic changes to the lives of men desiring men in China (Chapter Two), it was the internet-mediated narratives, Beijing Story being their best representative, that provided a new narrative understanding of a life with homosexual desire. For the first time, love between men was pronounced, not in the distanced and defensive scientific or journalist voice, but in the

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voice of men desiring men themselves. In the pioneer narratives, a whole set of sensibilities that are gay—a way of looking back to the world at large, a life in quest of love, a self centered around homosexual desire, as well as an affirmative way of celebrating sex between men— became articulate.

A whole set of conditions contingent to the threshold of the age of the internet charged

Beijing Story with great power. Bypassing old media under the control of authorities, Beijing

Story became a shared story for a whole generation of men desiring men. Taking the avenue of the vernacular, Beijing Story delivered distinct messages to a massive number of men across the whole nation, who for the first time could congregate in virtual space. And, just setting their first foot in the new realm, men were highly enthusiastic and sensitive to hear and echo the herald of

Beijing Story.

But from the very beginning, homosexuality was articulated within, and to a degree, limited by cyberspace. The messages carried by Beijing Story are thus private and apolitical.

The ambiguity against homosexuality is broken, but only among gay men and within cyberspace.

In the real world it remained largely intact. The internet as the space of articulating homosexuality simultaneously threatened to become a digital closet—this question is for further exploration in the following chapters.

Leaving the legitimate bachelor’ narratives behind, gay men like Jet were prompted to unravel the old life transcripts and weave new ones. In the following chapter, I will continue with the third and fourth snapshots to show a popular movement of the narration of gay stories online that is also a social movement of building gay identity and collectivity.

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Chapter 4 Narrating Gay Identity and Collectivity as a Popular Social Movement 4 « »

Gay identity, articulated by Beijing Story and other pioneer narratives, awakened a whole generation of men desiring men from the ambiguity surrounding them. Following this pioneer, gay-themed short stories, novellas, novels, and live writings soon flooded the Chinese cyber world to form a movement of gay narration in a volume beyond anyone’s reading capacity. This chapter will expand on what we have observed in Beijing Story and the first writers exemplified by Jet into a delineation of a popular upsurge in narrative gay stories. Continuing the last chapter, the third and fourth snapshots of gay narratives will be presented here. The third snapshot, Nanfeng (男风, active from 1999 to 2003), is an earlier online forum, selected for its unmatched influence on later gay narratives. The fourth is Xiaohu (小虎), a thread narrative that appeared on Tianya’s “Companion,” known for its popularity as well as for the peculiarities of thread narratives. The complications of Xiaohu deserve to be more fully explored, and in examining Xiaohu, I will switch the focus to examine the characteristics of identity and collectivity which arose in narrating gay stories online. The last chapter focused on the dynamics of very specific moments when the internet opened a new horizon to homosexuality, and this chapter will turn to delineate the proliferation of gay narratives at the macro level and describe their spread from the very small number of pioneers to include more men in less advantageous circumstances.

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But the proliferation was not only a movement in character but also a social movement that converted a generation of legitimate bachelors into men with a gay identity, together with the social changes that had happened and were happening around them. It is from these gay narratives that gay men in a gay China conjured, articulated, and retained a gay identity and a gay collectivity. Thus, if the internet provided a juncture for homosexuality to emerge in China, it was first and foremost a narrative one in which the most significant function of gay narratives was to engender a gay collectivity, where actions directly challenging the authorities in the real world were hard to come by. Narrating gay stories thus became a social movement creating an identity centring homosexual desire.

The second focus of this chapter examines the social sharedness of early gay narratives.

Once shared, narratives give rise to a sense of connectedness and commonality that are indispensable for the emergence of the consciousness of a marginalized group. In examining the sharedness of stories, we will turn to the social aspects of early gay narratives. Ken Plummer’s theory about sexual stories brings insights to this aspect. While Ricoeur emphasizes both the significance of narratives in the formation of an individual’s identity as well as that of a community, his study does not provide a detailed account of how they help engender social identity on a larger scale. Sexual stories, as Ken Plummer contends, are not merely “texts awaiting analysis and instead... [are] stories as social actions embedded in social worlds.”266

Plummer conceives a “formal sociology of stories” that pays particular attention to how stories

266 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories, 17. Italics are original.

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bring together individuals that were otherwise socially separated to form a sense of community.

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Conceived before the popularization of the internet, however, both Ricoeur and

Plummer’s theories do not fully engage the potentials afforded by the internet. The internet not only accommodated gay narratives rejected by conventional print, but it also opened up channels of creativity for authoring them. The styles of these narratives, as well as the creativity these men summoned up, I will argue, is different from creativity endowed institutionally—by formal education, certification, licensing, formal membership, and subsidies, for example—by being a creativity arising from the vernacular. In expressing desire not expressible by the institutional language and narrative modes, men took advantage of the electronic space to invent a language and a story-telling mode of their own, and along came the new gay narratives in great number.

Even an average man—as long as he knew how to type Chinese characters—could express himself, in a full length novel, a short story, or paragraphs and sentences, no matter how trivial they might have seemed to be. The internet and the particular ways electronic texts created, published, organized, or stored, provided opportunities to observe how average individuals and the collectivity relate their sexual desire through social interaction—the process Ricoeur could only see in finished works. Moreover, the web, by mediating and preserving traces of social interactions, also made the social process of the formation of minority collectivities evident— one that Plummer had to work out from resources limited by the capacity and conventions of the traditional media.

267 Ibid.

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Complete and coherent narratives are the main foci of my analysis, but I also want to pay due attention to mini-narratives, appearing in sentences or paragraphs, in the comment section of a novel, or messages in the personal sections, as well as in thread narratives. These mini- narratives and their authors, some of which we have come to in the last chapter when discussing

Beijing Story, had been deprived of existence in print, but the internet provided them an opportunity to surface. As trivial as they might appear, they do matter in providing actual/virtual traces of the individuals who articulated them and are indispensable in carrying out a social movement of forming gay identity and collectivity in cyberspace.

Wayback Machine is used as a means to retrieve lost data. Online traces are traked by following personal blogs and threads on BBS forums. I also use HTML code, the computer language in which the web pages were composed, normally invisible to the viewer, to acquire statistics relevant to web content analysis. In analyzing the number of comments on a forum thread, for example, the users’ repetitive quotation of each other makes it a difficult task to count the actual numbers of comments a certain user has made. But in HTML code, the precise number of comments can be acquired by simply searching the user’s name together with the marking tag appearing only in the original comment.

After 2005, some new strands of online homoerotic narratives appeared that are different from the early gay narratives in terms of their authorship, readership, social and economic arrangements and textual characteristics. Those narratives that are not in the scope of this study are for future study.

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4.1 Narratives on Other Gay Websites

To echo what was articulated by Xiao He and to continue Jet’s dashing into the erotopia of the internet, many men would come to tell their own stories, and together they contributed to creating a gay identity, a gay collectivity, and a gay China. These narratives further expanded the themes of gay narrative. Like Jet, many works wrote about new experiences engendered by the advent of the internet, with the excitement of the sudden expansion of making connections with other men, as well as the disillusion that soon came along as many same-sex encounters ended up being ephemeral one-night stands. To accommodate these narratives, the newly built websites—Guangzhou Tongzhi, Reddust, Whitepaper for Love and Boysky among them—had already started to carry gay narratives from the moment they came into being. Xiao He’s Beijing

Story and other works, too, were posted on these websites’ literary section as a major attraction.

All of these websites accepted individual works emailed to their literary section, and a work, no matter its genre, length and style, as long as it has a story line as a fiction or a cohesive theme as an essay, would be accepted and posted in the literary section. In the situation where almost every piece of work, especially popular ones, became shared by all gay websites, every website also tried to attract first publications. The earliest work on Guangzhou Tongzhi’s literary section was posted on April 10, 1999. A little later it started to accommodate columnists; in September

1999, Cui Zi’en was one of the first to become a Guangzhou Tongzhi’s columnist. Other gay websites took a similar route: Reddust, Boysky, and Whitepaper all had literature sections and soon recruited their columnists. A-Qing’s website, Starry is Tonight’s Sky, was a unique case for it hosted only his own stories. Since 1999, Boysky also started an annual literature competition,

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and its slogan—“Pick up your pen, you can also write well!”268—reflecting the fact that quite a few authors at the time still wrote first on paper then typed up their work on the computer, as well as the prevalence of vernacularity in gay narratives. Whitepaper at the time paid special attention to archiving cyber writings. Its editor Xiao Bai (晓白) conducted a considerable number of interviews with authors, providing valuable dialogue that documented the backgrounds or the themes in their works.

With the decline of gay websites soon after a series of purges of the Chinese web starting in 2004, interactive and participatory writing on BBSes became popular, with “Left Bank” on tianya.com as the BBS whose predominant popularity has lasted until today. In 2005, a trend of blogging arose and many individuals started to use their blogs to post their works, but this last stage of development of the cyber gay narrative falls outside the range of our study.

Authors writing for these websites developed their writing career more individually and organically. Many of them simply emailed their works to one or several of the gay websites.

Some of them enjoyed the honour of being a columnist exclusive to a certain website. But their connections with each other were casual and not necessarily related to writing. Leading this trend of narrating gay stories included Fu Xi (福汐), Jet, Equinox, Shi Fan (石凡), Xiao Hongxiu

(肖红袖), Ah-Qing, Tu Mu (涂沐), “Shanghai Cologne” (Shanghai xiangshui, 上海香水),

“River” (jianghe, 江河), and “Silent Walker” (jingjing xingzou, 静静行走)—and this list could

268 “Disanjie tongzhi yuanchuang zuopin dajiangsai” 第三届同志原创作品大奖赛 [The third grand tongzhi original work competition], Boysky (boysky.com), archived December 19, 1999 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/19991219142151/http://www.boysky.com/, accessed September 10, 2013.

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be much longer. Their works would make an even much longer list. The life experiences of these men varied largely, but they nevertheless reflected that of the generation intersecting with the advent of the internet. These men, reflected in their usually autobiographical narratives, were the first internet legitimate bachelors whose tethers to the normal system of authorities were loosened by the new market. And, as the first to enter cyber space, they acquired an epistemological distance from the real world that was a critical precondition for writing. Fu Xi and Xiao Hongxiu are two exemplary such authors. According to a short biography attached to his novel In the Days without Love on Guangzhou Tongzhi, Fu Xi (b. 1969) was a graduate in

English literature and, at the time his works were written, he worked for Time magazine’s office in China.269 Xiao Hongxiu, as he recounts in a touching memoir, “Towards Homosexuality”

(zouxiang tongxinglian, 走向同性恋), was born in the mid-1970s in the northern province of

Neimenggu. A youth, he failed to excel in his studies and other life expectations, and went on to pursue life in big cities, finally embracing his homosexuality.270 The writing career of these writers is generally short. Just like the websites builders, with the fading of the initial passion of writing and the increase in age, many in this group gradually became inactive after 2006.

Together, these writers expanded the genre and possible themes of homosexuality.

Martial art novels, a popular genre usually set in ancient China, were given a gay twist by many authors. Fantasy fiction, science fiction, popular romances, erotica, memoirs, campus love,

269 “Guanyu zuozhe” 关于作者 [about the author], Guangzhou Tongzhi (gztz.org), archived May 6, 2003 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20000304142440/http://www.gztz.org/, accessed September 10, 2013. 270 Xiao Hongxiu (肖红袖), July 8, 2003, “Towards Homosexuality" (zouxiang tongxinglian, 走向同性恋), Tianya, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-culture-85807-1.shtml, accessed September 10, 2013.

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barracks love, etc., were all experimented on through gay narratives that spread like a virus, encompassing all possible genres and social settings. But the predominant genre remained life writing.

4.2 Nanfeng and Other Websites: the Rise of Gay Narratives as a Movement

Figure 2 Homepage of Nanfeng as captured by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

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The third snapshot of the gay narrative movement I have chosen to present is the group of authors congregating around Nanfeng (男风), a homepage image of which, captured by Wayback

Machine on Jun 11, 2004, is shown above in Figure 2. Just slightly after Beijing Story becoming sensationally popular, a featured column dedicated to gay writings, Nanfeng, became a hotbed that fostered many influential authors and works. Its influence on the style and themes of gay narratives remained profound even after its decline around 2003. The column started in January

1999 as an electronic magazine run by Xiaohan (小汉), who also goes by his English name,

Hans. The term Nanfeng is a direct reference to male homosexual conduct or proclivities in traditional China.271 In 2001, Yifan’s BBS section was devoted to homosexual-related discussions, Free Discussions of Four Seas’s (四海纵谈, sihai zongtan) subsection dedicated to publishing new gay-themed works, Unscrupulous Times (wuji shidai, 无忌时代), also run by

Xiaohan, amalgamated with Nanfeng and the new website’s name remained Unscrupulous Times

(www.gstage.com),272 of which Nanfeng became a section for publishing gay fiction and essays.273

271 For a detailed etymological discussion of “nanfeng” and other terms used for male homosexual conducts or proclivities in traditional China, refer to Hinsch, The Passion of the Cut Sleeve, 57, and Kang Wenqing, Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900-1950, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 19-39. 272 “Introduction” (wangzhan jianjie, 网站简介), 2001, Wuji shidai 无忌时代 [Unscrupulous Times] http://www.gstage.com/intro.html, in rchived March 3, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20080509062426/http://www.gstage.com/intro.html, accessed September 10, 2013. 273 Linger (灵儿), “‘Sihai zongtan’ zhi jieri huaijiu” “四海纵谈”之节日怀旧 [Free Discussions of Four Seas and holiday nostalgia]. http://groups.tianya.cn/post-358927-2701283824285721953278927-1.shtml, accessed September 10, 2013.

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Xiaohan was “an MBA graduate” who worked for a company in the U.S.274 He passionately devoted a great amount of voluntary work to this non-profit website. He managed to recruit many writers, and created an encouraging atmosphere on Nanfeng to keep them active.

He maintained the website on a daily basis, but his greatest task was to secure enough new works to keep the website updated. Xiao Han’s own column was filled with stories of soliciting new works. In “Nanfeng the Baby,” Xiaohan likens Nanfeng to a baby of his own and others participants to “uncles and aunts:” “Next time when you come to see Nanfeng, please don’t come empty-handed. Bring some chicken broth or milk with you. Let’s feed him together, OK? Or if you like, Nanfeng can be your baby, too. More daddies won’t hurt.”275

Xiaohan’s most capable comrade was Xiaosu (小酥), who not only contributed many fictional works and essays but was also involved in the management of the website. Xiaosu’s

Zhao Xiaoming in Love (zhao xiaoming tanlian’ai, 赵小明谈恋爱) turned to be Nanfeng’s first popular novel. Xiaohan expressed his appreciation with humorous flattery: “Xiaosu is the treasure of Nanfeng. He has accomplishments in both the humanities and science, masters both essay and fiction, and possesses both beauty and wisdom. Just a few days ago, Xiaosu emailed a

274 Xiaohan 小汉, “dier quehan” 第二缺憾 [The Second Regret], Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi- bin/nanfeng.cgi0, archived July 8, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20010708151105/http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?article=12, accessed September 10, 2013. 275 Xiaohan 小汉, “Nanfeng baobao” 男风宝宝 [Baby Nanfeng], Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi- bin/nanfeng.cgi0), archived July 8, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20010708151656/http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?article=28, accessed September 10, 2013.

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novel for serialization. Xiaohan is tearfully grateful.”276 Likewise, many fictional works and essays by other authors were produced under Xiaohan’s urging and support.

As well as accepting authors with a welcoming attitude, Xiaohan and Xiaosu also reached out to seek men to join Nanfeng. Before joining Nanfeng, many authors had participated on

Yifan. They posted threads or fiction there, or simply went there to read the discussions. Some of them joined the website after seeing Xiaohan’s posts on other websites, as Ling’er (灵儿) testifies: “I found out that during Chinese New Year in February [of 1999], that our editor

Xiaohan had started to solicit works on Homo-Talk without Scruples [a forum on Yifan].”277

Some of them were invited by Xiaohan, Xiaosu, or later on, others, to join the website. One of them was “Freewheeling” (Shuaixing 率性): “Xiaosu and one of his friends—Xiaohan—started a pretty good website. He persuaded me to join the gang.”278 Still some others started to write after being inspired by fiction on Nanfeng. As Jac, who joined the website later, recounted: “I started to read Nanfeng a while ago. At that time it was not as popular as now. I just came here from time to time to read the development of Zhao Xiaoming in Love. ... Later on, I started sending my work in myself.”279 As a result, Nanfeng assembled a group of authors who led the

276 Ibid. 277 Linger (灵儿), “xindong”心动 [Tempted], Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/nanfeng.cgi0), archived April 13, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20010708151656/http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?article=28, accessed September 10, 2013. 278 “shuaixing” 率性 [ Freewheeling], “kaichangbai” 开场白[Opening Speech], Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/nanfeng.cgi0), archived July 2, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20010702030043/http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?article=556, accessed September 10, 2013. 279 Jac, “Qianyan” 前言 [Prologue], Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/nanfeng.cgi0), archived July 2, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20010702030043/http://www.gstage.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?article=718, accessed September 10, 2013.

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wave of narrating gay life. At the beginning of the website, any author who joined by emailing

Xiaohan an essay as an opening remark was assigned a dedicated column. Due to this column- centred structure, Nanfeng did not delete works unless requested by the author, and thus most of the works published there were kept for much longer than on other websites. In a 2006 snapshot by Wayback, 32 columns appeared on Nanfeng. As the number of authors grew, those who joined the website later shared three public columns, “Garden of a Hundred Flowers” (baihua yuan, 百花园), “Garden of a Hundred Grasses” (baicao yuan, 百草园), “Garden of a Hundred

Vegetables” (baicai yuan, 百菜园). Some authors with dedicated columns were also allowed guests to post works in his/her column. Altogether, counting using Wayback’s 2006 snapshot, more than two hundred authors had published on Nanfeng, with a handful of them identified themselves as women. 280 By 2006, these authors had published more than 1,300 pieces of work on the site, including novels, novellas, stories, and essays, most of which were written before the website’s decline around 2003281

Authors on Nanfeng demonstrated distinct features matching the generation of the early internet: those in the core cohort were mostly overseas students in North America, and young residents in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Like Xiaohan, many came from China to study in the U.S., and some had graduated, some were still in school. Xiaosu was a graduate student in science who “escaped to America directly from Shanghai,” and his works were composed in the

280 Among the female authors active on Nanfeng, Linger (灵儿) had a column, “Swaying Grassland” (mimi caoyuan, 靡靡草原), and Chaochao (超超) with “A Man Like Me” (nanren xiang wo, 男人像我). A few other female authors posted their writings in the three public columns. 281 This number is estimated according to Waybacks archive of Nanfeng captured on January 1, 2006.

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middle of “experiments, scientific instruments running day and night, endless data collection, and inexhaustible papers.”282 Many writer such as Liu Huo (流火), Fuge (赋格), and

“Freewheeling,” also studied or worked in the U. S. at the time.

In a way greatly different from the mainstream institutional publication and literary system, Nanfeng generated an atmosphere for men with no previous writing experience to become members of a highly active group that lifted their output from never having attempted creative writing to writers of stories, novellas, or even novels. All works, regardless of their length, genre, style, quality, or even completion, were highly welcomed and posted immediately.

Authors encouraged each other, read each other’s works, and took the effort to write essay-length comments. Writing was not considered an awesome or serious task but a fun and playful game, in which no hard lines were drawn between writer and reader, good work and bad work. Thanks to this welcoming atmosphere, Nanfeng became a hatchery for gay writing.

The highly educated background shared by the cohort of authors on Nanfeng did spawn a tendency of more “refined” writing among certain of them, but vernacular approaches to writing were more common in this group. Authors wrote as laypersons, and few of them considered themselves professional writers; certainly none expected that their homoerotic works would be published in print, even though some of them were talented and familiar with both classical

Chinese literature as well as Western canons. Pastiching well-known works was a common and

282 Xiaosu 小酥, “kaichangbai” 开场白 [The Prologue], Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/nanfeng.cgi0), archived July 7, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20020209160402/http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?article=1105, accessed September 10, 2013.

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easy way of composing a novel or novella. Eileen Chang (Zhang Ai’ling, 张爱玲), especially, was a favourite among these authors, perhaps because they saw a resemblance in Chang’s insightful depiction of women’s desire at the moments when modernity crashed into traditional

China, perhaps because these authors needed someone alienated by the Leninist literary system as a template. Xiaohan, Fuge, Liu Huo and others wrote a good number of essays discussing

Chang’s works. Lui Huo’s gay pastiche of Chang’s novella Love in a Fallen City, Falling in

Love in Beijing (zai Beijing duoru qingwang, 在北京堕入情网), was an especially excellent gay rendering of her work. The subtle interplay between the heroine and the hero in Chang’s original works was amazingly translated into a delicate romance between two men. We will turn to this

Liu Huo’s novella in Chapter Five. Some traditional Chinese stories were also very popular among these writers. The famous story of the White Snake (baishe zhuan, 白蛇传) for example, was pastiched by quite a few authors. Ah-Mo’s (阿摩) pastiche of this story, Between Heaven and the Human World (tianshang renjian, 天上人间), brings a homosexual twist to the triangular relation of the protagonists with an elegant language and mood matched by few mainstream writers.

As a game, authors on Nanfeng very often made jokes about other authors in their essays, or even made other writers into characters in their fiction. In Nanfeng user Honest’s subgenre- initiating novel of campus love between young men, First Year (xinsheng diyinian, 新生第一年

), in one case, Xiaosu becomes the name of a secondary female character who has a crush on the gay protagonist, Tian Yu (田雨), who later on turns to her when experiencing a setback in same- sex love. In the words of the mean and lovely university students, “Xiaosu had made her plot for long time. Last semester she always invited herself to Dorm 406, but she did not move Tian

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Yu… Tian Yu is the Prince Charming of our grade, and he was captured by Susu [Xiaosu] the pancake face.”283 Liu Yan (流言) even wrote a story, “Three Stories about Han” (han sanpian,

汉三篇), to banter Xiaohan, Xiaosu, Honest, Erniu (二牛) and other writers on the site by caricaturing them as the characters in his playful story. Quite a few works liken Nanfeng to a small town, and the authors as residents. Some even mock the website as a brothel, with the authors being prostitutes.

Overall, the website created a tolerant and friendly atmosphere conducive to generating works. Many writers, starting as readers commenting on others’ works, went on to produce a large body of works. As a result, Nanfeng fostered a group of authors, some of them highly productive. The vernacular was the main avenue to achieving creativity for these writers, but quite a few of them demonstrated an ability to write works of high quality that could emulate mainstream authors.

Unscrupulous Times stopped updating in 2006 and by 2010 the website was no longer in service. The influence of Nanfeng and these first gay websites, however, was long-lasting. If

Beijing Story broke the new ground of the vernacular, authors on this website further expanded themes, genres, and styles of narrating homosexual desire. From January 1999 to 2003, in the short time span of its four year peak, the website brought about a huge outpouring of gay fiction, including works with the most profound influence. The very best of these novels and stories can

283 Honest, First Year (Xinsheng diyinian, 新生第一年), Ch. 29, Nanfeng (http://www.gstage.com/cgi- bin/nanfeng.cgi0), archived April 18, 2001, by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20010713041821/http://www.gstage.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?id=21, accessed September 10, 2013.

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rival those of the mainstream literature, and they directly influenced the styles, narrative patterns and themes of later gay narrative. Many works that first appeared on Nanfeng could still attract tens of thousands of clicks and thousands of comments when later re-posted on Tianya’s gay section, “Left Bank”.

The most pupular gay fictions published on Nanfeng make for a long list. Honest’s First

Year, Xiaosu’s Zhao Xiaoming in Love (zhao xiaoming tanlian’ai, 赵小明谈恋爱), and

Mankiller’s Memoir of the Monk Class (heshang ban zhi suiyue suixiang, 和尚班之岁月随想) were the germs of the campus love genre. Erniu’s North (beibu, 北部) and Peaceful Year

(taiping nian, 太平年) , Liu Huo’s Falling in Love in Beijing (zai beijing duoru qingwang, 在北

京堕入情网), Hao’er’s (耗儿) Three Days with Jade (sanri yu, 三日玉) and Ah-Mo’s Between

Heaven and the Human World (tianshang renjian, 天上人间) continue to be popular even over a decade later. New gay websites, as long as they have literature sections, include these novels.

Some writers did not complete their major work when they participated on Nanfeng, but went on to compose their work elsewhere after the site declined. Xiaole (小乐), for example, took five years, from 2002 to 2007, to finish a full length novel, Feng and Ji (feng Ji, 枫霁).

After 2005, Nanfeng was rarely updated, due partly to the fading of the initial enthusiasm of the participants, partly to the dispersion of many authors to their own personal blogs, and partly to the convergence of internet censorship that made it more and more difficult for users in

China to access the website, as gstage.com was hosted on an American server. By 2010,

Nanfeng’s hosting website, gstage.com was no longer accessible.

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4.3 Narrative Threads on “Left Bank” and Other Forums

Yet another trend constituting part of the rise of gay narratives was interactive thread novels that gained popularity around 2003 on BBS forums. The most important venue to accomodate this form of writing was Companion (yilu tongxing, 一路同行), a BBS forum devoted to gay men and lesbians hosted by Tianya (天涯, tianya.cn), a site which had become

China’s most popular online forum, featuring dozens of highly popular forums. Companion’s predecessor, Between the Same Sex (tongxing zhijian, 同性之间), was established in April 1999 and was renamed to its current name to evade possible censorship that might be brought by its original name.284 Its two major sections, “Left Bank” (zuo’an wenzi, 左岸文字) and “Right

Bank” (you’an wenzi, 右岸文字), are dedicated to gay-related and lesbian-related topics, respectively. Under the umbrella of Tianya, Companion survived major internet purges and managed to maintain stability while dedicated gay websites experienced dramatic changes that resulted in the loss of archives, violent commercialization, or demise.285 Though a subsection of a mainstream forum hosting site, Companion became the largest literary venue, in terms of both visitors and number of works, for gay men and lesbians after the decline of gay websites around

284 In a post reviewing the history of Companion, a long time moderator of the forum and well-known gay author, Xiao Hongxiu (肖红袖), mentions that pressure, likely from the government, in 2004 resulted in renaming of the forum from “Between the Same Sex” to “Between Friends” (pengyou zhijian, 朋友之间), and under protests of the participants, subsequently to “Companion.” See Xiao Hongxiu, “Ni zhidao ma? Yilu Tongxing de qianchenwangshi” 你知道吗？一路同行的前尘往事 [Get Any Idea? The Past of Companion]. http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-451869-1.shtml, September 10, 2014. 285 While remaining a popular website, Tianya, too, has been under government surveillance and has undergone great changes. Tianya’s most popular forum before 2004, “All-Things-Concerned Tea House” (guantian chashe, 关天茶舍), a forum about current events, used to have a great influence on popular political opinion. This privilege has disappeared and Tianya has become mainly a lifestyle forum today. See Xiao Hongxiu, “Ni zhidao ma? Yilu Tongxing de qianchenwangshi” 你知道吗？一路同行的前尘往事 [Get Any Idea? The Past of Companion].

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2005. Moreover, “Left Bank” played a great role in preserving early gay writings, as the reposts of many fictional works and essays on “Left Bank” become the only copy online after they disappeared, sometimes together with the original host websites.

The majority of gay narratives on “Left Bank”, as well as their sister counterparts on

“Right Bank”, take a different form that drifts further away from literary conventions.

Appearing in threads, many of these narratives are based on the author’s experience, and the setting of an open forum always allows—indeed, requires—contributing comments from readers.

Live writing, or writing with minimal alteration of real life experiences, is particularly popular on BBS threads, as it requires little planning and opens itself to other visitors’ participation.

With its gigantic capacity unmatched by gay websites, along with its consistency and sense of belonging, “Left Bank” has become home to the largest number of gay authors, among them Nan

Kang (南康), “Knife” (dao, 刀), Yan Liang (严亮) and almost all the other most popular authors after 2006.

The following will use an interactive narrative thread, Xiaohu (小虎, little tiger), written by a man under the user name “Yudong in Winter” (冬天的郁冬), as the fourth snapshot to demonstrate the rise of gay narratives, as well as a case study of how a piece of narrative becomes the site of engendering gay individual identity as well as a gay collectivity.

As an open BBS forum, any registered user with an account on Tianya can start a thread or post comments in one. While in rare cases the administrators censor a thread or a comment before it is posted, the commonness of appeals for interference from an administrator when a debate escalates to personal attack or when a thread violates someone’s privacy suggests that the

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forum is not monitored in real-time. In general, within the guidelines of the website, BBS forums maintain an open atmosphere, and a specific culture has flourished, engendering a whole set of web slang and symbolic interactions that sometimes extend into the real world. A new comment is added to the bottom of the last one in the order of publication time, forming a multi- layered structure called a “building” (楼, lou) in Chinese net slang. The person who starts the post is “landlord” (louzhu, 楼主, “owner of the building”), and each following post is a “floor”

(ceng, 层) of the “building”. Sometimes the “landlord” and other readers might work together consciously to keep a thread going by adding more pieces of comments, and that is called

“constructing a building.” A successful “building” is decided by the “height” (the number of following comments), number of clicks, and how much sensation it makes in both cyberspace and the real world. The number of comments is the most important indication of a post’s success.

Most fiction originating from Tianya was serialized. The author, or the initiator, of the thread posts an opening remark and begins to tell his story segment by segment. Readers—or more appropriately, followers—visit for new updates, and sometimes post their comments, or interact with each other. The author, besides updating the new section of the novel, also answers their questions, or interacts with them by responding to their comments, or by participating in the activities going on in the thread. The followers’ comments might be related to the novel, discussing questions about the plot, the protagonists, anticipating the ending, etc. They can also be about the author’s life. But sometimes these comments can digress from the narrative to a topic one considers might be interesting to others. Current events, a triggered thought, gossip or even plain nonsense can all be posted. The discussions are usually friendly, but sometimes can

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evolve into unfriendly arguments or even vituperation. With few limitations, the ambiance of freedom and support seen on Nanfeng was developed even further. One of the most popular posts on “Left Bank” was able to attract 5,289,133 clicks and 49,433 comments.286

A thread narrative is not a text in the traditional sense—fixed, finished, closed, and solely authored by the writer. Rather, it is a hypertext that is itself the result of the ongoing interaction between the initiator and followers. The fact that the author cannot go back to change previous segments once they are posted also favours plain narrative style and language, whereas employment of literary devices usually requires deliberation and revision. Thus many thread narratives exhibit the vernacular and its authenticity. In addition, the setting up of thread narratives is different from conventional narratives in that they are “exposed” narratives: As the author’s interaction with followers in the thread is crucial to retaining the followers, his writing intentions and plans are also subject to the followers’ inquiry. The work appears not as a completed product but as a process of writing. As a result, it is unusual for an author to be detached from his followers, and his plans and intentions, as well as attitudes to characters which cannot be kept implicit as in printed books. Even the author’s personal life is inevitably subject to some degree of exposure, and the relevance of the story to his real life usually results in an honest narrative voice, or at least it sounds like one. For these reasons, thread narratives afford unique angles to look into the sites where the experience and the text are increasingly open to and influence each other. The experiences and texts of various followers, in the meantime, can

286 This thread is Woxin cangliang 我心苍凉 [My Desolate Heart], by “woben shanliang 3000” 我本善良 3000 [I’m Originally Kindhearted 3000], http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-175253-1.shtml. The count was made on March 19, 2014. Of course, the number of the visitors is much fewer than the click count, as some readers might have contributed hundreds of clicks each in the process of following it. The number of comments is also unreliable as a measure of participants, since some followers contribute a significant portion of the comments.

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be open to and interfere with each other, as the followers can all post these in their comments. It is in this highly dynamic and susceptible interaction between the experience and the text on the one hand, and all the participants on the other, that the gay identity and collectivity took shape, crystalized, and gained the power of authoring the self and the reality.

Xiaohu, novel serialized from July 18, 2004 to November 9, 2004, is named after one of its protagonists. The story, according to the author, Dongtiande Yudong (冬天的郁冬, Yu Dong in Winter), is based on his real experiences but has undergone alterations, as he says in the very opening of the thread:

This story records my life from university, and graduation to now. Of course, to protect the privacy of myself and others, I will not completely write it as it happened, especially addresses, names, schools and some other specificities. Readers, if you like, do not take this little story as documentary literature. Take it as a novel. Everyone please give me a chance. If it is good I will continue. If it is boring I will just save my efforts and stop it.287

At the beginning of the story, Xiaohu and Yu Dong are both youthful and handsome boys who have just started their university and share a passion for soccer. Starting with an argument on the soccer field that evolved into a physical conflict, both boys soon find that they share an array of things from their handsome appearance, their passion for soccer, their dormitory residence, and their friendship with their caring roommate Hao Jian (郝建). Their friendship soon evolves into sexual gratification and with that, an affection they both find hard to deal with.

When the internet becomes available at the university, they find online that what they are

287 Dongtian de yudong 冬天的郁冬 [Yu Dong in Winter], Xiaohu (小虎), http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-43808- 1.shtml#ty_vip_look[%E5%86%AC%E5%A4%A9%E7%9A%84%E9%83%81%E5%86%AC], accessed September 20, 2013.

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engaging in with each other would make both of them homosexuals. The boys are both confused. Xiaohu, especially, estranges himself from Yu Dong and reconnects with his ex- girlfriend. Yu Dong, at the same time, is approached by a student, Zeng Chao (曾超), who offers support and the understanding of a big brother when the former is experiencing hardship after breaking up with Xiaohu. After a long time, however, Zeng Chao also reveals his own attachment to Yu Dong, who finds that his support, both academic and emotional, is hard to do without, and they become lovers. Xiaohu, learning of the relationship between Yu Dong and

Zeng Chao, regrets giving up Yu Dong and asks him if he wants to resume their relationship.

Xiaohu also reveals that he ended his relationship with Yu Dong due to an anonymous email he received earlier, sent from a person who claims to be a girl caring about him. The email revealed that the sender had witnessed the boys kissing each other, and that Xiaohu could still “repair” himself if he wanted. Moved, Yu Dong nevertheless refuses the proposal as he finds that his relationship with Zeng Chao has become more significant. After graduation, the former friends find jobs in different cities. With Zeng Chao’s help, Yu Dong passes the examination for graduate school to follow the former to Beijing in the most prestigious medical university. In the meantime, Xiaohu, too, is taking the examination for the same school, perhaps in hope of joining up with Yu Dong again in Beijing. In a telephone call, Yu Dong learns that Xiaohu has not lived in his parents’ city, and in searching of him, he finds, to his surprise, that Xiaohu had been living with Hao Jian, the “caring roommate,” who, it turns out, has been in unrequited love with him, and was the author of the anonymous email.

A plain story laid out in the vernacular, Xiaohu tells a quotidian love story between young men with no literary twist. Xiaohu employs the very simple narrative strategies that started with Beijing Story: after a brief introduction by the narrator at the very beginning, Yu

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Dong flashes back to the first day when the two boys met, and simply narrates the events from a first-person perspective in a linear order, as it was experienced. The language used is simply matter-of-fact everyday vernacular language, and the love and feelings, too, are quite simple and ordinary. The story is filled with the everyday details of the university life of medical school students, and after the flashback at the beginning, the narrative is as organic as though it happened in real life. The novel was the author’s first attempt at writing; however, it nevertheless became popular on “Left Bank.” The original post attracted 217,931 clicks and

2,612 comments by June 12, 2011, and the novel was also copied by other major gay websites such as Guangzhou Tongzhi, Boys Don’t Cry, and Boysky, to name but a few.

4.4 The Experience of Following a Thread Story

The settings of Tianya’s BBS ensured that followers’ participation was crucial to a thread’s popularity, and for that matter, its survival. As the threads in the forum are ordered according to a few categories: date, clicks, or responses, and new ones appeared every minute in the day time thanks to Companion’s national popularity, a thread without enough clicks or comments would “sink” from the first page and hardly draw any attention from visitors, a matter of life or death for a thread since the authors seldom continue if there are not sufficient followers to keep them motivated. This setting ensures that the followers’ visible participation—click counts or number of comments—is crucial for the existence of a thread.288

288 The focus of my discussion is forum story serialization. Besides story-telling, there are discussion threads in which users contribute their opinions to a given topic brought up by the first author, who is not different than other contributors except for the fact that she or he is the one rose the discussion. There are also threads in which the first author simply upload materials with little temporal or narrative order, like in a thread devoting to funny pictures or short videos one garnered from various sources.

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As such, forum comments as a type of communication have features that can engender an experience remarkably different from other means such as oral interlocution, letter correspondence, book reading, web logs (blogs), emailing, or internet-mediated instant messaging. Inspired by observations on emails between two sisters, Charlie Rowe studies the features engendered by the settings of email correspondence. The similarities between email correspondence and forum discussion allow us to draw some parallels from Rowe’s study. Very much like what Charlie Rowe has pointed out with regard to the features of email, forum discussion is an intermittent written correspondence, hence it is also “a hybrid of written and oral language,” which maintains both the interactivity of oral conversation as well as the editability and deliberation of written language. In Rowe’s words, it “allows, relative to conversational written modes, a fairly rapidly (within minutes or even seconds) while still allowing for editability (thus promoting creativity).”289 In addition, forum comments, again like email, also allow users to quote others, which engenders “text visibility” that renders forum discussion

“conversational, providing the ‘memory’ aspect to compensate for the lack of immediacy.”290

But unlike email, forum discussion is a means of many-to-many communication, 291 and the thread is stored on the hosting website instead of any participant’s computer or email inbox, which gives forum discussion a more communal or semi-public environment. These features open a non-conversational dimension of forum discussion. A comment can be presented for the purpose of performance or game-playing rather than interlocution. Interaction among the

289 Charlie Rowe, “Building ‘Code’: Development, Maintenance, and Change in a Private Language,” American Speech 82-3 (2007), pp. 235-36. 290 Ibid. 291 Of course, the first author who starts the discussion does have privilege as opposed to other participants, but unlike a personal homepage or blog, he does not have control over the conversation once it has started. His privileged position is granted by other participants when they agree to respect him as such.

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participants, not necessarily involving the author, at times can also dominate the dynamics of the thread, accentuating its social aspects beyond the author’s narrative. In addition, one can, with the exception of the author before finishing his story, visit a thread without taking the responsibility of leaving a comment. As such, a thread bears more similarities to a place in which not only messages (that of the author’s story or participants’ comments) are hosted, but also a place capable of engendering events and experiences.

Due to these features, the thread of Xiaohu and similar forum novels stretched the print- bounded literary conventions further away from what started with the novels and stories on

Nanfeng. As any readers can contribute their comments at any time while the story is being serialized, the thread becomes interlaced with the segments of the story, the readers’ comments, and the author’s own comments. In a popular post, the comments could add up to longer than the story itself. In the case of Xiaohu, the novel started from July 18, 2004 and took nearly four months to finish on November 9, 2004. After the serialization was completed, new comments from both the author and the followers were still being added to the thread at the time I retrieved it on June 12, 2011. The followers contributed much more to its length than the author of Xiaohu himself. Of 2,613 total posts, the number of posts by Yu Dong himself was 81, with some enthusiastic participants posting as many as 116 (“Surpassed Once”), 48 (“Unruly Emperor’s

Son-in-law Zeta”), 35 (“Silent Sea”) and 30 (“Erotic Spain”) times.292

292 The original names of these contributors are: “Surpassed Once” (cengjing yueguo, 曾经越过), “Diaoman fuma zeta” 刁蛮驸马 ζ [Emperor’s unruly son-in-law Zeta],, “Dahai wuyan” 大海无言 [Silent Sea], and “Qingse xibanya” 情色西班牙 [ Erotic Spain].

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The comments in Xiaohu are first of all about the novel itself. The followers’ comments on the characters, showing their favour of a particular character, anticipating the development of the story, and above all, finding deep resonance in their own experience. A follower, “White

Marlboro” (Baise Wanbaolu, 白色万宝路) comments when Xiaohu and Yu Dong break up:

“When I read the part in which [Yu Dong] tears the necklace off [Xiaohu’s neck] I almost could not hold it in. The bros are good together, how come things are getting so bad? I really want to cry…”293 One hour later he continues, likely after pondering his own experience: “Sometimes it’s really hard to forget someone, because he left too much stuff with you. Sometimes you think of him even seeing the slippers he wore when he visited you.”294 Comments like this are abundant, and seem to be natural for the followers to contribute. Some readers go further by offering writing advice: “I think the opening flashback takes too much space. It makes the whole story too long and difficult to end. If you are busy with work, or you want to save some time, I suggest you simplify the description of roommates. Write only things that matter and give up unimportant details. That way perhaps readers will feel energized [when they read your writing].”295

Readers’ comments, however, can deviate from the story itself to a wide variety of topics.

Some comment on details that would otherwise have been ignored in a fictional story. Many

293 Baise Wanbaolu 白色万宝路 [white Marlboro], August 16, 2004 (22:44), comment on Yu Dong, Xiaohu (Reading edition) (小虎（阅读版）), http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-43808-1.shtml, accessed September 20, 2014. 294 Baise Wanbaolu 白色万宝路 [white Marlboro], August 16, 2004 (23:43), comment on Yu Dong, Xiaohu (Reading edition) (小虎（阅读版）). 295 Diaoman fuma zeta 刁蛮驸马 ζ [Unruly Emperor’s Son-in-law Zeta], August 4 2004 (8:15,), comment on Xiaohu (Reading edition).

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who went to medical school, for example, recall how hard the examinations were in response to

Yu Dong’s account of end of term cramming. Some others are obsessed with the where the story took place. They bother themselves with trips to West China Medical University (huaxi yike daxue, 华西医科大学) and report their expeditions of the buildings and soccer field, as many details in the narrative suggest that that was where the story took place. One user, “Little Bird

Flying Across Sunny Sky”, even posted pictures taken at the university.296 Such practices, however, are objected to by many others, who are concerned with Yu Dong and the prototypes of the protagonists’ privacy. Questions about the author’s real life are often raised, to some of which the author takes the time to answer, to others he has to remind the readers to respect his privacy.

Some comments are not commentary by nature but more like activities. The most common activity the followers engage themselves in is simply a one word comment, ding (顶, to raise the floor), which contributes to the popularity of the thread by adding one more comment but itself carries no specific detail. When the author stopped updating and disappeared for a few days on August 21, 2004, many readers were concerned that he would leave the novel unfinished, or in Chinese cyber slang, “leave a hole” (wakeng, 挖坑). Many of them posted to demand updates, some with endearing scolding, some begging, yet some guessing what was going on in Yu Dong’s life. Among those is “Flying in Sunny Sky” (qingkong feixiang, 晴空飞

翔), who became a registered user with Tianya only to follow the serialization closely:

296 “tianqingle xiaoxiaoniao feiguo” 天晴了小小鸟飞过 [Little Bird Flying Across Sunny Sky], comment on Xiaohu, May 7, 2008 (14:46, 18: 59), July 10, 2008,

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Yu Dong, oh Yu Dong, I have searched this name on various forums many times. I saw the serialization on another forum and immediately liked it. I like the true feelings oozing from your words. Even if this is not a one hundred percent true story, it must be the combination of your experience and your ideals. With my friend’s help, I’m finally ashore on the Left Bank. Hehe, first thing I did here was ding you. I’m waiting for your new posts. It’s been a week.297

Reading the story, following the discussion, and indeed, simply being in the forum seem to have become a significant part of some readers’ lives, as Communityblue says: “Stole a few minutes to go to an electronic library to get online when I’m studying. Just to ding this novel.

But the landlord has not updated. Crying…”298 “Foreign Land” (他乡, taxiang) too, bore the story in his mind even when he was away from the city: “Came back from a trip. The first thing to do is check Xiaohu. Still no new update. Dongdong go!”299 The author, too, finds communicating with readers an imperative in his life, as he is eager to know the reception of the story and, in the end, just exchanging messages with readers becomes an essential part of his life.

“So many brothers in this “building” are so passionate. I often peek at your comments when there is nobody around.”300

As Yu Dong’s story unfolds, however, followers were divided into two factions, one in support of Xiaohu as Yu Dong’s true love, the other in support of Yu Dong’s current lover, Zeng

Chao. By October 7, the debate between the two groups developed into a heated one that sometimes caused mayhem, with some resorting to personal attack or uncivil language. Yu

297 Qingkong Feixiang (晴空飞翔), August 27, 2004 (13:24), comment on Yu Dong, Xiaohu (Reading edition). 298 Communityblue, September 10, 2004 (14:58), comment on Yu Dong, Xiaohu (Reading edition). 299 Taxiang (他乡), October 2, 2004 (19:55,), comment on Yu Dong, Xiaohu (Reading edition). 300 Dongtiande Yudong, October 1, 2004 (13:35), comment on Yu Dong, Xiaohu (Reading edition).

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Dong himself had to step out to mediate. The discussion in October, 2004 contributed 550 comments in total.

Discussions in the thread continued after the denouement of the story on November 9,

2004. Heated discussion lasted for two months, with 286 comments in November, 2004, 276 in

December, 2004, and 145 in January, 2005. As Yu Dong gradually disappeared from the thread, the number of comments decreased greatly. The average number of monthly comments in 2005, with the exception of January, was 43, that for the following years was 50 (2006), 18 (2007) and again 18 (2008). The thread, however, remains alive long after the story’s completion. New followers who discovered the thread would leave their comments and continue to contribute to the popularity of the thread, now on smartphones. In April 2009, for example, “Little Knut”

(xiaoxiao Knut, 小小 Knut) and chunfengdu, two followers who recently found the thread, contributed 66 comments. They first just simply “dinged” it and then a conversation developed between them. To respond to chunfengdu’s greeting, “Ding. Hi upstairs, it seems that you are a loyal fan of Xiaohu!”301 “Little Knut” says 5 minutes after, “Yes, I marked this page on my cellphone and ding it every day at the same time. I always feel that works as encouraging as

Xiaohu are hard to come by these days. [Others] are all sentimental and melodramatic, and too shallow. I hope that more guys could see this one and do some reflection after reading it.”302

301 Chunfengdu, April 8, 2009 (13:27), comment on Xiaohu (Reading edition). 302 “Xiaoxiao Knut” 小小 Knut [Little Knut], April 8, 2009 (13:32), comment on Xiaohu (Reading edition)..

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A few participants of the serialization returned to the thread years after the story was completed. They posted their comments, now nostalgic, such as this one made by “Apple

Omelette” on August 17, 2011:

How long has it been? Seven years. Just a moment ago, seeing Xiaohu emerge on the first page on Companion, my heart twitched, and my tears almost dropped. Still remember the first time I saw this thread. I’d just got to college. I had so many dreams about college and life after graduation then. I believed in love. I was expecting. And I was brave. Seven years after, I graduated 3 years ago. I’m already tired, but I haven’t encountered love. This world only presents me with desire and reality. I will not be resentful. I will keep going. Best wishes for Xiaohu, Xiaodong, and Zeng Chao.303

He is narrating his own story, expressing nostalgia about the youthful but wasted years, and the thread, still carrying the comments made then, now has become the memory of the years that have passed by. But in the meantime, isn’t his story here narrating yet another story—one about the thread itself—how its meaning changed through the years in the eyes of someone carried away by time?

Though not a radical realization of potentials of hypertextuality, Xiaohu is nonetheless remarkably different from traditional texts. Its thread is more than the story Xiaohu in many senses. Unlike a printed novel, it is not a closed text; instead, it incorporates many “ancillary parts,” as Landow calls them when comparing print to hypertext:

One can easily visualize reading a text for which one has only partial permission, so that portions of it remain forbidden, out of sight, and perhaps entirely unknown. An analogy from print technology would be having access to a published book but not to the full reports by referees, the author’s contract, the manuscript before it has undergone copyediting, and so on. Conventionally, we do not consider such materials to be part of

303 “Hebao pingguo dan” 荷包苹果蛋 [Apple Omelette], August 17, 2011 (23:05), in Xiaohu (Reading edition).

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the book. Electronic linking has the potential, however, radically to redefine the nature of the text, and since this redefinition includes connection of the so-called main text to a host of ancillary ones (that then lose the status of ancillary-ness), issues of power immediately arise. Who controls access to such materials, the author, the publisher, or the reader?304

In this light, the comments made by the followers, while seeming ancillary, are indeed indispensable to the thread. At the very basic level, without the constant encouragements carried by these comments, the writing was unlikely to finish. Because the settings of the forum place primary weight on the followers’ support, the process of writing is also present in the narrative itself, as the first author was simultaneously in an ongoing communication with the followers, the theme of the story, writing strategies, and his ongoing life in the real world while the story was serializing. These are all woven into with the story itself. The comments, in addition to supporting the narrative, are also expressions of the followers’ own stories and emotions, providing visible traces of how they make sense of the author’s story. Thanks to these traces, the readers gain presence in the story-telling. Together, the participants create a narrative of the thread itself that is parallel to the author’s story: The thread grows, binds the author and the followers together, and keeps moving forward even after the story was finished. The heated debates and factional struggles among the followers not only add to its popularity, but also create a dramatic flavour to the thread. The thread, then, is better seen as an environment of ongoing many-to-many conversations which provids both context and motivation, as well as an audience for Yu Dong’s story to be told.

304 Landow, Hypertext 2.0, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 358-59.

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Reading, or precisely, following a thread, too, is active and participatory, greatly different from the silent and static reading of a printed work held in one’s hands. When reading online, one is linked to other websites or other links within the same site—the immense semiotic universe residing on the web—hence one is in an explicitly linked hypertext environment.

Additionally, one is linked to other participants in tangible interactions. A book, on the other hand, is a piece of self-contained text isolated from its surrounding, and a book’s intertexuality, an important feature of literature mediated by the paper, is implicit. The connection between its writer and readers and among readers is merely imaginative. Because of all these features of thread narrative, the hierarchy between the author and the readers is largely reduced.305 A thread in this sense is not only a text for reading, but a hypertext that is itself a game of interaction. The aspect of activity in reading—implicit in reading a book—was amplified and became evident, and thus following a thread became an experience itself, side by side with the semiotic reception of the text.

4.5 Co-Authoring a Reality

The hypertext of a thread narrative also endows its followers with more power than readers are prescribed by a book. On the one hand, followers could be the ideal readers an author could have only dreamt of previously. They were the author’s comrades, encouraging, enthusiastic, and contributing, and they joined in when the writing was ongoing. Reading with their life, they were more than willing to invest great sympathy and empathy, drawing from the

305 The “landlord” on Tianya does hold some privileges. Besides being tagged as “landlord” of the thread, she or he decides when to start a new page, but these conventions are only formal, and she or he has no control over the followers’ comments.

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author’s writing and echoing it with their own feelings and experiences. The reading process for a passionate follower included simultaneously composing his own life narrative, in comments as short as a few lines to long comments that themselves matched the length of a short story, to which the forum provided both the space as well as peer encouragement to accommodate. On the other hand, some followers might turn against the author or other followers, and by posting meaningless, negative, or even hostile comments—in web slang, pouring water (guanshui, 灌水

)—they also had the power to ruin a thread.

Successful threads like Xiaohu derived their popularity from a friendly environment, as well as a narrative style that was conducive to the follower’s participation. The vernacular narrative style of Xiaohu resulted in an authentic and touching story with the power of motivating followers to recall their own life, and prompted some to write their own stories and recollections. Highly stimulated by the stories, the followers could easily convert themselves from readers to writers. Beijing Linfeng (北京林烽) is one of the many readers who was moved to contribute his own memoir:

I have read this thread every day for more than twenty days,. When I read today’s update, it brought me back to the past. I could feel the hardship and the pain, as if I had been experiencing it again. Back then, he also rejected this identity, and refused to sink into this mire. [He] changed from the initiator of passion to aloofness in the end, from a friendly word at the beginning to fists and kicks in the end, and he hurt me all of a sudden. It’s so hard to look back to those days. Every day was filled with tears, pain, and indulgence, and my studies were almost completely neglected. Fortunately, we stopped hurting each other when he finally found that loving me was more important than other things. I don’t know if this story is true or not. I just realized that there were very similar experiences happening at different places and among different people.306

306 Beijing Linfeng (北京林烽), August 9, 2004 (22:33), comment on Xiaohu (Reading edition).

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Similarly, yiyi636633 could relate the story closely to his own experience:

Landlord, I’m also studying in medical school. Younger than you, but have similar experiences. The new semester will start tomorrow, and I will be facing biochemistry and physiology. That will be really depressing. He and I were high school classmates. Same situation as you guys. We also shared a dormitory, hung out together, and in the end we also had scuffles with each other.307

Beijing Linfeng and yiyi636633 are but two of many men who told their stories in the thread. The other followers we have mentioned earlier, as well as the ones we will see later, are all telling their story explicitly or implicitly. Indeed, every follower who posted in the thread relates their own story in one way or another. The thread, in this sense, is not merely Yu Dong’s own story but a story-telling venue similar to a congregation in which the participants take turn to tell their stories, a setting more familiar in a pre-modern society as with the “cycle of folktales,” as Stephen Benson calls it, in the Arabian Nights, Decameron, or in the Chinese context, Strong Tales from Make-do Studio, if the anecdote of Pu Songling (蒲松齡) offering tea in exchange for stories is to be believed.308 But this “cycle of folktales” in cyberspace is not one for telling fictional stories, but one for the “men of narrative”—individuals carrying stories of their own life—to present themselves. For one thing, as Benson notes, together with Ong, the internet engendered a new version of orality to realize the “combinatory mechanism” of “cycle of folktale”—a mechanism “that describes and enables the generation of stories.”309 The cyber realization of this combinatory mechanism, however, is perhaps more powerful in generating new stories, since it engenders a virtual presence but in the meantime provides anonymity to

307 yiyi636633, August 25, 2004 (0:49), comment on Xiaohu (Reading edition). 308 Stephen Benson, Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folklore, Theory, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 44. 309 Stephen Benson, Cycles of Influence, 55.

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overcome the barriers that keep one from telling one’s story in the real world. In addition, the thread, too, invites “the performative aspect of oral narration”310 in the interaction between the participants. Each story told within the thread is an instance of one’s life with similar desires, similar experiences and similar feelings, and all these instances are related within the presence of one another. The result is a sense of narrative understanding of what it was like to be a gay man, and at the same time, a sense of being a member of one’s own kind.

The cycle of the online gay folktales is not limited to a single thread. Just like Yu Dong himself, who started a thread out of an irrepressible impulse to tell, Yan Liang (严亮), a retired military officer, started his own thread, Days in Military School (junxiao guangyin, 军校光阴), in a very familiar way inspired by Yu Dong’s story:

It’s almost time to come off work, but suddenly I have a very strong desire to write something. I don’t have much to do at work these days. So I have been reading many love stories on Tianya. I was touched deeply, as if many things I experienced before emerged when I was reading. A lot of feelings and emotions [I read] felt like my own experiences, only that the happiness and sadness happened in different scenes. I was thinking to myself: everyone is experiencing numerous incidents, but we did not know which to forget, and which to remember. If we do not bear in mind what we are meant to remember, the memory is just emptiness. But if we let the antennas of our memory extend, many details we thought we had forgotten would still be clear. Just as said by Yu Dong, the author of Xiaohu, I also do not know what demarcates the real and the fictional, memory and creation. I do not know how this impulse of writing that suddenly surged before coming off work will affect my life. Whatever. I only hope that there are some people who would be interested in my story. And I hope that my story won’t be misread by my lover. Let’s start.311

310 Stephen Benson, Cycles of Influence, 109. 311 Yan Liang, Days in Military School (junxiao guangyin, 军校光阴), http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-123679- 1.shtml, accessed, November 3, 2013.

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Yan Liang is continuing the circle of narrating a gay self. Even his very way of starting the story remains us how Yu Dong started Xiaohu. Yan Liang, too, whose story was serialized from February 1, 2007 to April 14, 2007, is narrating parallel to his life and in the vernacular.

Like many other gay stories, Days is a story based on the author’s own life written in the first- person voice. By December 6, 2011, when it was retrieved, it attracted 272,356 clicks and 5,771 comments on “Companion”.

Another author “From R University to P University” (cong R da dao B da, 从 R 大到 B

大) serialized 941 from February 15, 2005 to March 30, 2005. A life story about himself, a graduate student presumably attending the prestigious Peking University, and his lover, the thread attracted 61,631 clicks and 402 comments by December 6, 2011. This list can be extended to great length, as many other popular gay stories were written in threads on

“Companion.”

Thus, from Beijing Story to First Year to Xiaohu, gay narratives inspired even ordinary gay men to tell their own stories. Reading a gay story, from the commenters of Beijing Story on

Guangzhou Tongzhi to Jet, to the members of Nanfeng, to Yu Dong and Yan Liang, goes hand in hand with seeking a personal narrative for oneself, which, in turn, goes hand in hand with writing one’s own. The borderlines between reading, seeking one’s own narrative, writing, and finally, living the actual life have become blurred. Increasingly, gay narratives connected to each other, and spread contagiously.

Each and every single case of story-telling, from a one-liner to a short story, to a novel, to an oeuvre by an author, to a thread co-authored by hundreds, is one in which a gay man stands up to assemble “my instance” of gay existence. By making one’s own case, no matter how

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trivial, each man is performing as a gay subject who speaks against the ambiguity. Always in first-person or quasi-first-person voice, always based on the life experience and memory of a particular generation, always telling the story without literary twists, and always employing plain vernacular, the myriad gay narratives recounted online are repetitive by nature. In the face of the hyperlinked contextual environment on the internet, the conventional literary evaluation weighing quality over numbers, bounded to the book, collapses. Here online, the number matters as much as the quality. Each story, even the “bad” ones, is a contributing speech action of standing up to testify and to be present as a gay man, as the power of testimonies and truthfulness depend on the number. The repetitiveness of these stories is similar to what Ong points out of the oral culture, where the “additive,” “redundant,” and “copious” individual stories join each other to form the “fluency, fulsomeness, volubility” of collective story-telling. 312

Bogatyrev and Jakobson note that “folklore is set specifically toward langue, while literature is set toward parole,” in their study of folklore.313 In their repetitiveness, the myriad gay narratives join together to form a chorus of narrating gay desire articulated by Beijing Story and other first gay narratives. From one thread to another, tens of thousands of threads in “Companion” form a congregation of storytelling. From “Companion” to other websites, the whole cyber gay world is connected to form a network of an even greater story world. These millions of stories,

312 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 39-41. 313 Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev, “Folklore as a Special Form of Creation,” trans. John O’Hara, in Folklore Forum, 13 (1), January 1980, pp. 1-21.

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hyperlinked to each other, form a giant banyan tree that itself is a forest of stories, or the “totality of symbolic expression,”314 as Heim calls it.

Similarly, in constituting an alternative gay reality, repetitiveness is not redundancy but necessity. Because of their great number and congenital bond with the real life afforded by the vernacular, myriad gay stories, collectively narrated, become self-sustainable enough to overcome the resistance of the language and the norms of the offline world to form an alternative gay reality. This alternative reality also offers a whole set of survival kits that are indispensable for living out a gay life in the real world, where comrades are rare and support is hard to come by. From individual support to the sense of a group, from everyday mindset to tricks for dealing with dangerous situations in the real world, from detailed emotional drama to life transcripts, this alternative cyber world built through storytelling provides more than the fishery narratives could offer. As innumerable gay stories are being told together, gay men can constantly immerse themselves in these stories, with their own experience and their own desire enhanced by repetitive reading of similar stories. Following others’ stories enables one to plot out one’s own, and subsequently changes the way gay men look at themselves and make sense of their sexuality: through the story, men individually acquire a past, an emotional interior, and collectively they form a shared history and a common memory.

314 Michael Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 215.

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4.6 Popular Narrative and Gay Lore

The oceanic capacity and openness of the internet also accommodated many shades of writing: At the pinnacle are writers like Xiao He, Fu Xi, Nan Kang, and Ah-Mo, whose tenant vanquished many well-published mainstream writers. Under them are authors who wrote a few stories or novellas, or even one or two novels that survived the ephemerality of the internet.

Lower down are writers who produced one or two pieces of rarely read stories that eventually dissolved in deep cyberspace. Even further below are some who set out to write a story but could not finish it. There were also different approaches to writing: from those who took writing seriously like Xiao He to many who wrote for socializing or just for fun.

A great number of gay narratives on the early Chinese internet, so often ignored, however, were authored by ordinary readers, or more precisely, participants, of these narratives, who contributed to this torrent of gay narratives with a single short comment. The voices of the general reader had been muffled in the vacuum of the print system, but the internet, for the first time, afforded a margin for common readers to present themselves together with the work.

Many of these comments are themselves mini narratives. Appearing as a trickle, they merged into a torrent that made up the main trend of gay narratives.

It is difficult, however, to estimate the exact number of gay narratives produced during the first decade of the internet in China. This is due to a few reasons: for one thing, all websites tried to expand their literature section by adding any piece of work the webmaster could find online, resulting in a general overlapping of works published on many websites. Most of the websites, at the same time, did not pay attention to archiving their contents, and when redesigning or updating, many of them simply deleted their literature section or left dead links to

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the titles. Whitepaper’s fiction section in its literary “Aibai Library” (aibai wenku, 爱白文库), for example, had a large collection of 7,465 titles by 2006, but when it decided to change the website’s course to focus on “community building,” “Aibai Library” was taken down.

Moreover, the tightening of censorship, together with the trend of commercialization around

2004 had wiped out a great number of the early gay websites, and many works have since disappeared along with these websites. “Left Bank”’s collection plays a great role in preserving gay narratives, but it is designed without considerations of retrieving works at all. Many reposts of previous works were not careful to keep track of different versions, leaving the exact date, website, and sometimes, author, in doubt. In addition, “Left Bank” does not provide options for sorting threads by date, which means many early threads are not accessible unless one knows its author or the title.

Thousands of authors contributed tens of thousands of gay narratives—novels, novellas, stories, memoir essays, finished or unfinished—in the years from 1998 to 2005, a gigantic volume far beyond the capacity of the publishing system. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg; the number of men who contributed narratives in the broader sense—in comment sections, forum discussions, personal messages, or online chat rooms—was innumerable: every man who set a foot in the gay cyber world in the first ten years of the internet in China, one might say, has left textual traces in one way or another. Together, these gay narratives form a torrent unseen by the history that speaks to the desire and love of a marginalized minority of the population.

From Beijing Story to “Dashing Madly at Midnight,” to BBS life stories, gay narratives appearing on the internet take the avenue defined by the vernacular. In stark contrast to the institutional literary representation, gay narratives very often tell the authors’ personal life in

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private language. Their authors do not assume the position of a writer, and they usually maintain their anonymity. The readership, too, was private, consisting of men of the same kind as the authors, rather than the general public. The circulation of these stories, in addition, is mostly limited to the cyber gay world, with only a handful of gay novels having been published, thus avoiding possible interaction with authorities in the real world or their representatives in the virtual world.315

The gay narrative avenue meant that these narratives, while tightly woven together with one another, are located in a secluded gay cyber world outside the mainstream symbolic system.

The institutional literary system, while declining in the face of the internet and commercial culture, remained immune to gay narratives at the end of the first decade of China’s internet age.

The vernacular also demonstrate itself in the very feelings and emotions of being gay, setting gay love—or one might say, the quality of gay love—as it was inseparable from the text.

Gay subculture as a marginalized lifestyle tends to take informal, very often underground, avenues in general. The lifestyles, the very manners by which gay men engage each other, the languages they use to recount their private lives, and the informal channels through which these stories spread are all part of a “dark existence” without formal representation in the mainstream discourse system. This is especially demonstrated in Joseph Goodwin’s study of gay folklore in

315 The following is a list of other published gay novels: Xiao Jie (小杰), Overseas Dairy (piaoyang riji, 飘洋日记), Wuhan, Changjiang wenyi chubanshe (长江文艺出版社), 2003. Tai Di (泰迪), Pretty Boy (piaoliang nansheng, 漂亮男生), Beijing, Zhongguo guoji wenhua chubanshe (中国国际文化出版社), 2003. Nilu Zhuren (逆旅主人), Love and Punishment by Lake Weiming (weiming hupan de ai yu fa, 未名湖畔的爱与罚), Nanjing, Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe (江苏文艺出版社), 2012. He Yaohui (何要辉), Xiongdi,Vol.I 兄弟之上 [Brothers], (Beijing, Zhongguo guoji wenhua chubanshe 中国国际文化出版社, 2010). And Xiao He’s Beijing Story, see note 255.

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1980s middle America, in which gay men wove together a gay subculture with verbal and nonverbal communications, humour, drag (female impersonation), and narratives of personal experience. 316 Marginalized social positions, in Goodwin’s study as well as many other similar cases, usually tie gay narratives to a sympathetic bond with the vernacular.

If gay lore could exist among small numbers of men desiring men in relatively isolated cities in the pre-internet eras, as discussed in Chapter One, the power of vernacularity was amplified exponentially by the internet to sustain a national popular gay story-telling culture of a sort that only a social movement can emulate. As Howard points out, the internet as a participatory medium opens up “powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity.”317 Alongside that, one might add the opposite: the vernacular also enhanced the power of the internet, as a style, a means of creativity, a mode of romance, and a new relationship between the author and the reader.

The remediation of homosexuality to the internet galvanized the articulation of homosexuality that was followed by the proliferation of a much greater number of gay vernacular narratives. Furthermore, if titled narratives constitute archipelagos, they were surrounded by an ocean of minor narratives contributed by men who responded with their own stories in the comment section, or messages in the personals section, and chat room conversations. All these narratives, joined together to form a gay folklore. This is folklore because 1) it remains informal and secluded from the mainstream discourse system that is

316 Goodwin, Joseph, P., More Man Than You’ll Ever Be!: Gay Folklore and Articulation in Middle America, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989).

317 Glenn Howard, “Electronic Hybridity,” p. 192.

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governed by authorities, 2) while they exist in all possible varieties, their invariable task is to explore the theme of homosexuality in the context of China, 3) they function as folklore in the sense that they provide a buttress for gay men , from where they can form a self around their sexual desire, a strong bond with each other, a life transcript that prepares them for struggles in the real world, a mindset that helps them make sense of living a gay life in a heterosexual world, and 4) these narratives are woven together across geographic, social and cultural production systems.

This cyber gay folklore is more powerful than its pre-internet predecessors. With the rise of gay narratives, the isolated atomic existence maintained by the ambiguity against homosexuality was smashed and the commonality shared by this group formed a sense of collectivity which shared the same sexuality. Thus before and after the movement of gay narratives, life changed for men desiring men in China, and connected by these narratives, this generation of men became gay. In a society where open challenges to the authorities in public spaces were minimal, the movement of popular narrative became a social movement leading to the formation of gay identity and collectivity in China.

4.7 Conclusion: Narrating A Gay Collectivity Online

Foucault famously declared regarding “the endlessly proliferating economy of the discourse on sex” in modern Western societies since the eighteenth century: “Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated—and in such a relatively short span of time—a similar

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quantity of discourses concerned with sex.”318 This statement, to a degree exaggerated and rhetorical, even taken as fact, would be dwarfed by the sheer number and volume of gay narratives that appeared in such an explosive way on the web in China. From Beijing Story to tens of thousands of others fictions, to millions of mini-narratives appearing as short comments or other forms, cyber Chinese gay narratives proliferated within an extremely narrow time span of less than a decade. The very short time span meant that the group of men who produced this body of narratives shared distinct generational commonalities, and as a result of a generation of legitimate bachelors’ encounter with the internet, a gay world came into being in cyberspace.

Within this alternative world, the ambiguity against homosexual was dispelled, the authorities faced down, the foundation for a new life course laid, and a common homosexual experience arose. If narrative understanding in Paul Ricoeur’s sense is first of all individualistic, a narrative understanding shared and testified by many through their personal instances form a gay folklore with the power of defining a collectivity, retaining a reality, and upholding an identity that were all non-existent just a few years ago. Thus repetition led to similarity, similarity led to a strong bond with each other, and from the strong bond a collectively shared identity took shape, stabilized and finally crystalized. The scale and the effects of narrating gay stories could only be achieved by a social movement in other contexts.

The rise of a gay identity and collectivity in China, then, must be attributed to the internet: a condition greatly different from what happened in Western societies. Ken Plummer

318 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Trans. Hurtley, Robert, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 33.

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has argued for the primacy of the narrative in the formation of a community of sexual minority like gays and lesbians in Western societies:

My argument is simple. I will suggest – just as I have for rape stories – that for narratives to flourish there must be a community to hear; that for communities to hear, there must be stories which weave together their history, their identity, their politics. The one – community – feeds upon and into the other – story. There is an ongoing dynamic or dialectic of communities, politics, identities and stories which have their roots in the nineteenth century but which reach a critical “take-off stage” by the middle of the twentieth. At this point, it becomes a global phenomenon....319

Narratives, too, as mentioned earlier, are the primary means for men desiring men in

China to come up with a gay identity as well as a collectivity. But different conditions engendered different narratives, and different narratives led to different meaning of gay identity.

In Plummer’s argument, one cannot help noticing that the more than half century that was taken for gay and lesbian coming out stories to become the prevalent narrative mode to frame romantic relations among homosexuals was also the times when individualism became prevalent in

Western societies, among other material and ideological consequences of modernity. This is something which Anthony Giddens argues for intimate relations in general and John D’Emilio for homosexuality in particular. 320 As Ken Plummer emphasizes, however, all these factors are

319 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories, 87. 320 Anthony Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). D’Emilio argues that homosexuality as a modern convention in the West was a corollary consequence of the rise of capitalism in the long period spanning from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, which set the necessary conditions for homosexuality to rise. These conditions include the shift of the family from an economic unit to a unit of private life, transformation of the centre of sexual life from procreation to pleasure, the rise of impersonal societies, and with them, autonomous lifestyles. See John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barala, and David Halprin, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 467-78.

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anchored primarily in individualism, as “the notion of gay identity only becomes a possibility once there has been a breakdown in traditional notions of the self.” 321

A second condition that was conducive to the rise of homosexuality in the West was “the shift in communications and mass media,” as Ken Plummer argues in line with McLuhan, which is worthy of quoting at length:

Cultures of the past were largely oral cultures, bound into worlds of face to face talk and for a few, usually elite groups, the world of writing. The possibility of communicating homosexuality to wide groups was nonexistent. Yet the past century or so has experienced the proliferation of new communications: shifts in modes of travel and the rise of the tourist gaze; shifts in access to print—the cheap paperbacking of the world and the emergence of newsletters and desk-top publishing; new media—radio, film, television, video; and shifts in technologies—telephones, faxes, computers—making the world a global village. All the many new technological inventions have brought with them new social inventions: independently of what we communicate, we now communicate in ways that are fundamentally different from earlier centuries. And whilst this has brought great fears of “mass society,” it has also brought a diversity of communication in segmented social worlds that was simply inconceivable in earlier times. The development of gay cultures has been massively aided by this.322

A third factor, finally, was “the emergence of new social movements” that gained momentum in the 1960s, including the feminist movement and African-American Civil Rights

Movement with roots in the nineteenth century. 323 The gay movement, as part of the larger social trend, provided for and was supported by the proliferation of the coming out story.

Ken Plummer thereby formulates a process that gave rise to gay identity in Western societies. This process is one of mutual feeding and enlargement between individualist homosexuality and its community, thanks to the mediation of the mass media and direct personal

321 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories, 92. 322 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories, 91. 323 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories, 94-95.

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contacts. It presumes a pre-existent community who feeds the individuals crucial information, collective support, and role models for what it meant to be gay and how to live out a gay lifestyle. The individuals, on the other hand, feed back to this community through their “joint action,” by becoming a member of it and taking action to sustain the existence of this community. This two-way process of symbolic interaction goes on and on for as long as decades, as Plummer says, and finally reaches a “critical ‘take-off stage,’” and gay identity and communities gain a foothold in society. From the vantage point of online communication, communities mediated by print—as Anderson suggests for the case of nationalism and Plummer for the case of gay communities—are literally “imagined communities,” for their formation requires imagination to visualize, and their actualization requires mutual feeding between the individual and the community, and their sedimentation requires interactions and performantive enhancement that take paths into the real social world. 324

Gay narratives in China arose from a fundamentally different set of conditions.

Individualism was a contributing factor but not as decisive as the internet. Individualism presumes an accommodating public sphere, and its political pleas take social movements to realize, usually requiring openly challenging the authorities both as an individual or a social group. If the case in China is as it has been argued by Yan Yunxiang—that its recent and rapid adaptation of individualism derived from the economic aspects of capitalism is parallel to an evident reminiscent of socialist collectivism and a latent Confucian tradition (Chapter One)—the rise of homosexuality as both an individual and group identity was not via the route of

324 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.

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individualism in the real world but, rather, via the internet. It was the internet that engendered an individual and anonymous homosexual collective identity without compelling individuals into direct confrontation against political and traditional authorities. The second factor listed by

Plummer, the rise of mass media, only afforded a limited space for the presence of legitimate bachelors’ narratives from the 1980s to the mid-1990s in formal discourse and among men desiring men themselves, but they served mainly as cautionary tales that led to the embedding of same-sex desiring in heterosexual lifeystyle, and hence were not sufficient for the rise of a gay identity and collectivity. The gay social movement in China, the third factor highlighted by

Plummer, cannot take even a shred of the role its counterpart in the West had. As the silent crackdowns of the 2001 Beijing Homosexual Film Festival to the 2005 Beijing Gay & Lesbian

Culture Festival have demonstrated, public activism, with its prerequisite of individualism and the tolerance of authorities, has never been an option in China’s context.

In Chapter One, I have delineated the landscape of homosexuality in China that is defined by 1) a social sphere under tight surveillance of traditional and political authorities, appearing as a restrained yet implicit ambiguity against homosexuality, 2) lack of gay communities capable of engaging a social agenda, 3) socially tethered individuals, and 4) inchoate individualism and consumerism offered by the market economy. It is the rise of the internet that brought a new online gay space and converted a generation of men into agents that opened up a new online social horizon for the emergence of a gay China. And it was in this online gay world that a gay self could be articulated by the pioneering narratives.

In this context, the internet afforded a popular means of making connections between men and transmitting and sharing narratives without taking the route of old media where

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authorities held tight control. Online anonymity created a different setting for story-telling that enabled the socially tethered authors to write their marginal sexual desire without risking their social status by coming out to face society at large. Through the avenue of the vernacular, the gay narratives maximized the creativity of a whole generation of the first gay netizens and enabled them to author their own stories. The ease of sharing and spreading these stories online facilitated the proliferation of gay narratives in great number in a short time span. Finally, the experiential dimension of the internet had the effect of converging online activities, such as reading, writing, and commenting, among others, and converting them into efforts conducive to the realization of an erotopia.

Continuing the argument of Chapter Two and Three, I argue for the primacy of the internet in the rise of gay identity as well as the gay collectivity in China. However, this chapter’s examinations of gay narratives take this argument in a more specific direction. I argue that the Chinese gay identity and collectivity was primarily constructed through a popular narrative-making movement occurring on the internet that involved the generation of the first homosexual netizens. Subsequently, I am suggesting a formula for the formation of gay identity and collectivity in the context that is specific to China.

Thanks to its unique features, the internet first invited the articulation of homosexuality in a new narrative pattern of gay romance and in no time it triggered a torrent of narrating gay stories participated in by a whole generation of netizens. The process of mutual feedback between the individual and the community described by Plummer was greatly compressed and accelerated, being so rapid and effective that it could be better described as a resonance between individuals. All of a sudden, without having to gradually increase interaction mediated by old

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media or social movements in formal politics, this resonance reached the “take-off stage” that took a few decades in the West. The result is the simultaneous formation of both the individual and the group. If the process of the formation and spreading of coming out stories was an example of, in Plummer’s word, “snowballing,” the proliferation of Chinese prodigal narratives online was an explosion.325 Such an explosive process shortened the time taken to form a gay identity and collectivity exponentially: within a handful of years after the popularization of

Beijing Story, a generation of men desiring men had fabricated a homosexual identity and a collectivity for themselves by narrating their own stories.

This movement, however, went unnoticed and unrecognized by mainstream society.

Happening in virtual space and taking the avenue of the vernacular, gay narratives are segregated as private narratives, and this has indications for the gay identity and collectivity formed by narrating gay stories in cyberspace. The gay identity and collectivity, forged silently in a virtual world, was convenient for society at large to ignore, and more so it happened all too fast— paradoxically—to be noticed. Without confrontations between gay men and society at large, the gay identity and collectivity were kept in the online space. This is seen in the fact that gay narratives, with the exception of Beijing Story, hardly made a mark on the facade of the formal discourse system. The internet, at the moment it engendered a gay identity and gay collectivity online, immediately enclosed it in that virtual world.

325 Ken Plummer, quoted above, mentions the computer, among other means of mass media. Conceived at the dawn of the internet, however, Plummer’s theory did not recognize the full potential of the internet and hypertext.

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This movement of narrative as a social movement, at the same time, needs to be qualified as hermeneutic—in the sense that it brings a narrative understanding of gay life—rather than activist, and it is private rather than public. This homosexual identity and collectivity, having incubated in cyberspace, is still wrapped by the very thin but firm membrane between the real and the cyber worlds, and its viability is still to be tested in the reality of China. Homosexuality, now in its fully grown form, resides in the cyber world but remains rejected in the mainstream discourse system. The internet thus constituted a digital closet at the moment of engendering a gay identity and group.

4.8 After the Initial Wave

By 2004, censorship on the internet had become more cohesive and effective. As many gay websites disappeared and the influence of the surviving ones declined, a few trends continued to carry Chinese gay narratives. Blogging became more popular. Sina, Netease, Sohu,

BlogChina (blogchina.com, later renamed as bokee.com) and many commercial websites provided free space for bloggers. Many individuals started their own blogs, preferring the sense of a personal homepage a blog can offer. Another trend was led by China’s IT giant Tencent (腾

讯), the provider of QQ, China’s equivalent of MSN, who also started to emulate MySpace with its Qzone (QQ 空间, QQ kongjian) in 2005. As QQ became a large part of online socializing for gay men, many subsequently transplanted their narratives to their private QQ Space.

Writing for this generation of men was a phase of life. By 2005, the initial enthusiasm faded and the first gay websites were either wiped out or experienced violent commercialization, with most of earliest gay authors also fading out from sight. As the first generation to challenge bachelorhood, this generation was also faced with a similar, only starker, choice to that of their

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predecessors when their legitimate bachelorhood came to an end. Some members of this generation broke the established conventions, like Lan Yu would have if he did not die, going on to live as a confirmed bachelor, or realizing their romance with another man. Some of them submitted to heterosexual marriage, like Handong, but they too, again like Handong, would tell their own version of Beijing Story to themselves in their wedding bed, day after day. But in all cases, narrating gay stories was no longer a central enterprise of their life.

Gay narratives, too, had changed by 2005. Of the many possibilities experimented with by these early gay writers, some trends would continue, and some would fade. The more literary trend started on Nanfeng waned, even though it did not completely die out. The more vernacular writing on the internet, however, continued and has become prevalent today on Tianya, Huatong

(华同社区, bbs.gaycn.net, est. 2001) and other websites. New trends also appeared and took over: erotica for commercial consumption appeared on websites such as Qidian (起点, www.qidian.com), Jinjiang (晋江, www.jjwxc.net) and shulian (书连, www.shulian.com), where readers could access the first chapters of the novels for free, but had to pay (1 cent per chapter on

Qidian in 2006) to become a VIP reader in order to read the climax and ending of the fiction, or at least have early access to it. Writers, on the other hand, were paid by these websites by click counts. Many of these works were written in a fashion to emulate yaoi, the genre of Japanese female-oriented homoerotic fiction, or danmei (耽美,tanbi in its original Japanese) novels, that tend to stereotype love between men as one between a muscular man and a feminized boy. With a large female readership, the danmei romances generated large commercial profits and soon became an overwhelming trend in the writing of male homosexual love and sensibility. Only pornographic fiction, which was also largely commercialized, and vernacular life narratives by

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gay men could still take hold of an audience of some gay men. As the internet became a quotidian part of the new generation, the poetics of gay stories also shifted, and Beijing Story meant different things in a new and different era.

In the following chapter, I will move onto a semiotic and semantic analysis of the

Chinese gay prodigal, who is omnipresent in gay narratives, as I believe his imagery best represents gay men’s situation in China.

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Chapter 5 Wandering out the Door: The Prodigal Romance of the Internet Generation 5 « » You are my son, Oh, you are my flesh. You are my poor heart, Oh, you are my heartless fortune. Son, you do not want your mother, Oh, baby you do not want your dear ones. Son, you did not live long enough to have a wedding bed, Oh, you died too young to earn yourself a coffin. You are my sweetheart, Oh, you are my flesh. The day is too long and the road too far, My unfortunate child you don’t look back. Heading on your way, you leave. Walk carefully, The day is too long, the road too far, and you cannot see well. You follow the lantern and never look back. 326

In Fuxi’s (福汐) novella “In the Days without Love” (在没有爱的日子里), a boy witnesses a woeful scene. His maternal grandmother, restrained from stepping outside by neighbours and relatives and forbidden to shed tears, has to see her son leave for the graveyard without her, as according to Chinese beliefs, “for the sake of the whole family’s fortune, senior family members should not send a junior family member out, and they should not wail when the coffin is taken out of the door.”327 The above dirge she sings becomes the only way for the mother to express her unbearable grief: “In the long street rose the dirge sung by grandma in the old melody. Standing inside the door, her empty eyes looking out, without wailing, without

326 Fuxi 福汐, January 30, 2003, “Zai meiyou ai de rizi li” 在没有爱的日子里[In the Days without Love], Ch. 8, Guangzhou Tongzhi (www.gztz.org), archived January 3, 2005 by Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20030416150548/http://www.gztz.org/default.htm, accessed January 17, 2014. 327 Fuxi, “In the Days without Love,” Ch. 8.

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sobbing, without crying to the heavens and throwing herself to the earth, she just sang the dirge with her melodious voice.”328

“It is heartbreaking and bowel-rending when a white-haired person sends off a black- haired person” (baifaren song heifaren, 白发人送黑发人), as the Chinese idiom goes. Yet what makes it most unbearable for the mother is that the son dies unmarried and sonless. He would be denied a spot in the family graveyard; instead, he would be buried in a public graveyard reserved for those who are cursed by life, such as a nameless vagabond found dead in the village, or a child who died prematurely. He could not have a coffin; a mere box made from used wooden boards, rites forbidding it from being painted, would do for him. There would be no mourning curtain, no basin for burning underworld money, no mourning stick—all necessary for even the most basic Chinese funeral. And of course, no son would cry for him or offer sacrifice for him at various Chinese festivals. He would become a restless ghost wandering forever because no offspring would send him to the family temple where eternal life is acquired.

A death like this is death within death, and a life that leads to such a death a complete waste, no matter what else one achieves with that life. Yet this is not the end of the tragedy, for this dirge, at the same time, is sung for the mother herself. Without an heir to continue the family lineage, her son has also led her to an annihilation, since no paternal grandson will accompany her to the graveyard.

328 Fuxi, “In the Days without Love,” Ch. 8.

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The funeral is the climax and the final judgement of a Chinese life, more so than any moment when one was alive. It sums up the metaphysical significance of life in a society with a dominant emphasis on secular order and worldly achievements. As religions are secondary to familial worship, eternal life is achieved in posterity, through the continuation of the family lineage. Dying a father to sons is life’s greatest accomplishment; it secures one’s position in the kin pedigree that crosses this life and into the afterlife—and so life and death, vicissitude and eternity, existential and transcendent existence. Dying sonless, on the other hand, is the greatest tragedy in life because it leads to nothingness. In traditional China, a man would do anything to prevent the above scene in In the Days without Love from happening, from prayers to the

Buddha, to repentance and restitution for his wrongs in order to avoid the retribution of being deprived of an heir, to marriage to a concubine if the couple is infertile, and if all else failed, he would adopt a son.

The Chinese concept of the jia (家) indicates the combination of the family and the home, fusing the kindred as well as the living space. By functioning as the Confucian vehicle for fulfilling the ultimate human pursuit for eternal life, the jia incorporates a metaphysical dimension into the mundane everyday family life through a tradition emphasizing ancestor worship over religion. The jia is itself a temple: the daily family life is already a means of acquiring eternal life by conveying a superior form of life—the life of the kin—in each man and his wife’s limited individual mortal lives. The family thus has a metaphysical significance: it is not only a social and biological arrangement, but also a form of existence that is secured through generations of individual males.

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More than a societal unit, the jia serves as the central metaphor and cultural myth underpinning the traditional Confucian social and political system. It provided fundamental models for human relationships and the meaning of social existence. The patriarchal hierarchy is constructed using the jia as a central metaphor, and social relationships are understood through the prism of father-son, brother-brother, or husband-wife relationships. The relationship between the emperor and his subjects, a pivotal concept cementing traditional Chinese societies, is usually compared to that of the father and the son. Likewise, male-male relationships are usually seen through the lens of sworn brotherhood.

Although it is a sanctuary of comfort, order, care, familiarity, and meaningfulness, the jia by itself is not self-sustainable, as it needs material supplies, marriage prospects, and, in competition with other clans sharing the same locality, raising itself above them to ensure its survival. Sons are sent out to acquire provisions and achieve feats—merchants to gain wealth, scholars to attend civic examination, or farmers to labour in the field—that are necessary for the survival and prosperity of the jia. The world, however, also constitutes a sharp contrast to the jia, as while it provides necessities, it is also fully in flux with excitement, adventure, aspiration, and of course, temptation and danger. A son might find himself lured by prostitutes and “fox girls,” hindered by dragons and monsters, and thus lost in this vast world, unable or unwilling to return.

Life for a male within a traditional Confucian jia is two-fold: a man’s limited individual life is also a living part of the life of an abstract but eternal family. Individual life is characterized by its desire: it pursues pleasure and is essentially hedonist; it is driven by direct needs and impulses; and it resists regulations. Family life, on the other hand, is marked by

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duties, and with them, the collective aspects of life that carry metaphysical meaning. It is through the jia, both a social as well as a symbolic institution, that individual life and family life are joined together, and it is within the family that individual desire and social duties are fulfilled. By the fulfilling of family duties, the individual and the collectivity, the past and the future, the ancestors and the offspring, ephemerality and eternity, can all be synchronized and an insignificant individual life becomes meaningful. Individual life becomes the vehicle of family life, and family life the destination of the individual life.

These two aspects of life are clearly not always reconcilable. A young man can only become a true heir of the jia and realize the larger, abstract, and rational life within his individual life by achieving feats and gaining wisdom in the world. Being young and inexperienced in balancing these two ends, however, he is especially apt to be driven by desire, unwilling to subdue his own life to the family, vulnerable to dangers, and easy to stray from the right way.

Thus on the one hand, there is tension between individual desire and familial duties, and on the other, tension between the home and the world.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell universalizes the human experience as “the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero...in the rites of passage—separation—initiation—return”:329 Wherein the hero leaves the realm of the kin, crosses the threshold and enters the world, and returns reborn a new self free of the burden of the ego, bringing the kin the boon, to achieve “atonement” (at-one-ment, in Campbell’s sense) with the father figures. This journey of the hero, as Campbell calls it, is a “monomyth” told in myriad

329 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 28.

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stories by all cultures.330 While Campbell emphasizes the psychoanalytic significance of the stories, the journey of the hero can also be analyzed semantically in relation to the two pairs of tension mentioned above. In particular, if the heroic adventure in quests of deeds represents the positive prototype, the negative adventure of a hero, very often appearing as prodigal stories about redeeming oneself and restoring one’s position in the symbolic order, is also a highly popular universal theme and especially akin to the journey made by gay sons.

In the Chinese tradition, the story of the langzi (浪子, prodigal son or wandering son), or prodigal, a son who loses himself in the world, learns his lessons, and finally makes his way back to the jia, has been a prevalent motif. The Chinese prodigal, however, leads to a parallel to his

Biblical counterpart of prodigal, whose story is told in Luke. In using the term “prodigal,” I make intentional reference to the Prodigal’s story in the Bible, as the two traditions make for intriguing parallels and contrasts, but my analysis will be focused within the context of Chinese literary tradition, unless I specify the Western or Biblical prodigal.

Despite the prodigal’s return to the jia at the end, the prodigal’s odysseys in the world, be they erotic, adventurous, marvellous, or a concoction of various genres, are also popular motifs, of course. The erotic journey of a hero, particularly, can appear in a few patterns. One of these is the romance of the scholar and the beauty (caizi jiaren, 才子佳人) that elaborates the erotic or romantic interplay of a young scholar and a beauty, each subject to restrictive Confucian moral confinements, and who finally attain a happy ending. However, when the beauty is a disguise

330 Ibid.

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used by a monster, the pattern can also become a cautionary tale for the male about the dangers of desire, trespassing, or women.

Because they are sequential, very often the prodigal journey and the romance are combined in one story. The odyssey in the wide world, more amusing than the moral carried by the prodigal story, often extricates itself from the loop of home-leaving and homecoming required by the framework. This combination also derives from a deeper semiotic level: Within the realm of the jia, the temporal dimension is predominant, and events are imbued with meaningfulness in relation to the rhythmic repetitiveness accommodated by the jia. In the world at large, the spatial dimension is prevalent, giving encounters a sense of rhythm through wandering and tarrying. Each of these two realms are supplementary to each other. The tension of the temporal meaningfulness of the jia and the spatial expansiveness of the world is resolved by the prodigal’s journey made between the jia and the world.

Modernity brought mutations to these traditional stories. The prodigal son narrative pattern in modern literature sometimes goes with the traditional figures under heavy disguise, sometimes takes the appearance of those figures to their negation through the modern “rebellious son”, and still appears even during times when the family, society, and narrative patterns and conventions have undergone vehement criticism and dramatic changes in China’s traumatic modernization. The romance of the scholar and the beauty, on the other hand, has been reshaped as the modern romance in accordance with the gender norms and individualism of social changes.

Being a son is such a preeminent and universal part of the gay male experience in the

Chinese tradition that since the emergence of homosexuality in Taiwanese literary representation

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as early as the 1960s, and in Tong Ge’s 1997 story collection Good Man Rogo, the anxiety over the tension between homosexual desire and family duties has been a main force driving many, if not all, gay narratives. More than heterosexual romantic heroes and heroines, who usually appear as free individuals turned passionate lovers, gay men are strained between sexual desire and duties to the jia, and their status as a son always overshadows their love, feelings, and the choices they make, with the result that they love primarily as prodigals rather than free individuals.

Perhaps because his sexuality demarcates an unfathomable crevasse between him and his jia that is even deeper and broader than the one made by the modern “rebellious son” earlier in the same century (we will discuss the “rebellious son” archetype a bit later in this chapter), the complications and predicaments arising from the encounter of homosexuality with the Chinese jia invoke the more latent, but also more inherent, concept of the jia. Correspondently, it is the prototype of the prodigal, rather than that of the modern “rebellious son,” that is the imagery that captures the reality of Chinese gay men. Yet the modern romance, the epic of an individualistic journey into an expanding social world, offers its appeal once gay prodigals enter the wider world. Now bestowed with the power of the internet and the freedom of the market economy, the internet generation’s erotic engagements with each other become deeper and more significant than casual sexual contact, powerful enough to change one’s life course and self-concept. For the men who authored gay narratives, this engagement demands to be told as romance with the same potency as heterosexuals of the same generation. To fashion a love story between men as romance, however, is an extremely difficult task, as men’s love is always met with the hostility of political authority, the defiance of the lover who is also a prodigal son, and moreover, their own internal resistance.

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Simultaneously incorporating the prodigal story and the romance, love between men as reflected in web narratives can be best epitomized as prodigal romance. The tension between the attraction of the jia and desire for men shapes the inner life of gay men, prescribes the gay subject, and informs the meaning of homosexuality, as well as the gay prodigal’s odyssey into the world and return. Consequently, the tension between two narrative paradigms of the Chinese prodigal son and his romantic adventure is the cue in the formation of the meaning of homosexuality for men in China. Situating the prodigal son in a modern journey, this chapter will argue that the image of the prodigal son’s dilemmatic situation, caught between a Confucian tradition and a modern drive of desire as the centre of individual identity, holds a claim to universality among gay men in China. I believe that gay men’s relation to the jia is the key to the particularities of homosexuality in China, and accordingly, it is also the most important site, in the period of our study, from which the meaning of homosexuality is derived.

Yet, coming from the field of story of its times, the prodigal romance is not a combination only of mainstream narrative paradigms. It almost always includes, but is also a critic of, the earlier dominant same-sex narrative pattern, the legitimate bachelor’s narrative, as already touched upon in Chapter Three when we discussed Bejing Story. The prodigal romance so often is between a man who longs for a romantic same-sex relation and another who is prone to the legitimate bachelor’s narrative, and in that sense, is not simply a gay romance but always a debate between two narrative patterns.

Still, while the particularity of prodigal romance is primary, it is not free from the

“coming out” story, another pattern in the field of story, which, carrying in itself both the universality of gay identity as well as the particularity of its Western origins, demands its

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response in the context of China, and the prodigal romance is itself a reflection of, a critique of, and, to a degree, an adaptation to it.

Thus the prodigal romance assembles multiple narrative patterns, from the traditional

Chinese story of the prodigal and the modern romance of the desiring individual to a critique and negotiation of the legitimate bachelor’s narrative and the Western gay pattern of coming out that articulates identity politics. The voice of each of these patterns is evident, but they interact with each other to form a highly complicated symphony, and together they form a single story that narrates the life of gay men in the internet generation. The principal purpose of this chapter is to elucidate the complexity and particularity carried within the prodigal romance.

If so far our telling of the evolution of male same-sex narratives has focused on the shift and transmission of gay signification from graffiti to cyber narrative, this chapter will turn to the narratives themselves. I take into account as many pieces of works as the size of this chapter can accommodate in order to reflect the lushness of gay narratives; but another priority is to emphasize important authors, and for that reason, a few writers’ works are featured more than others, usually with one piece in the foreground and several others in the background. Remy

Christini has conducted a very careful study on early online gay narratives from 1996 to 2003 and examined their evolution in terms of the matureness of their writing and evolution of the themes.331 This chapter focuses on selected works which embody the theme of prodigal

331 Remy Christini, “The Rise of Comrade Literature: Development and Significance of a New Chinese Genre,” (M.A. thesis, Leid University, 2005).

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romance, which I believe to be the most important in understanding homosexuality in China’s context.

In the following sections, I will first draw a brief lineage of the Chinese prodigal son narrative and romance, then I will establish the connections between gay narratives and the literary conventions of the prodigal son narrative and romance. After that, this chapter will reveal what it means and feels to be gay as a prodigal, and this will lead us to the central argument of this chapter, that gay prodigal romances push the boundaries that define what constitutes proper sexuality and a meaningful life further and further, to a difficult affirmation of a desiring subject who defines himself by his erotic choice. The last part of this chapter will compare and contrast prodigal romance with coming-out stories. There I will argue that the gay prodigal story carries the specificities of homosexuality in China; but like the coming-out story, it is not a fixed narrative pattern the will lead to a predestined fate for gay men. Rather, it has already mutated and will mutate, and thus the future of the gay prodigal is intrinsically related to that of sexual politics in China.

5.1 The Prodigal Son in Chinese Narrative Tradition

One of the most influential and prototypical Chinese prodigal son stories is Bai

Xingjian’s (白行簡, ca. 776-826) “The Courtesan Li Wa” (Liwa zhuan, 李娃傳).332 A well- known Tang chuangqi (a form of tale), “The Courtesan Li Wa” has inspired many versions of

332 Bai Xingjian, “The Courtesan Li Wa,” trans. Peter Rushton, Yau-Woon Ma, and Liu Shao-ming, in Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations, ed. Yau-Woon Ma and Shao-ming Liu, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

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the prodigal son story from prose to drama in Chinese literature. Due to its importance and archetypical status, it is worth recounting “Li Wa” in some detail.

The hero, the young Master (gongzi, 公子), is the only son of Yingyang Gong (滎陽公), a prestigious official with abundant family wealth. As a talented young scholar, he is praised by his father as “the winged steed of the family” and sent to the Capital to take his examination, which he is expected to excel at with ease. Once in the Capital, the young Master encounters a courtesan, Li Wa, and falls in love with her. He stays in her house and forgets about the examination. Once the young Master has squandered his money, Li Wa and her madam get rid of him with a trick. Poor and devastated, the Master falls ill and is left in a funeral home.

Thanks to the care of people working there, the Master recovers. To make life, he changes his name and becomes the best of professional funeral singers. Later, Yingyang Gong finds out about the Master. He blames his son for his degeneration and is shamed by the disgrace he brought upon the family. He whips him to vent his anger, and believing his son is dead, he leaves his body by the roadside and returns to his home. The Master is saved by his companions from the funeral home, but his slow recovery finally exhausts their good will. Unable to be a funeral singer, the Master becomes a beggar. His body covered with scabies, he disgusts everyone. In the winter, he teeters on the brink of death from cold and hunger.

One day he begs for food in front of a house which turns out to be the residence of Li Wa and her madam. Li Wa feels extremely guilty for bringing the Master such misery. Resolved to help him, she claims her freedom from the madam and supports the Master with her own money.

Once the Master recovers under her care, she brings him back to his scholarly career and keeps him motivated. After two years of hard study, the Master takes the examination and excels. He

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is then appointed by the Imperial Court as an official in the prefecture which his father administrates. As Li Wa realizes that her background as a prostitute would stigmatize the

Master, she is determined leave him. She admonishes him to marry a lady of the gentry to honour his family. In his father’s administrative offices, the Master and Yingyang Gong reconcile in tears. Having learned the whole story, Yingyang Gong sends a formal matchmaker to Li Wa, and arranges their marriage according to the rites between gentry families. With Li

Wa’s assistance, the Master is promoted many times, and all of his sons grow up to become high-ranking officials. Li Wa herself is also made a noblewoman by the Imperial Court.

While sharing obvious similarities, the Chinese prodigal is different from his Biblical counterpart in at least a few aspects in regard to our later analysis: 1) His journey is mission bound, not out of personal choice, as in the case of the latter, who first “set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living” and after that decided, “I will set out and go back to my father” (Luke 15: 18).333 2) A trial and punishment of the former by his father figure is necessary to reassure his mission, even as he never seeks to go home without accomplishing it, while the latter does not have to face a trial even though he articulates his regrets both in his mind (Luke 15: 18) and to his father (Luke 15: 21), in the same sentence:

“Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”334 3) In order for the Chinese prodigal to be accepted, he must redeem himself and return as a hero restored, carrying home the boon of his mission, whereas the Biblical counterpart

333 Herbert May and Bruce Metzger, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1973), 1269. 334 Ibid.

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simply “got up and went to his father” and the father “saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15: 20).335 4) The

Chinese father represents the patriarchal order. As a contrast, the father in the Biblical parable is understood more as representing God and his forgiving love, and the story as a whole is intended to shock at the end, since earlier parts of the Bible (coming from at least centuries earlier) even counsel killing disobedient children.

A caveat is needed here: I am aware that there is a massive compression in this work of the Bible’s origins as entirely Western and how Christian culture has engaged with what is viewed as a symbolic story about their God over two millennia. However, I engage with the parallels more on a virtue level which does have a God viewed as a loving father who forgives unconditionally. Despite verses in the Bible encouraging parents to beat their children or even kill them, I do think Christianity in particular has an anti-biological parental attitude lurking within itself through views of the celibate as better than the married person with children, and that this has had major ramifications in Western culture.

Back to comparison, the aspect in the Chinese story that contrasts most greatly is its romantic elements. The Bible sketches the prodigal’s loitering as briefly as possible without going into detail—“the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.” As a story meant to marvel its readers, “Courtesan Li

Wa” favours the ups and downs of the prodigal’s romantic encounter with an alluring, destructive beauty who finally turns out to be a guardian of the patriarchal symbolic order. The

335 Ibid.

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prominent length given to the romantic interplay between the Master and Li Wa, however, sets the story within the genre of the story of the talented scholar and the beauty. Highly popular, the genre musters many appealing factors—a talented young scholar with brilliant prospects in life, and a woman of extreme beauty, conflict between family duties and desire, and the winding course of love and life. While the talented scholar and the beauty’s sexual encounters typically result in a happy ending in a wedding, sometimes such the romance can conclude otherwise. The

Tang chuanqi “The Story of Yingying” (yingying zhuan, 鶯鶯傳), for example, ends with the hero’s abandonment of the heroine, claiming that “great beauties invariably either destroy themselves or destroy someone else,” and that is why he has “resolutely suppressed” his love. In this regard, “Courtesan Li Wa” is truly a marvellous story in its audacious rehabilitation of a prodigal as well as boldly exalting the beauty from a prostitute to a noble lady.

The embedding of the Master’s romantic encounter in the story of the prodigal is not unique but universal, as romance can only happen when the hero leaves the jia behind and enters the world at large. The jia is marked by its temporal rhythm of humanized time, of festivals and works and days, as well as rites of passage that mark an individual life cycle from birth to funeral. The world at large, on the other hand, is characterized by its immense spatial scale.

Extending to the unknown and adventurous realm of dragons, ogres, lions, caves, and labyrinths, it releases the hero for open wandering, adventures, and revelry or subjects him to attacks, ambushes, or straying, as Campbell would have it. The hero’s prodigal loop, in the sequence of separation, initiation and return, can also be described as marked by traversal of tempo-spatial boundaries: upon leaving home, the realm of ceremonies and sacrifices, he enters the world, where time becomes abstract, and the dominant feature is instead the space. It is the temporal restriction—that the hero must return again to the home (or his tribe) and reset his life rhythm—

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that gives his journey meaning, which would otherwise become meaninglessly picaresque. In this sense, the prodigal narrative is one about the conflict between a temporal coordination and a spatial voyage, paralleling the conflict of duty and desire in the individual. Even though leaving home and returning are often reduced to a framework for the story with the adventure being its most charming and central part, the spatial wandering must resolve as a closed loop as well as a temporal restoration. This has implications for the emerging gay narratives, as there is, as I will argue, competition between the temporal paradigm of the prodigal narrative and the spatial paradigm of gay romance.

No particular Chinese story has the prestigious status of the Biblical parable as the prototype, and it is my choice to use “Courtesan Li Wa” as the epitome of the Chinese prodigal.

The Chinese prodigal stories are large in number but diffused and mingled with other themes.

Later in the Song huaben (話本), or storyteller’s transcripts, the prodigal son stories were one of the favourite themes, both for their didactic values and for the aesthetic appeal of the plot’s twists and turns. Many prodigal son stories were adapted into plays. Feng Menglong (馮夢龍) and Ling Mengchu (凌蒙初) also included prodigal son stories in their famous collections of stories.

There is, of course, enormous variety to the prodigal son stories. In “The Courtesan Li

Wa,” for instance, the helper, Li Wa, who rescues the hero from his downward spiral is the same irresistible beauty who set him on a miserable trajectory in the first place. In another prodigal son story—Ling Mengchu’s Amazing Tales: First Series(or Astonished Slaps Upon the Desktop,

I (Chuke Pai’an Jingqi 初刻拍案驚奇), Vol. 22: “The young pampered lord squandered money to pamper himself, and the prudent father-in-law earned him back cleverly” 痴公子狠使噪脾錢

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，賢丈人巧賺回頭婿). For example, after the prodigal son—Master Yao—squanders the immense family fortune his father left to him, his rich father-in-law makes sure that he experiences his ordeal to the utmost so that he can acquire the motivation to rehabilitate himself.

The wise father-in-law sends a senior person to mentor the son-in-law at various turning points along his ordeal. The father-in-law assumes two figures in the prototypical story: he is both the de facto father whom the prodigal son leaves behind and finally returns to, and he is also the helper who points the prodigal son to a way out of his miserable situation. Despite the many differences among prodigal son stories, however, they all incorporate the elements discussed above in one way or another.

The prodigal son stories can be also be supernatural. The fox and ghost stories, a prolific theme in classical Chinese narratives, usually feature a young scholar who finds himself lost in an overgrown graveyard, being seduced by a beautiful girl who is either a ghost or the human incarnation of a fox. Other genres can also include, or sometime fuse with, the prodigal son stories.

While most prodigal stories resolve themselves with the reconciliation of individual desires and family duties, or that of the son and the father, there are some stories that take the risk of bringing the conflict to a climax. The story of Nezha (哪吒) in a Ming fantastic novel,

Canonization of Gods (fengshen yanyi, 封神演義), especially, takes this conflict to extremes.336

336 Nezha is the disciple of the Taoist god Fairy Primordial (taiyi zhenren, 太乙真人). According to divine providence, he is commissioned with the vanguard of the Zhou army in its overturning of the Shang Dynasty. He is sent to be incarnated as the son of General Li Jing (李靖). After three years of pregnancy, he is born in the form of a

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As his outrageous deeds bring his parents fatal threats from the Dragon Kings, and more severely, the denunciation of his father who accuses him of being an unfilial son, Nezha decides to redeem his misdeeds, even though his power exceeds the Dragon Kings greatly: “Today I will cut my gut open, scoop out my intestines, pick the flesh from my bones, and return them back to my parents, and thereafter my misdeeds will have no implication for my parents.”337 And so he does this to himself. Even after this violent episode, however, more powerful gods appear to tame Nezha so as to restore his obedience to his father. Less extreme demonstrations of the

Confucian idea, “One’s hair, body, and skin are a gift from one’s parents and one has no right to mutilate them. That is the beginning of filial piety” (身體發膚，受之父母，不敢毀傷，孝之

始也), stating that ownership of one’s body and life belongs to one’s parents, can be found in stories such as “The filial son” in Pu Songling’s (蒲松齡) Stories from Make-Do Studio (liaozhai zhiyi, 聊齋誌異), in which a son cuts his flesh to feed his mother.338

In many stories with more complicated plots, the theme of the prodigal son is less evident than in the single-themed huanben or chuanqi stories. The theme of the prodigal son can be invoked more or less metaphorically, or appears as a secondary theme. Jia Baoyu (賈寶玉) in

Dreams of the Red Chamber (honglou meng, 紅樓夢), for instance, is seldom sent on a journey

meat ball, and jumps out when his father cuts it open fearing that it is a monstrosity. A child born with amazing prowess, however, Nezha brings his father great troubles by killing the Dragon Prince and other misconduct. 337 Xu Zhonglin (許仲琳), Canonization of Gods (fengshen yanyi, 封神演義), Ch. 13, “Fairy Primordial vanquishes the Stone Goddess” (taiyi zhenren shou shiji, 太乙真人收石磯). My translation. 338 Pu Songling (蒲松龄), “The filial son” (xiaozi, 孝子), in Stories from Make-Do Studio (liaozhai zhiyi, 聊齋誌異), vol. 5.

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that takes him from his family, yet his everyday life is a journey away from his father, and his sojourn in Prospect Garden is an indulgence of his own pleasure, or at least a secret pleasure derived from escaping from the patriarchal authority embodied by his father.

The theme of the prodigal son in traditional Chinese literature has formed a series of works and a repertoire of prodigal figures. From Jia Baoyu in Dream of the Red Chamber to Du

Shaoqin (杜少卿) in The Scholars (rulin wanshi, 儒林外史), whenever a man tried to break the system, the crack would usually appear from within the family, and the man would usually be depicted as a prodigal son. The prevalence of the prodigal son-themed stories reflects the culture’s anxiety over a few basic contradictions such as over-indulgence versus discipline, individual pleasure versus family duties, the desire for migration versus the desire for settlement, love of the father versus hate of the father.

The anxiety over the basic contradictions caused by the tension between the family and the individual is also a driving force in many traditional homoerotic narratives—so much so that the erotic objects, male or not, makes only a secondary difference. As long as the prodigal son returns home with his assignment accomplished, his homoerotic experience does not make him different than prodigals seduced by women or other temptations. Traditional homoerotic stories usually pair an incumbent prodigal son with a feminized man, usually from a lower class, or simply with a male prostitute, as we can see in the cases of A Precious Mirror for Ranking

Flowers (品花寶鑑) and other stories. In the instances in which both men in a same-sex relationship are prodigal sons, the stories usually end by sublimating eroticism to friendship, leaving some room for ambiguous eroticism between the two men. Invariably, the major consideration of the story is the prodigal son’s return to the jia to follow through on his duties of

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marriage and procreation and become transformed into a socially, economically, and biologically prolific man. The prodigal son’s lure, the feminized man, is indifferently treated as the sacrifice, not unlike the women in mainstream prodigal son stories. The feminized man is either integrated into the reformed man’s household as a male concubine or servant, or he continues a downward spiral leading to nihilism and abandonment. Like their brothers in the mainstream prodigal son narratives, same-sex prodigal sons ultimately conform to the traditional patriarchy and to its gender, class, and sexual conventions.

5.2 The Evolution of the Prodigal Journey in the Modern Era

Entering modernity, the jia has been a major site where modernity and tradition contested and compromised each other, and the prodigal son narrative is certainly an essential apparatus for negotiating family duties and individual desire. Along with changes to the formation and the connotation of the jia and its prodigal sons, modernization paralleled those changes with mutations in the literary paradigm of the prodigal son. The shift in prodigal son narratives in these eras foreshadows, demands, reflects, responds to, and reacts to social and semiotic mutations of the jia. This section will briefly sketch the mutations in the prodigal son narrative in different periods in relation to the change in the meaning of the jia through an analysis of a number of narratives. Such an examination is necessary for our study of gay prodigal son stories because it helps us understand the meaning of the jia in the ever-changing system of meaning reflected in literature. This evolving meaning of the jia constitutes the background—a dynamic one since it is in constant change—of our study of the gay prodigal son stories.

The Chinese family has undergone drastic and constant changes since China was confronted by Western modernity in the 19th century. Due to its centrality in Chinese culture, the

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jia has inevitably served as an essential site for exerting, as well as resisting, various movements of modernization. From the May Fourth Movement (1919), the Nationalists’ new marriage law and New Life Movement (新生活運動, 1934-1949), to the overt politicization of the family during Mao’s era, to the birth control policy in the Reform era, through to today’s rapid urbanization, each wave of social change brings unforeseeable and fundamental changes to the constitution and meaning of the jia. Yet even after being the target of waves of social changes, the jia remains a repository of values and a channel through which tradition persists in today’s

China. Even in Mao’s era when the jia was penetrated by political struggle, it remained the fundamental metaphor for tethering people to their work unit, neighbourhood, class origins, and other given or inherited relations.

As the meaning of the jia changed through modernization, the prodigal son narrative pattern became less evident than it was in classical literature. Yet in more delicate and complicated ways, the prodigal son still makes his appearance in modern Chinese fiction, plays and films. Many works of modern fiction do not include the complete narrative loop of the prodigal son’s departure and return that join at the jia; rather, they intend to break this loop by providing a locale for meaning to exist rather than the traditional jia. As will be delineated in the following, modern prodigal son narratives resolve the son’s conflict between family duties and individual desire in three distinct ways. The first views the jia as a confinement and rebels against it. The second replaces the family with the nation. The third reclaims the family as the site on which to anchor individual existence. Together, they form a genealogy of the evolution of the prodigal son narrative pattern in modern Chinese fiction.

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The first category of fiction provides or alludes to a new modern home as an alternative locale to the traditional jia, such as the one Juansheng (涓生) and Zijun (子君) try to build but fail to sustain in Lu Xun’s (鲁迅) “Regret for the Past” (Shangshi 伤逝); or a new family such as the one Ba Jin’s (巴金) prodigal sons, the Gao brothers, long for in the seemingly promising ending to the trilogy Family, Spring, and Autumn (jia, chun, qiu,《家》《春》《秋》); or Qian

Zhongshu’s hero Fang Hongjian’s (方鸿渐) new home, in Fortress Besieged (weicheng,《围城

》).

These alternative locales, however, always seem to be unstable and fragile. Juansheng and his lover Zijun’s (子君) new little family based on modern idea of romantic love as a rebellion against traditional arranged marriage, for example, could not survive the hostile surroundings of the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement. After their romance fails, it seems that there was no choice for Juansheng or Zijun but to return to their traditional families. Thus, despite his reluctance, Juansheng completes the conventional narrative loop of the prodigal son, and his rebellion is relegated to that of a prodigal’s excursion outside the jia. For a female rebel, the cost comes as much higher: Zijun dies of both punishment by the authorities as well as

Juansheng’s abandonment, The Gao brothers successfully dismantle their giant family, which is depicted as the quintessential traditional Chinese jia that realizes the Chinese dream of “four generations in one hall.” However, the new modern family they build in the end of the story is weak and vague, as they do not have a specific conception of what it would be like, let alone how to bring it to life. The meaning of life, the form that human existence takes, and the rhythm of everyday life shaped by the traditional family system, once destroyed, will forever be deferred because the brothers have only the violent destruction of the traditional jia but no vision for

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constructing a new jia. Their new home is only the ruin of the transitional family that opens to a future full of uncertainty.

Qian Zhongshu masterfully takes the struggle between a modern prodigal son and the traditional family to a deeper level in Fortress Besieged. The protagonist, Fang Hongjian, a failed student returning from Europe with a fake diploma purchased for ten dollars, is a modern prodigal son who returns to a home that he is about to lose or has already lost. He is a failure even as a prodigal in the sense that he is a fake himself, and has no capability nor will to redeem himself with the feats required for an authentic return. His father’s jia, in the meantime, is on the verge of falling apart as it is displaced to Shanghai due to the Japanese invasion as the story advances. As both the prodigal and the jia are fake, the prodigal journey itself becomes a wandering whose destination is forever denied. At the end of the novel, this wandering ends in the new home built by Fang Hongjian and his wife, Sun Roujia, where his father’s clock, taken from the old house in their hometown and passed to Fang Hongjian, strikes the hour:

The old ancestral clock began chiming away as though it had stored up half a day’s time to ring it out carefully in the still of the night, counting “One, two, three, four, five, six.” It was six O’clock five hours ago. At that time Hung-chien [Hongjian] was on his way home, intending to treat Jou-chia [Roujia] nicely and request her not to stir up any more unpleasantness between them over the incident of the day before. At that time Jou-chia [Roujia] was at home waiting for Hung-chien [Hongjian] to come home for dinner, hoping he would make up with her aunt and go to work in her factory. The irony and disappointment of men unintentionally contained in the out-of-date timepiece went deeper than any language, than any tears or laughter.339

One of the most powerful literary images in modern Chinese literature, Qian Zhongshu’s clock strikes a key metaphor of the modern Chinese conundrum of the jia. Despite its

339 Qian Zhongshu, Fortress Besieged (weicheng, 圍城), trans. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan Mao, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 361.

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abandonment by modernity, the traditional jia could never be gotten rid of; it still haunts the new jia, which imposed itself on the former but was unable to subdue it completely. Those two homes, one forever lost yet refusing to fade away, and the other summoned up but yet to be realized, overlap, embed, and void each other, the defiance of the universal time of modernity by an heirloom of the old jia sounding out this negation. Together the modern apartment and the traditional jia constitute a strange place of displacement, a limbo where one estranges and loses oneself in a place one calls home.

It’s no wonder, then, that in this modern jia dragging a traditional shadow, Hongjian and

Roujia, the hero and the heroine returning from their prodigal journeys into the world, are unable to set even their own clocks to each other as the timepiece of the family is forever severed from the space that is modern. This is a modern situation in which time and space are no longer synchronized, resulting in its subjects’ unresolvable disorientation. This metaphor, furthermore, is as much that of China as a nation. Such desynchronization, as we will see later, will only become accentuated to a much greater degree with gay subjects.

The second category of fiction offers a new relationship, usually a political relationship between the individual and the collectivity, to replace the bio-political relationship of the traditional jia. As the legitimacy of the CCP’s regime depended on weakening the family first and then appropriating its position as the center of the value system, this transposition from the family to the Party/collective and the appearance of prodigal sons in the revolutionary literature further reveal the shift of the meaning of the family in the first three decades (1949 to 1978) under the CCP regime. The prodigal son appearing in this fiction is under heavy disguise, and it sometimes requires discernment to find his connection to his classical origins.

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During this time, the relationship between the individual and the Party, usually in the forms of a production team or a factory workshop, becomes the center of anxiety in literature.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the narratives that deal with this anxiety make use of a plot that is similar to traditional prodigal son stories. In the new proletarian literature, the Party, usually personalized as a leader of the collective, is placed in opposition to the individual who strays away because of his individual desire. The Party has become the center of the value system that provides the vital social relationship to individuals, and thus, it takes the place of the family. The prodigal son/daughter, at the same time, is the child of the Party. He or she is lured by bourgeois lifestyle, be it material pleasures or ideologies, such as vanity, and strays away from the proletarian value system and gradually loses him/herself. With help, however, he or she realizes the error of his/her ways and returns to the collective to complete the narrative loop as a prodigal son/daughter. His/her relationship with the family, on the other hand, either becomes secondary, or in some cases, is explored as a site of class struggle where members are scrutinized according to political standards. In the revolutionary classics such as The Song of Youth (qingchun zhi ge,

青春之歌, 1958) and Red Cliff (hong yan, 红岩, 1961), for example, the camaraderie between the secret Communist Party members is charged with strong attachment, altruism and passion that surpasses family ties and romantic bonds to become the most valuable and intimate human connection. The revolutionary prodigal son/daughter, sometimes a sub-plot in the narrative, sometimes the dominant plot, can be found in a wide range of texts ranging from novels during the land reform (1950-1953) and the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-1958), to the Red Classics, and culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Ironically, the theme of the prodigal son is reincarnated in the revolutionary literature that swore to transcend it.

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The third group of prodigal son narratives emerged in the aftermath of the Cultural

Revolution, when there was a concurrent shift in the meaning of the jia and the Party. As part of the general depoliticization of everyday life, the conjugal family again gained its place as the anchor for individual existence. The ideology that enabled the prevalence of the Party, on the other hand, withdrew from the realm of domesticity to the public sphere. During this process, people acquired a certain degree of privacy inside their homes. Narratives that restore the family as the center of human existence and that criticize the overpoliticization of previous decades emerged in the new literature of the post-Cultural Revolution era. Works such as Yu Hua’s To

Live (huozhe, 活着, 1994) extended the repertoire of the prodigal son narratives in modern literature. 340 Among these works, Yu Hua’s To Live provides the most insightful statement of the relationship between the individual and the family in a new context that was largely constituted by the social and political turmoil of the last century.

In To Live, Fugui (福贵) is a typical prodigal son before the Communists take over. He gambles away the fortunes of his landlord father and almost his wife, Jiazhen (家珍)—a scenario familiar to the classic prodigal son story. After the Communists take over, the only fortune left to Fugui is his family. Yet one by one, political movements take the lives of Fugui’s family members. In the end, Fugui is left in the world by himself, and his everyday survival depends on keeping his dead wife, children and grandchild alive through virtual conversations, as

340 To Live has two editions. The first one was published on Harvest (shouhuo, 收获) in 1992. This second edition, revised and expanded, was published by Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan chubanshe (中国社会科学院出版社, Chinese Social Science Press) in Yuhua wenji 余华文集 [Anthology of Yu Hua] in 1994. All the discussion is based on the 1994 edition.

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symbolized in his calling his ox by his own name and speaking to it about imaginary oxen named after his lost family.

To Live demonstrates how much the survival of an individual depends upon the survival of the family, particularly under the crushing power of political circumstances. It contends that despite the harshness of the CCP regime, and despite the dominant narrative that helps the Party usurp the position of the father, the family remains the strongest tie that bonds people together and continues to be the source of the meaning of life. Thus, family is the only source that can engender a meaningful life, and family is the only means for individuals to escape the vicissitudes and atrocities of history that haunt the modern eras. Here we see a return to embracing of the family from Ba Jin’s and later writers’ revolutionary rebellion and Qian

Zhongshu’s sarcastic attitude against the family—literature itself has returned home.

Yet the form and the meaning of the family changes after the ruthless social and political movements. Fugui’s jia is a quasi-nuclear family that includes his wife, children and a parentless grandson whom he raises by himself. It is not a chain on the endless family tree that functions as a node of time and history like the traditional family; it simply rejects history and engages only in the present. To that end, Fugui does not seek an eternal life by resorting to the traditional collective Chinese imagination of an afterlife. His imaginative method of keeping the mental construction of his family in his solitary consciousness all takes place in the present. His sense of the jia marks a conceptual and institutional gap from the prototypical jia around May

Fourth in Ba Jin’s novels.

Moreover, the meaning of the jia in To Live is in constant flux under social transformations. Fugui’s jia extends from the Sino-Japanese war, through the civil war, to

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various political and social movements under the Communist regime, through to the Reform era.

Wave after wave of political movements and social and economic change are powerful enough to wipe away lives, values and valuables, and along with them, the general condition of human existence. In an unpredictable and ruthless world that crushes any individual resistance, jia becomes the only vantage point where one can mount any resistance to an ever-changing and hostile world. It becomes the locale—perhaps the only one left after a long history of turmoil— that transcends history and its vicissitudes. Therefore, the significance of the family as the essential nexus for individual life after the overwhelming crushing of the CCP regime was not weakened but only enhanced. Fugui’s obsession with his dead loved ones and the allegorical scenes in which he gives his own name to his buffalo and conjures up his dead family in his monologue, then, become the heroic acts of a Chinese farmer against the immense animosity towards existence imposed by history.

The three categories of modern prodigal narratives, from the rebellious sons against the jia, to the personification of the party, to the reassurance of the biological and affection for it, completes a dialectical circle by re-embracing the jia in China’s modernization. Although I have outlined them in rough linear order, these three patterns of prodigal son narratives do not replace one another in chronological order. Rather, both the traditional concept of the jia and modern concepts of the jia blend to form a polysemantic field in people’s everyday lives. In the countryside, people still visit their ancestors’ tombs to offer memorial services. In the cities, this tradition is not practiced regularly but can still be evoked. The everyday practice of bringing alive a family is a mixture of the possibilities on the spectrum, the concrete ingredients depending on individual experience. Accordingly, writers employ different prodigal son narrative patterns to recount their relation with the jia. The eclectic nature of the concept of the

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jia in modern China reflects the times: China has been in constant change, locked in the compulsion to change, yet its traditional meaning system has never disappeared; it still lingers and awakens as situations arise. As signified by the clock in Fortress Besieged, the jia is the occult tunnel through which the most pertinacious traditional beliefs enter the modern meaning system. The gay prodigal son narratives, as we will see later, reflect yet another major change, as well as consistency, in how the jia regulates its sons’ sexuality.

5.3 Romance, Heteronormativity, and Interpellation

Seldom can a prodigal loop close without a chain of romance. Romantic encounters of the prodigal narrative, like the protagonist himself, also experienced modern mutation. The classic interplay between the talented scholar and the beauty, when they both became modern subjects, partly gave way to romantic love of individuals defined by free will and passion.

Parallel to the modern mutation of the prodigal story, romance narratives also made a journey in modern Chinese literature. The Gao brothers’ hatred of the traditional feudal family comes largely from the belief that it causes unhappy marriage through the system of arranged marriages, and for the Gao brothers, loving someone of one’s choice is synonymous with rebelling against the patriarch. Lu Xun’s Quansheng and Zijun elope to live together, seemingly using the thrill of eloping to cover the gravity of making a conscious decision to live as permanently estranged prodigals. Fang Hongjian’s most important mission is to find a wife, especially as his pursuit of a tenured position is failing. Love between proletarian comrades is deemed to be uplifting, as the formula of “revolution plus love” prescribes, and thus is different from petty bourgeois sentiment. Fugui’s romance in To Live is a twisted one, as his first abandonment of his love only sets him on a lifelong project of refinding this love. And finally,

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An Dun’s popular romance told by real men and women, wrapped by absolute privacy, is the very core of the new desiring subjects of the era of the Market.

Romance is a quest; and in order to capture the heart of the lover, like those acquiring treasure, the heroine or hero, too, has dragons to slaughter, labyrinths to penetrate, and ordeals to survive. However, romance is, more than anything, a narrative, and a narrative in quest of itself; romance as a story of oneself is a core constituent of the subject, as Giddens notes, for it is always first of all a narrative of a life story and a shared biography of the heroine and the hero.341

The quest for love is thus always one for a narrative of oneself, and a life-or-death matter to modern subjects for whom dying having not loved and being loved in return is a true annihilation.

Romantic love, as we know it, is the most individualistic and intimate relationship between individuals, by default a pairing of a woman and a man. Unlike other social relationships in the modern setting, romantic love is deemed to be driven by passion, self- sovereignty, spontaneity and originality, and it is, very often, the salvation of mundane life and the ultimate expression of freedom in a highly organized and specialized modern world.

Authority, be it in the form of the Party, the nation, the danwei, the parents, or any other form, is but something that lovers are happy to ignore or, if necessary, to rebel against.

Yet the image of romantic relationships itself has always already been romanticized.

More than any other myth, perhaps, romance is what Altusser said about ideology: “the imagined

341 Antony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), 75.

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relationship of human beings and their reality.” In love, romance serves as a mechanism that produces, reproduces, and reinforces the matrix of dominant ideologies of gender, sexuality, and love, as well as the social reality related to it through all possible threads. As individualistic, adventurous, and sublimating as it seems to be, however, romance is always a way of deploying power relations—one only needs to recall the intensified gender roles, purified emotions, and compulsory expressions of love to illustrate how closely and intrinsically these two parts are related to each other.

In Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performantivity, Lisa Fletcher weds

J. L Austin’s theory of speech act to Judith Butler’s performativity to an intriguing study of the articulation of “I love you,” what she calls “the romantic speech act” that defines the romance novel: “[R]omance is a fictional mode which depends on the force and familiarity of the speech act ‘I love you.’”342 This utterance, as Fletcher argues, is

a synecdoche of heterosexuality’s insistent and compulsory repetition. “I love you” is uttered as the clarifying conclusion in the paradigmatic narrative of sexual intelligibility which ties a line of causality through the points of sex, gender, and sexuality (a male who is masculine desires a female who is feminine and vice versa.) To this extent heterosexual romance fictions can be read performatively as an incessant rendition of heterosexuality’s promised but never fully achieved absolute intelligibility. 343

While Fletcher’s study focuses on Anglophone writers publishing under the subgenre of historical romance fiction between 1980 and 2005, her argument deserves a broader application to romance and even the application of the romance pattern in real life. The articulation of love, and the whole set of romantic interplay, usually highly programmed, with its protean varieties,

342 Lisa Fletcher, Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate: 2008), 7. 343 Ibid., 34.

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that lead to that articulation, is, as Fletcher argues, in the very centre of stabilizing heteronormativity.

Fletcher further links the utterance of “I love you” to Althusser’s concept of interpellation—the process in which individuals enact their subjectivity by responding to the

Ideological State Apparatuses when addressed by the latter, as demonstrated in the famous example when one turns to a police officer’s hailing of “Hey, you there!”344 What Fletcher set out to do, through Benveniste’s insight into enunciation’s power of constituting the speaking subject, is to “identify the interpellative function of the historical romance… and the enunciative mechanisms by which that interpellation is effected:”345

…the utterance “I love you,” as romance’s defining performative, is an instance in the linguistic and grammatical suturing of formations and assumptions of “identity” through insistent reiteration. Further, “I love you” is circuitously individual and sociable; its grammatical logic figures coupling as an immanent relation. Its strict pronoun matrix can be read as an abbreviated map of popular and psychoanalytic theories or fictions of the acquisition and maintenance of structures of identity or self. In these stories of self, the subject becomes “I” interrelationally—through its recognition of an (O)ther (you). Nonetheless, the subject retains its individual integrity through an insistence on its final inaccessibility or unknowability. “Love,” which popularly and definitionally can be named but never fully known or understood, mimics the assumed inaccessibility of the meaning or identity of the individual (I)—its self-possession. All sorts of social imperatives—most importantly to do with gender and sexuality—crystallized around the phrases “I love you.” It can be seen as exemplary of the fiction or fantasy which facilitates the subject’s interpellation into a phallogocentric and heteronormative society. 346

Behind what Fletcher pinpoints here, the “phallogocentic and heteronormative society,” we might add, is the phantom of the authority. In the Althusserian sense, we might say that

344 Althusser, Luis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1972. 345 Lisa Fletcher, Historical Romance Fiction, 35. 346 Lisa Fletcher, Historical Romance Fiction, 35-36.

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romanticizing, “I love you” being an instance among the sundry performatives of it, serves as a means of interpellation, a mechanism that summons up the individual to become a subject of authority through becoming a subject of love. However, unlike the means Althusser describes, interpellation through romantic story is not achieved by coercion of the state apparatus, the law, or contractual relationships; rather, it works through an erotic and affectionate and aesthetic dimension that Althusser does not particularly concern himself with.

Specific to our concern with the tempo-spatial congruence in gay love, I would like to draw attention to the surroundings in which the romantic speech act of “I love you” is uttered.

One of the greatest magic powers of (hetero) romance is that through a mechanism fueled by aesthetics, passion, and sex, the poetics of romance not only produces desiring subjects, but also romanticizes the surroundings around them that lead to consolidation or consummation in the articulation of “I love you.” If a surrounding cannot be agreeable with love and in that moment destroys a beautiful love—which in the end cannot perish but only is helped to sublimation, as with the household romantic lovers Liang Shanbo (梁山伯) and Zhu Yintai (祝英台) who reincarnated as butterflies—it proves itself fundamentally disagreeable with the most humane affect.

Romanticizing, in this regard, has been one of the ultimate judges of the legitimacy of a society and its ruling authorities, and for that matter, a judge no authorities could afford to fail.

In this light, authority’s legitimacy lies not solely in its politico-legal apparatus and ideology, the typical Marxist two-tier structure consisting of the economic base and superstructure; there is an emotional, affectionate, sexual, and sensual portion of the individual’s relationship to the authority in romance. Authority, too, needs to be romanticized in order to be one that loves,

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grants, and cares. It is the poetics of romanticizing, the same mechanism that consummates true love, that transformes a cold and abstract authority into one that is lyrical, tangible, and intimate.

Thus a romantic relationship is always one of triangulation between a man, a woman, and the authority. This is perhaps best demonstrated in a marriage registration scene. In the consummation of love and the contracting of romantic love, the marriage certificate is not only signed by the husband and the wife; a third party, the nation, also marries in, and its stamp of approving and legalizing the civil union, together with the couple’s signatures, endorses a triangular relationship that produces sexual citizens.

A pivotal site connecting the subject and the matrix of social ideologies, romance is thus the ubiquitous modern story that narrates “more” than other stories. It might be a difficult task to think of a story that could completely do away with the narrative paradigm of romantic love. It is difficult, too, to think of a subject who can do without a romantic life story. Always valorized as heterosexual, the romance composes the romantic story as compulsorily heterosexual. There is no need for exemplifying heterosexual romance here, since even without their sexual and passionate charm, the compulsority of heterosexual romance would appeal to men desiring men, as in Handong’s case when he is meeting Lin Jingping in a fancy restaurant:

The automatic doors opened and my eyes were lightened. She was really illuminant. A simple sleeveless bright gray dress wrapped her body tightly. Hung on her right shoulder was a black purse, agreeing with her black square earrings. Her hair was done up, with a few strands dropping casually. Her physique was wonderful. Her height was about 170 centimeters, just matching mine. I was somehow aroused. When she entered, almost all the men in the hall, Chinese or foreigners, were looking at her. When I reached my hand to hold her waist and walk her to the restaurant, I felt

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unusually excited and proud. My vanity was fully satisfied, and that satisfaction was something Lan Yu could not ever bring me.347

Handong is assuming a heterosexual male gaze when he examines Lin Jingping and assesses whether or not she could be an ideal bride. This examination, so meticulous as to include Lin’s height in centimetres, shows the pragmatism that is so often camouflaged by romantic passion. This male gaze also strictly demonstrates the rules of romanticizing the environment, which is a public space charged with social well-being symbolized by the automatic doors, the restaurant featuring Western cuisine in a high-end hotel, the audience, and

Lin Jingping’s dress and accessories. Every detail is delicately calculated to contribute to the general effect of romance—Lin’s hair style, earrings, dress, purse, and the choice of the place, and, most importantly, other people’s gaze. Simply holding Lin’s waist and walking her to the table, Handong could perform the role of the hero of a romantic love story.

5.4 Prodigal Romance

Before touching upon the online narratives, we need to look back briefly into the past of same-sex narratives in modern times across the strait. Pai Hsien-yung’s and other Taiwanese writers’ fiction since the 1960s, especially Niezi (孽子, Prodigal Sons, 1983), established the primacy of the Confucian parent-son relation in conceiving the meaning of homosexuality. The prodigal sons in Pai’s novel are a group of men who make Taipei’s New Park a haven. The core characters are four young men, each exiled from a broken family and has poignant relationships with their parents, especially their fathers. The thesis of the novel is not the erotic life of these

347 Xiao He, Beijing Story, Ch. 14.

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men, but rebuilding patriarchal relationships with surrogate father figures who can tolerate homosexuality.

Once men started to narrate their stories back on the mainland, the imagery of the gay prodigal son became prominent. The fishery stories of 1980s and 1990s in China are prodigal stories, as they prescribe a man’s same-sex desire within the journeys made into the fisheries confined by his bachelorhood. Upon each encounter, both men would restate the limit of their emotional involvement and such limits are seldom trespassed. These sexual and emotional encounters, while coming along with a sentiment of helplessness in letting go and sometimes reaching a beauty in deep understanding of each other’s situation, nevertheless end as secret anecdotes for one’s souvenir case. Each time, the prodigal son returns without disturbing the order of the jia, and by pulling himself back from his misdeeds to finish the classical prodigal loop, he redeems himself as a righteous son.

The imagery of the gay prodigal son, too, is ubiquitous in cyber gay narratives, and the family perpetually stands as the reference for his homosexual love. Different gay narratives may have different foci, but invariably gay men are described as prodigal sons, and their relationship with the jia is always a major source of anxiety. Yet the new conditions give rise to possibilities of trespassing semiotic boundaries and defying the prodigal narratives with the romantic.

Narratives appearing online are crammed with this new tension. To resolve it, they are not a single story but a competition between the prodigal and the romance. The first narrative paradigm is adopted by one of the men (the good son) as he still half-heartedly complies with the classical loop and the second by the newly appearing lover (the gay orphan) who desires love

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over the jia. Contrasting with the arc of the fishery narratives, this tension now demands an ending of significance rather than dilution to an anecdote.

I have chosen a number of stories to represent the gay prodigal for this chapter’s discussion. These stories include Xiao He’s “Huizi” (辉子, 1998),348 Fuxi’s (福汐) “In the

Days without Love” (zai meiyou ai de rizili, 在没有爱的日子里, 2003) and “The Man at

Gucheng Subway Station” (gucheng ditiezhan de nanren, 古城地铁站的男人, 2003); 349 “Love

Now”’s (ruguo ai jiu xianzai ba, 如果爱就现在吧) Ten Years Past, Still Not Forgotten

(shinianle, yijiu wangbule, wangbule, 十年了，依旧忘不了，忘不了, 2005),350 Tong Ge’s (童

戈) “The Morning When The Wings Broke” (zheduan le chibang de zaochen, 折断了翅膀的早

晨, 1997) and “Battlefield” (zandi, 战地, 1997), 351 Yuan Yin’s (原因) “My Own Brother”

(wujia youdi, 吾家有弟, 2001),352 Liu Huo’s (流火) “Falling in Love in Beijing” (zai beijing duoru qingwang, 在北京堕入情网, 2000),353 and Dao (刀, Knife) “Biography of a Frog”

348 Xiao He 筱禾, “Huizi” 辉子, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=175&id=23&msg=筱禾说书. Accessed January 17, 2014. 349 Fuxi’s 福汐, Febuary 8, 2003, “The Man at Gucheng Subway Station” (gucheng ditiezhan de nanren, 古城地铁站的男人, 2003), Guangzhou Tongzhi (www.gztz.org), archived May 6, 2003 by Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/web/20040205020120/http://www.gztz.org/default.htm, accessed January 17, 2014. 350 “Love Now” (ruguo ai jiu xianzai ba, 如果爱就现在吧), July 29, 2005, Ten Years Past, Still Not Forgotten (shinianle, yijiu wangbule, wangbule, 十年了，依旧忘不了，忘不了), Companion, Tianya, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-71948-1.shtml, accessed January 17, 2014. 351 Both stories are from Tong Ge’s story collection Good Man Rogo (haonan gouge, 好男羅格), (Hong Kong, Worldson Press, 1997). 352 Yuan Yin 原因, March 15, 2001, “My Own Brother” (wujia youdi, 吾家有弟), Guangzhou Tongzhi (www.gztz.org), archived December 20, 2001, by Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/web/20011202100252/http://www.gztz.org/default.htm, accessed January 17, 2014. 353 Liu Huo 流火, August 20, 2001, “Falling in Love in Beijing” (zai beijing duoru qingwang, 在北京堕入情网), Guangzhou Tongzhi (www.gztz.org), archived December 15, 2001, by Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/web/20011202100252/http://www.gztz.org/default.htm, accessed January 17, 2014.

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(qingwa zhuan, 青蛙传,) trilogy: “Awakening, I” (jingzhe, 惊蛰, 2001), “Dark Castle, II” (heiye chengbao, 黑夜城堡, 2001) “Loving only strangers, III” (zhi’ai moshengren, 只爱陌生人,

2002).354

As can be seen, this is a large number of stories to engage with in a single chapter. These stories—and a majority of other stories clustering to form a gay folklore in the first decade of the internet in China—are kin to each other in terms of their themes, internal anxieties, as well as the backgrounds and characteristics of their protagonists. Many, if not all, are centred on two motifs: the first one the prodigal journey a son makes into and back from the world, the second one, his adventure in the world that is romance. Many also expand and focus on the part of initiation to homosexuality or trace it back to childhood, thus qualifying themselves as examples of bildungsroman. The gay bildungsroman, while important, is not the concern of this chapter, as it is about the sexual and romantic initiation of the hero and thus indistinguishable from romances. The grouping of gay narratives is due to, as I suggested in the last chapter, the folkloristic nature of these narratives. This enables a Proppian or Campbellian reading of them.

Due to the lack of translations of these stories, I will first give a detailed account of “Huizi” which is representative of the jia-themed stories. Other stories will be referred to when they are needed in our discussion.

354 Dao 刀, September 6, 2001, “Biography of a Frog I: Awakening” (qingwa zhuan, jingzhe, 青蛙传·惊蛰), Companion, Tianya, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-3995-1.shtml; September 7, 2001, “Biography of a Frog II: Dark Castle” (qingwa zhuan, heiye chengbao, 青蛙传·黑夜城堡), Companion, Tianya, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-motss-4001-1.shtml; April 26, 2002, “Biography of a Frog III: Loving Only Strangers” (qingwa zhuan, zhi’ai moshengren, 青蛙传•只爱陌生人), Companion, Tianya, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post- motss-7634-1.shtml, all accessed January 17, 2014.

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“Huizi” (辉子), by Xiao He, first appeared in 1998 on Yifan’s BBS “Homo-Talk Without

Scruples.” While the more popular Beijing Story by the same author is considered by some readers to be melodramatic, “Huizi” is praised for its realism and plain style. “Huizi” is also considered to be an archetypical story of gay men in China.

“Huizi” opens with a flashback to the 1980s. The first-person narrator Xiaoyang (小洋) and Huizi are childhood friends growing up together in a shabby and crowded Beijing neighbourhood of common workers. Living next door to one another and only seven months apart in age, Huizi and Xiaoyang are closer to each other even than to their own siblings, and they share childhood memories as playmates. Of the two boys, Huizi is older, stronger, more muscular, and better in school. Xiaoyang, on the other hand, is always being taken care of by

Huizi as a younger brother. After primary school, the boys enter the same junior high school.

Huizi, however, is involved in a gang fight. Although only a minor participant in the fight that causes a teenager’s death, Huizi has to spend one year in a rehabilitation center and his life from then on carries that stigma and enters a downward spiral. After getting out of the rehabilitation center, Huizi is dismissed from school and starts to date a girl who mixes with teenage gang members, with Xiaoyang’s narration unconsciously revealing his jealousy. Xiaoyang, previously the weaker academically, is expected to enter university, and following that, a path in life that would honour his parents, or even the whole neighbourhood, as “the courtyards in this neighbourhood haven’t raised a university student.” 355

355 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 2.

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Adolescence goes on and the two young men’s lives drift even further apart. Huizi is in and out of prison. Xiaoyang, while studying assiduously for the college entrance examinations, finds himself helplessly attracted to Huizi and tries hard to hide this from Huizi and himself.

When Xiaoyang is enrolled in a university in Shanghai, a choice he made to escape from his desire, Huizi has to start to take over his father’s job at the vegetable supply depot.

In the first winter break, Xiaoyang sees Huizi with a handsome boy, Xiaowei, and he immediately senses the nature of their relationship. Hurt by seeing Huizi with another boy, he remains unable to tell Huizi about his secret love for him. As economic reform advances, Huizi starts a clothing booth in a market and becomes one of the first to taste the fruits of the new market economy. Never abandoning his role as big brother of Xiaoyang, he helps Xiaoyang with his stipend and he also looks after Xiaoyang’s struggling family.

During a summer break, Xiaoyang overhears an argument in Huizi’s house. Huizi’s father is in a fury because Huizi brings his lover, Xiaowei, to the house. Xiaowei is driven away from the house and Huizi’s father is sent to hospital because of an attack triggered by the incident. Soon, Huizi becomes the object of ridicule in the neighbourhood. The two men finally have a conversation discussing Huizi’s sexuality. Presenting himself as heterosexual, Xiaoyang asks Huizi to “change” in a sympathetic tone that demarcates their different sexual stances, forestalling Xiaoyang from revealing his erotic interest in Huizi. 356 Huizi, on the other hand, has resolved to protect Xiaoyang from “spoiling” himself in order to show that his moral sense

356 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 6.

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surpasses his sexual desire for Xiaoyang. His care for Xiaoyang, however, seems to be more than brotherly. 357

The last chance for the two men to act on their attraction for each other occurs later, when they drink together and Xiaoyang pretends to be drunk, hoping that Huizi will “teach” him “to do that thing.” 358 However, Huizi’s sense of protection for Xiaoyang trumps his sexual desire, and he kisses him but goes no further. Locked in an irresolvable conflict between his homosexual desire and the straight identity he assumes, Xiaoyang tries to kill himself on Chinese New Year’s

Eve with coal gas. Thanks largely to Huizi, Xiaoyang is brought back to life. When Huizi asks

Xiaoyang why he committed suicide, Xiaoyang lies that it is because his girlfriend “ran away with another man.” 359 This further confirms Xiaoyang’s heterosexuality and forever dispels any possibility of confessing his homosexuality to Huizi. Huizi then offers Xiaoyang advice that is obviously directed also to himself: “Do not just think about yourself. You have to think about your father and mother. If you had really died, your mother would follow you.” 360

After this incident, Xiaoyang comes to a recognition of his familial responsibilities: “It turned out I still had a father and mother. It turned out I still have to live my life for others!” 361

His goal is now to secure a good future to meet social expectations. He studies hard in order to enter graduate school and he has girlfriends to gain experience with women in the hope that one day he can live with a wife. At the same time, he has impersonal sex with men but avoids any

357 Ibid. 358 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 7. 359 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 8. 360 Ibid. 361 Ibid.

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possible relationship. As he confesses: “Whenever I did that thing, I seldom spoke. I did not even look at the faces. As long as it was a hard male body, it would do for me. After finishing the business, I would leave without turning my head.” 362 After graduating from university,

Xiaoyang chooses to go to his fiancée’s hometown, a smaller city, for graduate school and a pending marriage. Abandoning residence in Beijing or Shanghai is an unusual choice as it is considered to be more prestigious, but Xiaoyang senses that “something troublesome will be come up between Huizi and myself” if he stays in Beijing; 363 and it is also clear to him that it is too hard to resist the temptations of the city’s gay venues if stays in Shanghai.

Several years later, Xiaoyang hears that Huizi is again in prison for hooliganism, caught engaging in same-sex behaviour in a park frequented by men desiring men. Deeply ashamed,

Huizi’s family has threatened to disown him. His sister proclaims: “He deserves it! Two years is too light for him. He should be executed by a firing squad!” 364 His father, once again sick, forbids the family to visit him in prison, stating “there is no such person in this family.” 365

Xiaoyang visits him in prison and does all he can to bring his family back to him. With

Xiaoyang’s intercession, Huizi’s sisters accept Huizi and Xiaowei’s relationship. Xiaoyang goes back to his life, where his wife and newborn son embrace him with warm but suffocating family life.

“Huizi” will serve as the major example in our discussion of the gay prodigal. I will now introduce other gay prodigal stories briefly.

362 Ibid. 363 Ibid. 364 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 9. 365 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 9.

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Fu Xi’s “In the Days without Love” (Zai meiyou ai de rizi li, 在没有爱的日子里) is a saunter of the first-person narrator in his piognent early years growing up as an adopted son in a poor home and hometown in southern China, where he lives until the age of 15. Love and death, happiness and pain of people in a small ordinary Chinese town flow out of Fu Xi’s gut-opening painful but beautiful narrative flow. The boy’s loving mother commits suicide when her adultery was exposed. His adopting father is jailed for being responsible for the former’s death. Only to the very end, the first-person narrator reveals his romantic relationship with his uncle, who jumps off a bridge to the river after being arrested over stealing odds and ends of wood belong to a factory. His grandmother subsequently goes missing. Out of home, Fu Xi’s narrative continues in “The Men at Gucheng Subway Station” (Gucheng ditiezhan de nanren, 古城地铁站的男人)， if we consider they are from the same first-person narrator, who also narrates Fu Xi’s other works. “I” meets “the Men,” or “He” on a subway in Beijing, as both men’s everyday commute routes overlap. The two men develops a romance. In the mean time, “the Men” is advancing his relationship with his fiancé to wedding. At the night of the wedding, “I” finds himself on a train.

Soon after “I” moves from Beijing to Shanghai.

Tong Ge’s “The Morning When the Wings Broke” (Zheduan le chibang de zaochen, 折

断了翅膀的早晨) is a story in Good Man Rogo (Haonan luoge 《好男罗格》, 1997). During the night, the widowed mother Xiao Huiwen (肖慧文) catches her son, Xiao Yi (肖毅), having sex with another boy, Lin Mang (林莽). She is shocked at first, then makes sure to separate her son and his lover, believing the other boy is a bad influence on her son. She also seeks a psychiatrist friend’s help but only to learn that homosexuality is incurable. Lin Mang’s story, on the other hand, is more poignant. Orphaned since twelve, Lin Mang has to support his aged

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grandmother while going to school. A man in the neighbourhood, Chen Shuji (陈树基), takes him under his wing and waits until Lin Mang reaches eighteen to reveal his love for him. Not wanting to cause troubles for Lin Mang, who is going to university, however, Chen leaves him and keeps supporting him from a remote city. Feeling guilty and not wanting to hamper Xiao

Yi’s “rectification”, Lin Mang chooses to end his relationship with Xiao by jumping over a balcony, but luckily only breaks his leg.

Tong Ge’s another story from the same book, “Battlefield” (Zandi, 战地), is a romance between two soldiers from the angle of one of the protagonists, Xiao (肖). Zhao Laizi (赵来子) is a handsome, brisk and lively lad with whom Xiao shares a domitary in the barracks. Laizi initiates a sexual relationship with Xiao, but out of bewilderness, he writes a letter inquiring an expert from popular magazine about the nature of their relationship. The letter is extended to the army and the two soldiers are exiled to a sentry isolated in a cave on the frontline of the 1984

Sino-Vietnamese war. After the out break of the war, the two men stray from each other. Laizi losses both his legs in the war and is demobilized to work at a school. The story ends with

Xiao’s visit to Laizi.

Another novel, Ten Years Past, Still Not Forgotten (shinian le, yijiu wangbuliao, wangbuliao, 十年了，依旧忘不了，忘不了), by “Love Now” (ruguo ai jiu xianzai ba, 如果爱

就现在吧), first delineates a long romantic interplay between the two heroes, Wang Nan (王楠), an interior designer recently graduated from university at the beginning of the story, and Li

Zhong (李重), a successful businessman. It takes them a long romantic dance to reveal and confirm their sexual attraction to each other and finally establish a committed love relationship—

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recalling the similar dance between Handong and Lan Yu, this kind of romantic interplay is typical of gay love narratives. After this stage, the two gay men pretend to their families to be close friends sharing an apartment, but are found out during a visit made by Wang Nan’s widowed mother who, again like the mother in “Wings,” raised her son alone. His mother also does not hesitate to draw her son back into normal life. She calls Li Zhong’s family to share her findings as well as to urge Li Zhong’s parents to exert pressure on Li Zhong. As a result of learning the news, Li Zhong’s father has a stroke. Repentant for the harm his love for Li Zhong caused Li’s father and in order to avoid causing his own mother pain, Wang Nan ends his relationship with Li Zhong and moves to another city. Ten years later, Wang Nan is informed that Li Zhong is sick, and he makes his way to his deathbed. Li Zhong’s sister, who knows the whole story and is sympathetic to the two men, passes along to him a few videotapes that Li

Zhong recorded for him over the years they were separated from each other.

“My Own Brother” (wujia youdi, 吾家有弟), by Yuan Yin (yuanyin, 原因), is more dramatic than many other stories. At the beginning of this story, Zhou Chi (周迟), who works in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, is going home to Beijing for Chinese New Year. Well aware of the pressure he will receive from his parents to get married, he has made a plan to come out to his twin brother, Zhou Xun (周迅), who he thinks is heterosexual. Telling his brother, as

Zhou Chi’s reasoning goes, will win Zhou Xun over and help him resist the pressure from their parents. He soon finds out, however, that his brother Zhou Xun is also gay and in love with another young man whom he introduced as a friend. While the Zhou Chi harbours homoeroticism toward his twin brother, he cannot express it to him. A dramatic incident, however, changes the whole situation: when their mother is diagnosed with brain cancer and has

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to go through major surgery, her wish, spoken from her surgery bed, is to see her dear twin boys get married and bring her grandchildren before she dies. Realizing that keeping celibate would contribute to his mother’s death, on the one hand, and that it would leave his brother no choice but to take on the task of fulfilling dual filial duties, on the other, Zhou Chi cancels his coming- out plan and returns to Shenzhen to work on getting married. His brother Zhou Xun, as it turns out later, also made a plan to come out but changes his mind when he finds out Zhou Chi’s secret in a call he mistakenly took from Zhou Chi’s lover. Zhou Xun reacts even more quickly: on the day Zhou Chi leaves, he dismisses his boyfriend and brings a girl to send Zhou Chi off at the airport.

“Dao”’s (刀) Frog trilogy is an account of a men’s (Xiao Hei, 小黑) story in a serial.

This first installment is the narrator’s first erotic experience on the internet that ends only with a one-night stand. The second part of the trilogy continues the narrator’s advantures on the internet. The narrator receives a phonecall, in which a voice identifying itself as a police, interrogates his relationship with a friend he met on the internet. That voice, as it turns out, was the jealous ex-boyfriend of a man his friend met online. The narrator then meets a married man,

Zhang, when he is on a business trip to Nanjing. The two men have sex and expect their relationship ends with the business trip. Their story, however, continues in the third installment, as Xiao Hei and Zhang keeps their online chat. When Xiao Hei is sent to work in Nanjing by his work unit, the two men start contact more frequently. Zhang boggles at the advance of their relationship. Xiao Hei, on the other hand, invests himself in the relationship until they finally cannot go on with their relationship but end it.

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All the stories introduced above have two levels of narrative. The first, quite obviously, is all about romance between men. The second, always underlying and sometimes framing the story, tells the story of the gay prodigal son in relation to his jia and parents. Indeed, the motif of the prodigal son, while sometimes going unnoticed, is so universal that it can be found in almost every early Chinese gay story. Each individual story, of course, has its own specificities, as the gay romance might unfold against the backdrop of a university (“Wings”), barracks or a cave

(“Battlefield”), a danwei, one of the prodigal’s lodging, urban public space (“Falling”), or just like “Huizi”, inside the jia and the neighbourhood, for one could be a prodigal son within one’s own jia. The heroes, in the meantime, can come from different backgrounds as in the stories introduced earlier and many other generic ones, but whether the hero is a soldier, a confused student, a precocious civil servant, or a hedonistic businessman, he is tied to a thread that binds him to the jia, or if such a thread is absent, it will become all the more noticeable that he is defined by that absence. What defines the gay prodigal is that he is on a round trip whose point of departure and destiny are both the jia. Each of them, however, is on a different point of their prodigal journey, be it a centrifugal home-leaving or centripetal homecoming.

Moreover, the perspective of the prodigal, which sees the heroes first and foremost as sons attached to parents and a jia—or the lack of such attachment—shapes their romance with each other. This contrasts to heterosexual romance, in which the relationship with the family, while not unimportant, often fades to the background of the gender roles of the heroine and the hero. Even in the cases where the fiction’s central focus is on the romance of men whose background is implicitly, or represented as, a husband, a colleague, a friend, or a lover, he is primarily taken as a prodigal son. The result of this primacy is that, invariably, homosexual love is viewed primarily in relation to the jia and gay men are implicitly understood as gay sons. For

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this reason, the prodigal narrative is the configurative pattern and the central conflict of these stories is that between individual desire and familial duties. The primacy of the jia and familial duties also places gay love somewhere in between the talented scholar and the beauty model and the modern romance, and gay men in love are more likely to see each other as the alluring but dangerous figure assumed by a woman in the classical rendering. In contrast, heterosexual love predominantly leans to the modern end of this romantic equation.

A whole set of elements in these narratives, then, can be identified: in the centre is the gay prodigal son who often is the narrator and his romantic tango is with yet another prodigal son; each of them may have a different relationship with their jia and each of them is at a different point of the prodigal journey between the jia and the world. Within the jia is the realm of the parental figures, or their symbolic substitutes. The jia also facilitates a temporal framework defined by ceremonies, especially the son’s wedding. Moreover, it is the core location where homosexuality is confronted and tested by the parental figures. Outside is a world marked by its spatial expansiveness and the political authority’s power, in which gay prodigal sons meet and fall in love with each other, and from which they are drawn back to the jia. Within these parameters, two major endeavours of the protagonists drive the narrative: gay men are looking for love, but, at the same time, a way to return home. These two main desires of gay sons, love-seeking and home-seeking, are in conflict and the reconciliation of this contradiction is the main direction of the gay prodigal son narrative, since a gay man’s identity as a son exists prior to that as lover.

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Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress suggest that the utilization of familiar narrative patterns in narratives can help “to naturalize the content of the narrative itself.” 366 Prodigal romance, as verified by its universality, is the narrative paradigm of the generation of the internet in China.

A whole generation’s drawing to the established narrative patterns of the literary tradition, even though so often unconsciously and all too familiar to notice, speaks of the archetypes’s power in providing plot devices and momentum to recount stories that are otherwise difficult to tell.

Moreover, as Northrop Frye suggests, writers’ choice of literary forms, including genres and archetypal forms, are conditioned by their cultural settings. In Frye’s view, writers are not as free as we think they are; there are certain pre-existent literary forms that are universally appropriate to and thus indispensable to certain subject matter, and therefore, writers are bound to choose these forms or genres if they are to write about that subject.367 Frye’s insight sheds light on the prevalence of the prodigal son theme in gay narratives: “When so many poets use so many of the same images, surely there are much bigger critical problems involved than biographical ones.”368 As Frye reminds us, the fact that so many gay men tell their own story as a prodigal son in relation to their jia, then, should not be taken as only appealing to a narrative convention, but also one derived from historical experiences and social environments. Thus even though the vernacular and spontaneity of these narratives suggest that many writers may not be particularly aware of the prodigal son narrative tradition, by utilizing the prodigal son

366 Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 230. 367 Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature,” in Criticism: the Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). 368 Ibid. p. 506.

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prototype, gay narratives anchor themselves to the broader literary tradition, and such a choice of narrative pattern is not without significance.

In this sense, the prodigal romance is utilized as a literary space in which the crucial elements of homosexual existence are conjured up and brought into play: homosexual desire, the parents, the gay son himself as prodigal, his gay lover, another prodigal, the semiotic environment of the jia, and the world—both the latent traditional concepts as well as the contemporary contexts that homosexuality must confront, reconcile with, or escape from. It is in this interplay that the particular meaning of the homosexuality of the generation of the internet is signified. The prodigal romance, then, becomes the framework encapsulating elements of homosexual existence necessary for making sense of what it means and feels to be gay.

Furthermore, it envelops the emotional, cognitive, and behavioural sensibility of a gay subject in a single story. Prodigal romance is thus the narrative of contemporary gay experience in its historical transitions in China. By engaging this literary convention, moreover, prodigal romance is used by gay men as a site to negotiate homosexual desire with familial and societal duties. As much as the coming out story is the prototype of the Western gay narrative, the prodigal romance is the prototype of gay experience in China, and the prodigal son who is split between his home and his homosexual desire is the prototype of Chinese gay men.

As our earlier discussion of the evolution of the jia in modern literature shows, the prodigal son himself and the context for telling his story have both experienced changes. In relation to the evolvement of sexuality, the family has become a center of heteronormativity on the one hand and a funnel through which traditional conventions, especially family duties, reach modern life, on the other. Individuals, at the same time, are dependent on their families for a

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meaningful life in a changing society. These restrictions place gay men in an unsolvable quandary between their family duties and their homosexual desire. This conundrum between homosexual desire and dependence on the family is what I call Chinese gay men’s family complex.

The family complex is the most crucial nexus in understanding contemporary Chinese gay men’s erotic, emotional, psychological, discursive, social, and political situation. It operates on the epistemological level in deciding how gay men conceive of their sexuality as a part of their being. It also operates on the existential level in deciding how sexuality interacts with other factors in their life experience and preconditions their choice of possible life trajectories. If homosexuality invariably involves the desire for another person of one’s own sex, the particularity of Chinese men’s homosexuality lies in their relationship to the family that retains an underlying Confucian tradition in a modern context. Coping with the jia is at the very core of the homosexual experience in China.

Once it is understood that the jia is the main site for understanding homosexuality, we can then move forward to examine the meaning of homosexuality by reading the prodigal son narrative. In the next few sections, we will use the family complex as a framework of inquiry for examining homosexuality in the symbolic system of the jia.

5.5 Within the Realm of the Jia: The Parents as Grace Figures, the Crying Mother, and the Gay Prodigal Son

The figures of the parents are, firstly and obviously, the prodigal son’s father and/or mother. The parents devote their life to their son and place his happiness ahead of their own.

This devotion is the acme of parental love that requires no return on the surface level, and it sets

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up a parent in the gay prodigal son narrative primarily as a grace figure, one whose loving kindness prevails over all else. “Grace figure” is a phase I borrow from Geoffrey Proehl, but while Proehl emphasizes the parents’ capacity for patience and forgiveness, in the context of

American theatre,369 my primary emphasis is on the grace figures’ initial kindness toward and thence their permanent status as obligee of a debt of gratitude from the prodigal son. Proehl adopts the phrase “because these characters seem most marked by the expectation that they will practice acts of patience and forgiveness.”370 As a contrast, Chinese parents, unlike their

Western counterpart in the Bible, do not simply wait and embrace the prodigal son’s return unconditionally. Instead, they require the son return home having completed the feat assigned to him. If he does not, his attempted return will be a trial wherein he will be punished, rejected, and sent back to finish his mission, as we have seen in “The Courtesan Li Wa.” Meanwhile, Chinese parents are not “fixed in space and fixed in their role by the expectations of the dominant culture” as in Proehl’s definition of the American grace figure; 371 rather, they are active and voluntary in urging their gay son’s rehabilitation. Nor are Chinese parents merely “functional” like the American grace figures Proehl characterizes for their lack of subjectivity.372 Chinese parents act with subjectivity, one that threatens to take over the subjectivity of their gay son.

There are a set of variations of the configuration of the grace figure, from a full pair of parents, to a single one, to a surrogate one, to none. When both the parents are absent—because of demise, for obvious reasons, or disqualified for unparental deeds—another equivalent figure

369 Geoffrey Proehl, Coming Home Again: American Family Drama and the Figure of the Prodigal, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press; London, Cranbury, NJ: Associate University Press, 1997), 125. 370 Ibid., 134. 371 Ibid., 126. 372 Ibid., 123-139.

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may take the role of the father or the mother. A sister, for instance, might completely or partly assume the figure of a parent to a younger brother if their parents died earlier, as in the case of

Xiao He’s Mill of Coloured Porcelain (Caihui Fang《彩绘坊》).373

Since the May Fourth movement, it seems that the Chinese father has lost a great share of his authority and a significant share of his ties to his son, while the mother seems to still maintain, if not magnify, those ties.374 Fathers in gay narratives tend to have a lighter influence on the son. It is not at all rare in these narratives that some parents, especially a father, might be reduced to only a nominal figure as he has disgraced himself by his misdeeds against the jia, usually in pursuit of his own sexual desire. An example is Lan Yu’s father, who is corrupted by a woman and thus responsible for his wife’s death. The mother, on the other hand, is often characterized by her devotion, unselfishness, caring, and a loving bond between herself and her son. Yet she is also vulnerable and weak, requiring the son’s protection and repayment. The son’s obligation is even amplified as his masculinity lies largely in his ability to protect her from being hurt, especially from himself. Very often in these narratives she can be flattened to the stock character of the “old Mom” who cries over soap operas, lovingly nags, and cooks delicious dishes—but she loses touch with her son’s sexual life, taking for granted his normality, and therefore her happiness. She is simply a caring figure who needs to be taken care of because of her innocence.

373 Xiao He, 2008, Mill of Coloured Porcelain (caihui fang, 彩绘坊), http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=175&id=825&msg=筱禾说书, accessed January 17, 2014. 374 For a study of the predicament modern Chinese masculinity, see Zhong Xueping, Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of Late Twentieth Century (Durham, Duke University Press, 2000).

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Of all configurations, a single mother to an only son makes up the most dramatic situation. This mother’s life is completely lived for her son, to the point that, if we may, she is a parasite on her son’s life. A single mother concentrates in herself all of the elements of the grace figure—devotion, selflessness, sacrifice; and unspoken behind all of this is her sacrifice of her own a romantic and sexual life, a sacrifice that raises her to the status of a saint. All of these fuel the guilt of the gay son, only exponentially amplified by her fragility and the amount of hardship she incurred by raising him alone. The only son, on the other hand, is the single hope and only reason for the single mother, and hence he is the most encumbered gay son of all. Since there are no brothers or sisters, he is in a closed relationship with his single mother in which every knot is tightened. For him to disappoint his single mother with his homosexuality, therefore, profanes her essentially holy sacrifice for the continuity of the jia. Xiao Yi’s single mother in

“Morning” is certainly the epitome of the parental grace figure:

Suppose: You were a loving mother. You were in middle age. Your husband was a fickle man. He went off with another woman and sneakily left you and your four-year old son. Ever since you were wary of men. You gave your whole heart and mind for your son. For twenty years, you did everything for your son happily and willingly. Now your son has grown up to become a six-chi tall man from a toddling boy. You appreciated your son. In his broad chest and shoulders, his sturdy arms and legs, his moustache on the upper lip, his manly forehead and nose, and his deep and intelligent eyes, you could taste the hardship you came through to raise him. And you also wove your dream that now came closer: Your vigorous son took a pretty and elegant girl like yourself on his arm, and they all dressed in splendid wedding clothing. They smiled to each other in a rain of a profusion of colourful flowers. They both bowed down to pay their greetings to you, and with affection that made your heart beat faster, they both called you “Mom.” 375

375 Tong Ge (童戈), “The Morning When The Wings Broke,” in Tong Ge, Good Man Rogo (haonan gouge, 好男羅格), (Hong Kong: Worldson Press, 1997), 185.

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Thus speaks the mindset of the mother, especially that of the single mother, as viewed by a gay male writer. The incestuous undertone, however, might not derive from the author but an association any parent would make in her mind. Wang Nan’s Mom in Ten Years, too, is no different, as she also single-handedly raises Wang Nan from a toddler after her husband’s death.

Of all the mothers, Liu Su’s (“Falling in Love in Beijing”) perhaps presents the most poignant of mother-son relationships as the widow of a peasant who died in a coal mine collapse:

Mother carried the whole family on her back and lived through the hardship. My brothers got married one by one, but Mother did not allow the family to split. She said that as long as she was alive, we could not split up. My brothers and sisters-in-law were all afraid of her, but I wasn’t. Mother always treated them severely, scolding them for laziness or foolishness. In fact, all of them worked very, very hard. They never retorted, for Mother worked even harder, always being the first to get up and the last to go to bed. Mother got sick when I was nine, but we didn’t have the money, so she just dragged on with the sickness. She always felt cold. I shared the bed with her and I could feel that her bones were so cold that they became dried up. I can never forget the sound her bones made whenever she moved her body. I held her feet in my arms, trying to warm them, but to no effect. Mother said to me: “Little Su, you must study hard, then you will find a decent job, then you will marry a beautiful wife and have kids. But Mom, Mom can’t be there to raise your kids for you.”376

To disappoint Mom would take inhuman evilness. Mom’s tears, not Father’s cane, has the potency to dissolve gay love. This is why right after Mom cries to Handong, or Xiao Yi, or

Wang Nan, or any gay son, he ends his relationship with his Lan Yu. More likely, Mom does not need to cry, or even find out; just imagining how she would feel if she is put in the position of the mother of Handong, or Xiao Yi, or Wang Nan would make gay sons return home. Liu

Su’s mother dies when he is a teen, but that simply makes his mother the harder to leave, as she lives on inside him. One can fight the whole world, but one cannot fight the tears of a mom.

376 Liu Huo, “Falling in Love in Beijing,” Ch. 7.

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Because of their unmatched power, single mothers are uncommonly abundant in gay narratives, while fathers can be disproportionately absent. Even when one has both parents, the mother figure very often is assigned greater weight and, somehow, her weakness is exalted to increase her potential. Handong’s father dies in the middle of Beijing Story, only to increase his duties, as he also has to take his father’s role in protecting his mother. In “My Brother,” when

Mom is diagnosed with brain cancer at Chinese New Year and asks for grandchildren from her hospital bed—her hair shaved due to chemotherapy—the brothers immediately give up their plans of their respective same-sex relationships in order to comply with her wish.

Brothers or sisters are usually not a cause of a gay son’s anxiety, or if they are, they usually assume the role of the parents. The wife or fiancée, if one of the protagonists—usually a good son who places his duty before desire—is in a heterosexual relationship, seems to be of secondary and external influence on the guilt felt for gay love to the influence from parents and internal struggles. Marriage is usually accepted as an obligation to the grace figures and not as an obligation painful to break, as in the case of Handong’s marriage with Li Jingping. This is probably because of the generational position of the protagonists, still in their bachelorhood, having inherited a discriminatory mindset against married men due to the resultant loss of freedom.377 Another contributive reason might be misogyny/gynophobia toward female partners so that they are viewed as narratively disposable.

377 In recent years, the misfortune of “tongqi” (homosexual’s wives, or comrade’s wives, 同妻) has been called into attention by Pengyou, a blog circle of Chinese tongqi net (huaren tongqi wang, 华人同妻网, http://q.blog.sina.com.cn/gaywife), Wing-Broken Angels QQ Group (tianshi zhechi boke quan, 天使折翅 QQ 群, 237273699;185443309), Wrong Love Tongzhi Forum (cuo’ai tongzhi luntan, 错爱同志论坛, ), Tongqi Tribe (tongqi buluo, 同妻部落) on Tianya (http://bbs.tianya.cn/list-53879-1.shtml), Tongqi in Act (tongqi zai

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The heaviest and deepest cultural guilt men are burdened with is the gratitude they owe to their parents. The relationship to grace figures is the decisive factor in a prodigal son’s psychological persona and his familial status determines his arc in a romance with another man.

In accordance, two major prototypes of gay prodigals can be categorized.

The first is the gay orphan, someone who has no grace figures to tend him, nor a home for him to return to, or in a more dramatic scene, someone who leaves his grace figures behind and never returns home. The gay orphans are cursed to wander forever without a jia to return to, but instead have the freedom to love. Lan Yu immediately comes to mind in this category;

Fuxi’s narrator in “Days” and “Gucheng,” and Lin Mang in “Morning,” are other examples of characters left in the world without a jia and grace figures. The second is the good son, who is attached to his grace figures and whose odyssey is jia-bound. Handong exemplifies this group of men, and he is followed by Xiaoyang and Huizi, Xiao Yi in “Morning,” and Wang Nan and Li

Zhong in Ten Years, and “the Man” in “Gucheng.” They must return to the jia and their grace figures, especially their crying mother, and they have an overriding reason to leave a gay romance. Prodigal romances favour pairing a gay orphan and a good son for, as we will see, the interplay between these two best display the sentiments of gay love of the generation of the internet.

xingdong, 同妻在行动, http://www.douban.com/group/gayswifecryout), to name but a few. These websites have formed a network for tongqi. But like many websites on the Chinese internet, many of these websites have experienced various vicissitudes and many of them have disappeared.

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5.6 The Jia as a Temporal Framework for Homosexuality—Life, Marriage, Chinese New Year, and Death within the Chinese Family

The jia is the vessel that shapes the universal and abstract physical time into human time.

Time within the jia is marked by socially shared daily, monthly, seasonally, yearly, and lifelong rhythms of work and rest as well as the temporal nodes of annual ceremonies and festivals, on the one hand, and individual life progress through rites of passage from birth, to first birthday, to the wedding, to big birthdays, and finally, to death and the funeral. Within this temporal framework human activities gain meaning or are devalued as meaningless. Before more freedom and connection came with the internet, the compulsory fulfilment of duties to the jia has been strong enough to form a temporal framework that confined same-sex desire within legitimate bachelorhood, as reflected in the fishery narratives we discussed in Chapter 2. To a degree, all early cyber gay narratives can be said to be struggling with this confinement and seeking a breakthrough.

All temporal nodes ordered by the jia are symbolic ordeals for gay men. Weddings and funerals are the time to gauge the happiness and sorrows of the family. Chinese New Year is another less momentous but more frequent occasion for the same ordeal. At Chinese New Year, the family getting together, traditional sacrifices for the ancestors being held and all mundane familial activity gaining a heavy ceremonial aspect, the time is truly shared by members of the jia. The adult children’s marriage prospects become the most crucial factors for deciding whether the celebration will last or whether it will die out without future offspring. Chinese New

Year thus becomes an annual review of the fulfilment of universal family duties for gay men.

For Zhou Chi in “Brother” and Xiaoyang in “Huizi” who live away from home, physically going

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home for Chinese New Year is a yearly rehearsal of the prodigal son story. For Zhou Xun and

Huizi, even as they live with their parents, Chinese New Year becomes a time of reminding themselves that they are indeed on their symbolic prodigal journey. Mom’s tears shed during

Chinese New Year, as dramatized in “Brothers,” enhanced by her brain tumour, gain the greatest potency. Whether or not they can bring home the hope of getting married, whether or not they have a girlfriend—these are crucial factors that contribute to the happiness of the parents. Even the Zhou brothers’ liberal father agrees:

It’s not a big deal if you’re not getting married now. But in just a year or two, other people will find it odd, and our neighbours, colleagues, friends, and relative will not just be idle [from gossiping]. So it is better to take the initiative when you are still at a good age. Let’s drink this glass up for the New Year!378

This is expressed in a gay proverb: “New Year is a hard time for tongzhi” (tongzhi pa guonian 同志怕过年). But the New Year is just one node in the temporal framework of the jia that constitutes the primary Chinese context of conceiving homosexuality.

In discussing this problematic, Eve Sedgwick’s term, “the epistemology of the closet,” strikes the Western emphasis on the spatial. The modern Western architectural plan for a nuclear family reflects and engenders the individualist conception of intimacy and privacy of the members with the spatial division of the family house, differentiating public areas, the living room and the kitchen, from private areas, the individual bedrooms. The public areas are for social relations, and intimate and sexual activities are limited to the bedroom. The bedroom can be seen as the core locus of one’s sexual individuality, the part of the self that is most private.

378 Yuan Yin, “My Brother”.

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Inside the bedroom is the closet, a core within the core, where an ultimate truth of oneself is kept if it cannot go public. The Western metaphor of the closet as an “epistemology” of homosexuality is not by accident tied to the closets in house planning in the West. It designates a given essence, or homosexual identity, as a matter that does not change over time, but rather a matter of where to be, or hide.

Taken literally, the closet in Chinese houses and apartments was a very late phenomenon that has yet to even gain prevalence in the 2010s. In the typical traditional Chinese house, several married couples cohabitate in one household, and each couple or unmarried adult occupies a room or a suite, which serves as a daily social space of the members within the household as well as a bedroom. There is no closet; instead, cabinets are used for the storage of personal belongings. One’s room is thus multifunctional; it is always related to other members of the house. Corresponding to the traditional Chinese house plan is the relational self whose interrelation to others outweighs one’s privacy.

Modern housing in China has come to accommodate a nuclear family but the space remains to be shared by all members rather than divided among individuals. Lack of sufficient space is a factor, yet shared family time remains the primary configurative factor that relates all members and they have very little privacy or time to keep to themselves. In Huizi and

Xiaoyang’s houses, the families, both consisting of a couple and several children, have to manage living in two rooms. The distinction between public and private space in these cases is impossible as each room has to be multifunctional. This spatial fusion of public space and individual space and the interrelationship with family at the expense of one’s individuality is

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demonstrated in a scene in “Gucheng,” a story also written by Fuxi, when the hero pays a visit to his lover’s home:

[His mother] went to the kitchen. She made some noise there from time to time. Sometimes she turned the tap on and the water gurgled. He and I stayed in the room by ourselves. He gently gave me a smile. He sat on the bed, his head against the wall, as if he was thinking of something remote. I didn’t speak either. I sat on the couch. I bent down and rested my head on my hands, my eyes looking at the ground. Later on, he took a cushion from the bed and walked over. He said: You stand up. Put this cushion down there and it will be more comfortable. Then he said: May I turn the TV on, so that you can watch some TV? I shook my head and said: I never watch TV. He said: Then how about listening to some music with earphones? I shook my head and said: I’m good just sitting. You don’t worry. He stopped and stood by me. He gently patted the floor with his foot once and lowered his head and the longer hair on his forehead dropped down. I said: Or I’ll go to the balcony to have a cigarette. He raised his head and stretched it up a little and his hair wobbled to the back a bit. He said: OK. Do smoke. Just smoke in the room. Don’t go to the balcony. I will find you an ashtray. I said: Don’t look for it. I’ll go to the balcony to take a breath.379

This type of apartment is common for Beijing residents and most urban Chinese citizens, particularly before the commercialization of the housing market made larger apartments available on the market. It probably has only one bedroom, taken by the parents. The hero’s lover, “He,” sleeps in the living room. No boundaries, symbolic or physical, are set to engender a sense of privacy. The conversation itself is about offering “I” comfort, by “He”’s repeatedly asking, accentuating the jia as a place where mutual care among the members is constantly in flow without the separation of the bedroom. The care bonding the mother and her son, in the meantime, is constant, unbreakable like the time that flows within the jia, in the rhythm of the noise made by the mother in the kitchen reaching the living room. The father is not at home at this moment, but as Mother says, “Let’s wait for your father a bit. He should be back [from

379 Fu Xi, “The Man at Gucheng Subway Station,” Ch.4.

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work].” And furthermore, there are other grace figures, with “He’s” mother saying, “His

[maternal] grandparents only have me. They will count on him in the future.”380

When comparing the Chinese construction of homosexuality and the Western construction, the spatial dimensions of the closet are not just superficial. Not by accident, the uncanny mistranslation of “the closet” is “gui” (柜), i.e., “the cabinet,” with “coming out” being

“chugui” (出柜), i.e., “getting out of the cabinet”, points to the all too physical incompatibility of the Western “epistemology of homosexuality” with Chinese reality. If the Western concept of homosexuality, in the metaphor of the closet, presumes the division of individual and the family and society at large, the Chinese concept first and foremost provokes the temporal framework shared defined by the jia, in the epitome of the legitimate bachelor. Homosexuality is not conceived as a private and individual matter but one first of all in relation to the family.

A problem needs to be addressed a little later, when we discuss coming-out story in

Section 5. 10, however: the Western separation of homosexuality as an individualist domain, just like the appearance of the closet itself, is historical, coming about as a result of social movement and dialogues.

5.7 The Trial of the Gay Prodigal

The prodigal’s journey goes deep into the world, but the thread tying him to the jia always draws him on the path back home should he lose himself in the labyrinth. At some point on this journey, when he is pushed to the edge of death, the son might, voluntarily or not, make a

380 Ibid.

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trial return—trial being used in the fullest sense of both an attempt and putting oneself under binding judgement. Yet as pointed out earlier, the Chinese prodigal always knows that returning without his mission accomplished can only disgrace his parents and inflict sorrows on them, and his rejection is preordained before he crosses the threshold of the jia into the world. This is so clear to the Master of “Li Wa” that he does not even try to go home, and, moreover, does not seem to even think of trying. His encounter with his father and the symbolic death bestowed by the latter’s whip are but a dramatic playing out of the trial of the Chinese prodigal. For a gay prodigal, his trial, in which his homosexuality is rejected without question, foreshadows every mileage of his journey and every facet of his relation with his same-sex lovers. The trial, therefore, has symbolically always been prior to the journey. In this regard, the discussion of the trial should be placed before the journey is actually made.

Huizi, for example, does attempt a trial return with his parents, by bringing his lover

Xiaowei to his grace figures, ending in Huizi’s father’s frantic shouts reaching next door, to

Xiaoyang’s open ears: “Hooligans! I will kill you all! Sons of bitches!”381 The result of the trial is starkly negative: “his father was very sick and his mother almost comatose. After he brought his father back from hospital with a pedicab, Huizi stayed at his father’s bedside to look after him,” and “in this way, Huizi’s abnormality became known to the neighbourhood.”382 No different from the Master’s trial return in that Huizi’s, too, is a rejection. His imprisonment at the end of the story, bringing him to the very lowest point of his life, could not win his family’s

381 Xiao He, “Huizi,” Ch. 6. 382 Ibid.

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pardon, and their rejection in that case is a familial sentence coupled with the juristic sentence.

By contrast, Xiaoyang did not have to face an actual trial, being a seemingly good son, as he takes the classical route of finding some compromise and fulfilling his duties. But he, too, is not exempted from the trial. Huizi’s trial is as much for Xiaoyang, who listens carefully from next door. He, too, makes an attempt on his own life at the Chinese New Year, which is a verdict of a self-conducted trial. He marries a woman and has a son, but of course, a modern marriage does not leave room for his homosexual desire in the way a traditional marriage would.

Consequently, he is divided and subject to an endless battle between his homosexual desire and the “normal” life he assumes.

In all other stories, for all gay prodigals, with the exception of the gay orphans, the trial return is a necessary constituent of gay prodigal narratives. Other men’s experiences do not differ significantly from that of Huizi and Xiaoyang. In Ten Years, after his homosexuality was divulged—a trial return—Wang Nan separated himself from Li Zhong, in order not to hurt his mother. This costs Li Zhong his life, even though pressure from Li Zhong’s family is largely reduced because of his illness. In “Gucheng,” “He” brings his gay lover home for a family dinner—we have discussed the cramped apartment scene in the last section—that serves as an implicit trial return. In “My Own Brother,” both brothers plan to come out, only to realize that their homosexuality could kill their mother—a situation dramatized by their mother’s brain cancer—and they both separately resolve to marry a woman. Finally, in “Morning,” the widowed and devoted mother does not leave any options for her son other than marriage.

For the parents, the trial of the son is a showdown on the meaning of homosexuality: that sexual preference cannot be attributed to the son’s personal choice; rather, it is an act against

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their son, as well as themselves, since they own their son’s life as much as he does. The parents’ reaction in the trial is a self-defence against a wrong against their son and themselves. Unlike their Biblical counterpart, who sees the very return of his son as a rebirth (“this son of mine was dead and he is alive again; he was lost and is found”), Chinese parents take action to reform, or to find their son who, though in front of them, is now lost—dead, symbolically. They become the source of pressure demanding the son’s return to normal life; they conjure their power to restore the son to a good state. They are full of agency, and their authority can force punishment. They feel free to dispose of their son’s life, as if it was theirs to accept or reject. Wang Nan’s single

Mom in Ten Years hosts a dramatic trial—which happens when she visits Wang Nan’s apartment, when Wang Nan is on his kneel begging for her forgiveness after his intimacy with Li

Zhong was witnessed:

“Now tell me.” Mom was like a culprit waiting for conviction. “Mom, you heard it last night. I, I and Li Zhong are in that kind of relationship described in that book, only that we like each other with our whole heart. Mom, I have never been promiscuous, and we have been trying to escape each other, but we didn’t succeed. Because of me, Li Zhong broke up with his fiancée of eight years.” Wang Nan did not dare to look at Mom. Looking down, he spoke with great difficulty. He knew how much of a wound these words would cause Mom. “How long have you been together?” Mom’s voice was trembling a little. “It has been, been more than three years.” Wang Nan forced himself to have a bit more resolve to speak. For a long time, Mom didn’t make any sound. Wang Nan raised his head and saw Mom was wiping away her tears. “Mom, I’m sorry. I understand how you feel now. I’ve disappointed you, and I’m even more sorry to dad. But sometimes I really cannot control myself. I can’t tell why I like Li Zhong so much… I’ve discussed it with Li Zhong. If you feel you are losing face because of us, we will go to another city, or go abroad, hide ourselves far away. You just take it as if I were dead.” A sound slap hit Wang Nan’s face. In front of his eyes, his Mom’s face still wore tears that were not dried. Her face was all red, and her eyes full with anger. Wang Nan’s words enraged her. This disappointing son. How dare he say such awful words! “Wang Nan, is this what you wanted to tell me?! Tell me, did I raise you so hard so that I would hear words like these?” Mom was now like a hurt lioness. She could hardly care about the blood from her wounds. Her son had become so foreign to her.

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“Mom, you can beat me or curse me as you wish, as long as it relieves your anger. But please don’t let your anger hurt yourself.” Wang Nan was scared by Mom. He was worrying that Mom would have a heart attack. Wang Nan’s Mom’s tears were flowing. Is this the son she had been proud of? Is this the good handsome son she has been showing off to others? It was he that did things she could not believe. He said he was in love with a man, and he could abandon her for him. “Wang Nan, how could you hurt Mom like this? How could you do things like this? How could Mom face your dad? If you still think I’m your Mom, you immediately break up with him. Otherwise, I don’t have a son like you.” Weeping, Wang Nan’s Mom tried to persuade Wang Nan. Seeing Mom was so devastated, Wang Nan also wept. He said through sobs: “Mom, you didn’t know how scared I was when I found out that I was in love with Li Zhong. I dared not tell anyone, most of all you. I had to bear this all by myself in silence. For so long, we tried with great effort to leave each other, but, Mom, we really could not split up. Please, forgive us. Let us be.” “No! Unless I’m dead, I will never allow it. Wang Nan, you will tell Li Zhong tomorrow. If you don’t, I will. Perhaps you should come home with Mom first. Quit your job. You cannot live in these circumstances anymore.” 383

Of all trials, the one from a single mother is the most unbearable for the son. This angry mother, full of resolution to restore her son back to normal life, is another demonstration of the power of the single mother. In a very similar case in “Morning,” Xiao Huiwen, another single mom, has her son, together with the lover she caught him in bed with, kneel down in front of her and promise to end their sinful relationship.

Direct conflicts like these do not always happen. Tacit trials, however, can happen unannounced, sometimes catching the son at his weakest moment, as happens by the sickbed of the mother in “My Own Brother”:

At the door of the sickroom, Zhou Chi saw his parents looking at each other, holding each other’s hand, so he waited a while before coming in. Father said: “I’m going out for breakfast.” Mother replied with a “hmm,” but she held his hand even tighter for a while before she let go. Zhou Chi held Mother’s hand, but could not find anything to say.

383 “Love Now,” Ten Years Past, Still Not Forgotten, Ch. 73.

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Looking at Mother’s pale and haggard face and eyes stained with tears, his eyes became red and his nose twitched. Mother twitched her fingers and smiled: “Mom won’t die. Mom will be waiting for you to marry daughters-in-law and hold grandchildren...” Zhou Chi had to hurry to turn aside, his tears pouring down. He could not speak; it was as if his throat was jammed. The woman in the next bed gave a long sigh and turned over her body.384

This trial in the face of a sick mother who is not even aware of it, happens implicitly to the son, and is conducted and convicted by himself. As the narrator of the story, Zhou Chi’s mental processes in “My Brother” are visible to the readers, but the twin brother Zhou Xun’s withdrawal from his boyfriend, unknown to the reader as well as the narrator, is a parallel demonstration of the power of the virtual trials every gay man plays out perpetually in his mind.

If Wang Nan, Xiaoyi, and Huizi’s trials are extremely dramatic and do not necessarily happen in every story, other gay prodigals nevertheless experience them by witnessing one like that which occurs when Xiaoyang overhears Huizi’s, or they simply turn over the trial of themselves again and again in their mind like the Zhou brothers. The imagined trials are no less powerful than the actual ones. Almost invariably, no single trial convicts an innocent gay son.

A trial at an attempted homecoming to reveal one’s homosexuality, or worse, being caught red handed and experiencing the trial on the spot, is a necessary and universal element in Chinese gay transcript. Some will, like the classical prodigal, go back to their jia with a restored sense of self as a good son, at least temporarily; some, on the other hand, come to refuse the result of this trial and keep wandering out the door. A very few stories do attempt to explore a different outcome to the trial yet at most, they offer resolutions that are vague and unstable. Handong’s

384 Yuan Yin, “My Brother.”

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mother, for example, gives an unstated pass to his and Lan Yu’s relationship, but as we already know, Handong marries again after Lan Yu’s death.

5.8 The World and the Prodigal Sons’ Movements to and from the Jia

Once he steps out the door and leaves the grace figures behind, the gay son, commissioned with a task but harbouring a secret desire, enters the world. This is a realm under the surveillance of the political authority, marked by its spatial vastness interwoven by a universal modern clock, and filled with turmoils and whirlpools. Yet at its fringes lie tempting zones where the gay son is lured, initiated, trapped, and transformed. New factors, however, also add new opportunities to the traditional arc of a Chinese prodigal. The emerging market offeres an expanding new horizon, and the internet, in addition, affords a critical alternative space to the offline one for gay love to be articulated and consolidated more than ever.

The modern prodigals, in an era marked by the geographical and social mobility made available by the market economy, competing social values, individualism, and new alternative space facilitated by the internet and the mobile phone, walks out of the door as a “desiring subject” in China’s age of neoliberalism, as Lisa Rofel observes.385 By earning a wage in a city of one’s choice and by living away from the family, more and more gay men can gain greater leeway from the jia and its social network to explore their same-sex desire. A consequence is that the struggle between desire and duty has become more drastic in the generation of the internet than in their predecessors. The prodigal journey of this generation can be prolonged to a

385 Lisa Rofel, “Desiring China,” 22.

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much longer portion of one’s expected life, with the prodigal loop stretched further and further into the open world, even to the breaking point.

Yet the deep-rooted longing that has drawn generations of sons to complete the prodigal loop to reunite with their grace figures, in the meantime, remains a counterforce to the pull of the world and together they define the modern prodigal son’s orbit, at least symbolically, as demonstrated in the spectacular wave of homecoming at Chinese New Year made by hundreds of millions annually. In eras of change, in addition, homecoming also gained significance as the jia has become the last site for sons and daughters to defend the meaning of existence in a capricious and ruthless world. Yet the modern jia has become increasingly dependent on the external world for its survival, and sons and daughters become the desiring subjects who, if not completely defying, diverge from their duties as far as possible. The modern tension between desire and duty seems to drive sons and daughters constantly to a new round of the prodigal loop.

For a gay son, especially, life’s trajectory is a continuous oscillation between the home and the world.

In “Huizi,” the jia is a nostalgic place glossed by the happiness of childhood and the warmth of family and neighbours, while the outside world is marked by its vicissitudes. Huizi and Xiaoyang go to the world for school, work unit, university, and later, the market, as it becomes available, to accomplish their assignments. But in the meantime, that world is always in flux, from “crackdown on hooliganism” campaigns to the emergence of the market, bringing opportunities and dangers. The world also offers fisheries on its fringes, where they go to quench their desire. Further afield there are limbos in the form of prisons for those who diverge

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too far, which those like Huizi enter and exit repeatedly. Other stories are not overly different from “Huizi” in depicting these two dualistic structures.

The gay narratives appearing on the internet, as noted earlier, are markedly different from the fishery narratives of the earlier period in that love between men becomes a definitive and transformative experience that shapes their view towards the world and themselves, and in that, they are prodigal romances. A problem in these narratives, however, is that the world in which these love stories are carried out is the dominion of the political authority, and as much as heterosexual romance is where the authority shows its agreement, gay romance is where it demonstrates its disagreement. If the external world can melt the heterosexual romances and produce its moments of enchantment, that external world becomes an entity standing grotesquely between the men in love, permeating deeply into the feelings of men, as if at every moment the heroes are fighting the world at large. Fuxi, with extraordinary sensitivity, reveals a world through the eyes of his gay orphan narrator:

This old city, it had become chaotic and full of debris in the vicissitudes of the times. I could not discern its past, nor could I grip its present and future. Every day, every hour, it was in the progress of an inconceivable change. New buildings were rising everywhere, out of rising dust and smog. In there, I could neither find a perspective, nor an avenue, to know this city. This city for me was unreasonable and intangible. Its faded history, lost culture and ruined city walls, the bloody years just ended, bygone ancient splendid facades, the sea of humanity set in these times, the abandoned morals and morals yet to be built, all displayed themselves in front of me, leaving me no choice, just like the dust on the road that pounced on my face.386

With the stark contrast between a desiring subject and a disapproving world, unresolvable in gay narratives, the poetics of romanticizing lapses into that of melancholy in gay romance.

386 Fu Xi, “Gucheng,” Ch. 1.

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Against the backdrop of a world overridden by authority, love between men is all the more fragile. An ordinary parting of the protagonists at the end of a usual evening in “Gucheng”, for example, feels as unbearable as the last one when the surroundings are hostile:

I stood under the dim street lamps. The buildings around all stood in silence. Inside the walls, a row of trees had shed their leaves and become bare. Their doddering branches in winter were like so many pairs of hands, holding up the bright moon in the sky.

I looked at the form of his back. It moved along the way and became further and further away, smaller and smaller. Gradually it became fragile. An unspeakable feeling arose in my heart. I ran towards him, towards the mouth of the alley where his form was about to disappear, just to see him one more time.387

In another scene, Fuxi speaks of perhaps the most appalling sensibility bound to gayness:

[I]n my dream, I took a train in the subway. It seemed that I was looking for him. I did not know why I got off the train at Dongzhimen (东直门). It was just a vague intention, I had no specific direction, and I was just drawn by the flow of people to get out there. I walked through the hall. I climbed to the top of the stairs. Reaching the surface I turned my head to look. Suddenly all the people disappeared. I looked in front of myself, it was a wilderness strewn with weeds and thorns. I thought to myself: this is not Dongzhimen. But I thought it over and felt that it was. Later, I suddenly understood. I thought: yes, this is Dongzhimen in the underworld; there should be a Dongzhimen in the underworld.388

In this dream Fuxi creeps to the back of the world, sees it in the negative, and there a ghostly (and ghastly) world of heteronormativity appears. The unspeakable horror of the world, ringing truer than in the positive, had so far been concealed by the ambiguity, and is finally caught by Fuxi’s extraordinary sensitivity.

If romance is always spatial, invariably involving building symbolic and material dwellings that could accommodate love between the romantic partners, gay romance is

387 Fu Xi, “Gucheng,” Ch. 3. 388 Fi Xi, “Gucheng,” Ch. 6.

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especially first and foremost about the locale of love. To love in the world, no matter how briefly, rather than within the confinement of the fishery, the heroes have to find an enclave to shelter gay love. Before the fledgling market appeared, romance between men always had to conceive of very unusual locales that could accommodate more than the fisheries did. Tong Ge’s

“Battlefield”, for example, sets love in a “cave the width of a cat’s ear” (mao’er dong, 猫耳洞) that “can only contain two people lying flat side by side to serve as a frontline sentry”389 on the frontline of the 1984 Sino-Vietnamese War, overlooking a valley that divides China and

Vietnam, literally at the border of the nation.

Material conditions in China were contributive to the appearance of gay romance. Gay romance became possible only after the emergence of a free market in rental housing in the late

1980s. The market made “bachelor housing” available, similar to what historians like Paul Groth and Howard Chudacoff observed in North America in the half century from 1880 to 1930, and

Matt Houlbrook in London, England from 1918 to 1957. Apartment houses, rooming houses, residential hotels, by affording accommodation for bachelors, gave rise to a less confined sexual culture among young men, especially benefitting homosexuals. 390 The housing market in the

1990s in China, too, provided gay men with the freedom of being away from their families.

There they were under relatively weak social surveillance from authority, and a life relatively free of social duties such as marriage became possible. Shielded by their dwellings, some men dared to extend their relationships beyond the brief and impersonal encounters offered by the

389 Tong Ge, “Battlefield,” 127. 390 Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1994). Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture, (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1999). Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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fisheries. A new gay experience, centred on deeper and longer relationships that allowed them to build love and a gay identity, emerged.

In stories from this later period, a romance almost always starts when one moves to a major city from one’s hometown or the countryside. The first-person narrator of “Gucheng” moves to Beijing to work. Xiaohei in “Frog” is sent to work in a major city, Nanjing, where he finds an apartment.391 Liu Su and Liu Yuan in “Falling in love in Beijing” both go to a university in Beijing and stay in the city after graduation. In Beijing Story, Handong is rich enough to own a villa in a suburb of Beijing and an apartment in the city, and he is also a long- term tenant of a hotel room, and it is in these places that he and Lan Yu can engage in romance privately. Similarly, it is behind the shield of the walls of his rented apartment that Xiaohei finds himself empowered to take his lover:

In this moment without the shield of his eyesight and smile, his back was so accessible. I silently walked up to him, my heart throbbing like a running deer, and I grabbed his hand. For a moment he was still, just letting me hold his hands. Then he turned around to hold my hands. He whispered: “It’s better to let me go.” I leaned tightly against his body, my head pushing against his face. He was startled and said in a flurry: “Careful—be seen by people—” I held him and walked behind the curtain. He rested his hands on my shoulders. There was some disturbed confusion in his eyes. I smiled with resolution and looked at his handsome face. I knew. Even though his eyes could see through the world’s sophistication and had the experience that made life intelligible, at that moment I still had one thing to win him over. My hard youth got the upper hand on him, and it would wrap him and drag him into the eye of the storm of desire. “We could still be good friends, and that would be better.” He forced a smile onto his face, but there was a sadness of uncertainty in his voice. I nodded my head with all my strength. And as if to assure him, I ran my lips over his cheeks, ears and neck, which was covered with stubble. He held me in his arms and gently patted my back indecisively, as if he were patting a baby in deep sleep. Then the

391 Dao, “Frog III,” Ch. 4.

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rhythm of the patting in the end loosened, muddled, and becoming hard strokes one after another.392

In a room of one’s own, men can see each other as an individual with a personality; courtship and the articulation of love, like Xiaohei’s in the above scene, becomes possible. What the brave hero Laizi, says in “Battlefield” at the farthermost margin of the nation, “Even though we don’t want to be tongxinglian, we have to. Sharing the same life we have to love,”393 rings true and in these private spaces men could now love each other as they were forbidden to in public.

5.9 Prodigals in Love

The pairing of two men in a romance constitutes a mirroring relationship, as a prodigal’s lover is also a prodigal himself. Every gay story, in that respect, is a compound of two prodigal stories that reflect, contest, and compete with each other. Gay love, then, is always the negotiation of desire and duty at the deep semiotic levels of the narrative, hence the gay orphan and the good son, and furthermore, the contest between the prodigal narrative and the romance.

Out of all the possible combinations of the two protagonists, that of a gay orphan and a good son is much favoured over others. This pairing has the potential of creating fine stories, as the zigzag romance between Lan Yu and Handong exemplifies. On the one side is the gay orphan Lan Yu, who is driven by his desire. He is freed from family duties, and hence, he can be fully committed to love, to the point that he knows when to walk away from his encumbered lover so as to not cause inconvenience to the latter. The love of the gay orphan, however, cannot

392 Dao, “Frog III,” Ch. 4. 393 Tong Ge. “Battlefield,” 135.

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survive as it is almost desperate. Bound to his desire and without the anchoring of the jia, a gay orphan is usually weak in personality, is somehow always feminized, and admires his lover as a real man. On the other side, the good son Handong is encumbered by his duties and has set himself on the return trip of his prodigal journey. However, because he is the one who is in control, and because he is going back to the jia, where he can become a real man, he is the more masculine, and therefore, the more desired, of the pair. His love, however, cannot be more than an affair both in terms of duration and depth.

Other stories share this combination. In “Falling in Love,” the good son Liu Su is working a prestigious job as a cadre in a national department, and is engaged to the daughter of a high-ranking official to secure a promising future. The gay orphan Liu Yuan, on the other hand, is a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, alienated from family and self- abandoned in his persistence of homosexuality. Liu Yuan’s love is met with Liu Su’s half refusal and half consent. In “Gucheng,” the lover is the first-person narrator, who carries a poignant personal history from “Days” and is literally an orphan; the beloved, “He,” loans the first person lover moments of romance while planning his wedding. Xiaoyang is a good son when measured by all surface standards, but he chooses to establish his home, a nuclear family, in a smaller city distanced from his parents, which clouds his choice, and Huizi is a gay orphan implicitly or explicitly disowned by his family.

This pattern runs on and on. The combination of the good son and the gay orphan is even more ubiquitous in the symbolic sense. Even in stories where there are two men who are both alienated from their families and both identify with their sexual orientation, it seems that at least at some points one will waver, and in response the other will try to consolidate their love. The

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result is that the heroes always have difficulty synchronizing their love, more often struggling within an interplay in which when one is the good son doubting his sexuality and life choice, the other may become the gay orphan who fuels the romance with passion, and vice versa, until they reach a point of resolving this problem or an external change arrives. In Tong Ge’s “Battlefield,” for example, Laizi is the one who initiates Xiao into homosexual love, but doubts about their love later comes to possess him, and Xiao becomes the pursuer of the pair.

The ubiquity of the combination of the good son and the gay orphan suggests that we read the two counterparts not simply as external but also internal to each protagonist. Any gay man, in this regard, is both the good son as much as he is the gay orphan. Thus inside each individual, the two counterparts reflect each other, and this internal complication is further mirrored externally between the two protagonists. Lan Yu and Handong, Lin Mang and Xiao Yi,

Liu Yuan and Liu Su, “I” and “The Man,” or indeed, every gay man, have the double face of both the good son and the gay orphan.

Because of this double mirroring mechanism, romance between men is so often set up as a delicate interplay that almost always leads to mutual cancellation and premature withdrawal in the melancholy voice that seems to be particular to gay love, reminding us of the fragile and ephemeral same-sex love in the May Fourth representations and the fishery narratives, and the

Western narrative trope of the “Tragic Homosexual.” This melancholy runs even through moments of simple etiquette, such as at the moment of celebrating a birthday in “Gucheng”— after “the Man” has been spending the earlier part of the night with his fiancée:

I raised my glass and wished him happy birthday. He also raised his glass and said: thanks. He continued and said: happy birthday to you too. I looked at him with confusion, and I said: today is not my birthday. He lowered his head, as if he was

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drunkenly merging with the music. Silent for a while, he raised his head, looked at me with his bloodshot sombre eyes, and said: I know. But I don’t know if I will be lucky enough to be present when you are celebrating your birthday. So I congratulate you in advance.394

The same indissoluble melancholy lingers all the time, and it only feels stronger at the moments when the first person narrator is engaging sex with another man he meets:

He took my hand and brought me back to the bedroom. I lay in his bed. He bent his body to kiss and nibble on my body. I turned my head aside to look out the window. I saw the sky behind the tree branches outside of the window, and the white moon in the sky. Suddenly, I felt a loneliness from time immemorial.

He spread my legs. He entered my body. In the darkness I sprinkled my tears on the pillow. I did not wipe them away. I turned my head to face him and looked at him. He was gasping, and all over his head was sweat that was like tears. His face half upward, his mouth half open, blue veins throbbing on his neck, suddenly I felt all the things that were happening before my eyes were strange to me. As though this were an impenetrably immense and deep night, just like life itself.395

The loneliness aroused at the very moment of intimacy derives from an inability to romanticize the world and, for that matter, to anchor the spatial presence of gay love in the temporal present. If romanticization is always the central mechanism of seeking the accordance of temporal and spatial existence, gay love is always marked by the divorce of the two aspects; as a result it always comes with an alienation that isolates each of the two lovers in his own time flow, even when their flesh is penetratively interlocked, giving rise to a feeling of unresolvable strangeness.

Because of the external/internal struggles, the relationship between two men is a priori a love/hate one. Guilt and hate, set in two opposing mirrors, reflect the internal struggle to the

394 Fu Xi, “Gucheng,” Ch. 3. 395 Fu Xi, “Gucheng,” Ch. 6.

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surface, and amplify it many times over the struggle between the gay orphan and the good son.

“Frog” does not end with the parting of the two men, but with a darker scene when Xiaohei and

Zhang happen to meet at a fishery and go back to the former’s room for sex:

In my small, pitch-dark room, we did not turn the light on. Trembling, we undressed each other. Then we fumbled for the other’s body, a body that was both familiar and strange. I was soon as hard as a brick. He wasn’t yet. I pressed on him, raised his buttocks, and forced myself into him. His body contracted and he breathed out cold breath in pain. This was this first time I entered him. I had KY in my drawer, but I didn’t use it. He had said that he would never be a “zero.”396 I attacked him aggressively and stroked back and forth. Zhang’s fingers pinched into my shoulders deeply. On his face surged a painful expression. I discharged all my poison inside his bowels to my content, then I got down on my limbs like a dog. Zhang stuck out his spear and thrust it into my body. Then he bucked like a maddened wild horse. We had never done it in this position. I had said that I had to see his face when we were making love. But now, our bodies were joined at a filthy point and we did not see each other’s face. This way brought me a guiltless and lewd pleasure that I had never experienced before. I cried out slightly along with his undulations. As my moans became louder and louder, Zhang also started to echo me. These lustful cries of pleasure cut open the dark night and flew away in all directions, as if they were torn into many individual crows.397

Sex, hate, and love orgasm together. This is a typical example of gay impersonal sex, but for the two men, it is all too personal in its desperation. It is love of hate, hurt, and as Xiaohei calls it, poison.

This complicated and fluctuating interplay of love can sometimes be consummated—but always and only in nature, where humanity is left behind the horizon and the natural space is joined by physical, even geological, time—the nature that is associated with eternity, similar to the green wood in Western gay novels. The closer the lovers are to the human world, the more alienation they will feel within and in between themselves. In Beijing Story, Handong and Lan

396 In Chinese gay slang, a “zero”, or “0”, as suggested by the shape of the symbol, refers to the one who plays the passive role in intercourse, whereas a “one”, or “1”, refers to the active part. 397 Dao, “Biography of a Frog, III,” Ch. 10.

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Yu’s love becomes a real romance when they go for a hike. This trope is shared by Xiaohei and

Zhang in “Frog” when the pair go to Zhongshan Mausoleum in Nanjing, and there climb to the top of a mountain to take in a view of the natural world:

We just looked into the distance quietly. Zhang’s body warmth wrapped my back tightly. I could even feel that part of his body changing silently. But neither of us moved. We just held each other. I knew that since we had met each other, this was the only moment he really distanced himself from everything else. His responsibilities, his family and identity at this moment did not come to bother him. … I blushed a little. I felt that I was doted upon like a girl. But I cherished this feeling, so I didn’t dare to joke. Holding Zhang’s hand, I turned my head to look to the road winding far away beneath our feet. A feeling that I could not distinguish as either happiness or desolation suddenly appeared. I thought to myself: if an earthquake strikes now, we will be buried underground like this forever. And if his wife comes to see us, would she be very jealous? I raised my head to look Zhang. He was looking at the mountain road under our feet. I don’t know what he was thinking.398

When the human world retreats, love emerges from infinity as well as the indefinite.

Love in a dwelling, in contrast, while at times coming close to climax, is always very fragile, ambiguous, and unreal. In “Falling in Love,” Liu Yuan and Liu Su seem to come close to a moment like this when Liu Su is laid off from the department and moves into Liu Yuan’s little apartment, as seen through Liu Yuan’s eyes:

Every day when he returned, he saw Liu Su busy cooking in the room. He had some thin feelings of warmth, and some feelings that this would last as long as the earth and the sky, until the sea dried and the stones eroded. But the greater feeling overflowing in his heart was a sentiment that there was not much time left. He could not help but hold him from behind, and rock him gently. The setting sun spilled over into the room along the window. All of these things were as though in a dream, as though in an oil painting, as though it would last for aeons.399

398 Dao, “Biography of a Frog, III,” Ch. 6. 399 Liu Huo, “Falling in Love in Beijing,” Ch.13.

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But this moment of romanticizing, as the narrator himself is well aware of, is flickering between the true and the phantasm, between an instant and aeons, and between a sliver of space in the confinement of a tiny apartment and the immense space extending out to the sun through a small window. In that gulf, there is no human time or world to bridge those two ends.

No gay story would, or could, end at the rare moments of consummation. A brief moment of romanticizing can hardly withstand the hostility everywhere and everyday around it, and the melancholy eating it from within. Gay stories are always doomed to end within the human world at a human time. Beijing Story’s stiff ending with Lan Yu’s sudden death, discussed in Chapter Four, was a deus ex machina. “Battlefield” reunites the two soldiers in

Xiao’s room, where he holds Laizi, who now has only one leg and a heart like a “dried-up well” with no “passion for love and hate,”400 in an attempt to strain a moment of love:

I embraced him. Tears were running over my face. I tried to kiss him. He dodged. He murmured: “I don’t deserve you now…” “Nonsense. In this life…the only one engraved in my heart, is you, you…” His body gradually softened. He jabbered: “That’s enough. I made it even for this life…” The two men who experienced death in war entangled silently with each other in repressed sobs.401

How similar this is to Liu Su and Liu Yuan’s moment. But again, where the text pauses is where the problematic of gay romance arises. This seemingly wishful ending is flickering in the very particular juncture of time and place, both greatly confined, shared by only two men, and this is the only means by which a gay romance could secure a moment of romanticizing.

400 Tong Ge, “Battlefield,” 152. 401 Tong Ge, “Battlefield,” 153.

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Could it, even though the narrators are so careful not to ruin it, last even a little longer or expand a little further?

“Frog,” in contrast, comes to face the problems and lets the affair break down so Xiaohe the gay orphan could come to a moment of pondering his love affair with the good son, while he is waiting to see him for the last time:

Why bother seeing him for the last time? Maybe like anyone who’s beaten, I hoped to find a little reason for the existence of my past. This time I really wanted to ask him if he had ever loved me. Being loved, or not, no longer mattered, but I needed to form an attitude to face those memories that were ingrained in me. I stayed on the bridge alone, not knowing if he would come or not. I was not in the mood to go over the past. Hanging before my eyes was only his face, sometimes silent, sometimes tender, sometimes vexed. The water in the river was heavy, so heavy that it could hardly flow. A few motor ships moored by the bank. I waited quietly. At one moment, the story of Scholar Wei came across my mind.402 Had I been Scholar Wei, would I be willing to be submerged together with the pier? The wind on the river gently blew by again and again and Zhang’s figure did not appear in the distance. Behind me was the ceaseless river of cars, carrying in them fresh and sentiment. The sun gradually moved to the west. Zhang did not come, but I was not sad any longer. I just stood there stubbornly, letting the wind blow away the bygones. I walked back and forth, carefully examining every scene below the bridge. I felt light, even humming songs to myself. After staying on the bridge for three hours, I started to walk down the bridge. Cars making noise, air full of residue, Zhang has been left in the wind. Forever, forever, he would not follow me. I walked ahead straightforwardly, not caring about the bus running by me, nor the army of bicycles coming off duty on the roadsides. In the noisy sea of humans, I could not see my future. The only choice for me was walking ahead in the river of strangers, with my head down, not thinking any meaningless nor glorious thing. I did not want to be seen, nor understood. I just wanted to walk the way fate paved for me. I just wanted to be a modest passerby, without needing to know where my destiny was.403

402 The story of Scholar Wei comes from “Robber Chih” in Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi daozhi, 莊子·盜跖): “Scholar Wei made an engagement to meet a girl under a bridge. The girl failed to appear and the water began to rise, but, instead of leaving, he wrapped his arms around the pillar of the bridge and died.” (Trans. Burton Watson) 403 Dao, “Frog, III,” Ch. 9.

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Xiaohei’s insistence on a final meeting appears to be a desperate lover’s last request, but in a sense even less clear to his own awareness perhaps, he is demanding a narrative ending to their story. Zhang, of course, knows that he could meet Xiaohei and tell him that he cannot develop a romance with him, by making a little extra effort—but as he reveals in an e-mail to

Xiaohei later, his meeting was too important to leave midway so he waits until it finishes to take the trip to the bridge. Yet Zhang’s cruelty is not only that he misses the personal meeting, but also that he does not want to even grant the latter an ending to their story, even a sad one. By denying an ending, he makes this affair meaningless, and hence represses it to an insignificant anecdote. His main romantic story, after all, is the one he has with his wife.

For both Xiaohei and Zhang, what story they tell as their own life story is the way to define who they are. Insisting on his love even without its object, Xiaohei is also insisting on his desire being a defining factor in his life and the core of his identity, directly at odd with his social and familial duties. By denying his love for Xiaohei, Zhang, on the contrary, denies homosexuality as significant and subscribes instead to the identity of a legitimate heterosexual citizen. Their romance is a site where they grapple with each other on the plane of desire and duty, and hence whether to live up to a narrative understanding of homosexual identity as the gay orphan or the good son.

Leaving his adventure in the dark world behind, the good son, Zhang, Handong,

Xiaoyang, or any other, will return to his grace figures and let himself be engulfed by the crowd.

But like any man in similar situation, he is forever unsettled and his jia is no longer a final niche but a limbo, and he returns only to start the next prodigal trip. The very man who keeps silent at

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Zhongshan Mausoleum, as he reveals later, does know where they were when they reached the border of the human world:

“At that moment, a vast happiness, together, however, with fear of the same weight grabbed me. When I was enraptured to discover that I could still love, I also found myself turn the wrong way.” But there cannot be an ending for us. Love but so what? Can we reach the other shore?404

Precisely, Zhang is striking the key notes. This good son sees no ending that would lead to a meaningful story he could share with a male lover, and hence no life can be unfolded along his homosexuality. Xiaohei, of course, cannot answer this for Zhang, because this question has to be answered by each and every gay man for himself. Xiaohei’s own answer:

Maybe Zhang was right. There is no other shore for men of our kind. But we, too, will not go back to this shore. We can only swim and swim, even though we’ll find ourselves exhausted in the end.405

These two choices thus split the gay orphan and the good son: Zhang returns to the jia to redeem himself to his grace figures and conceal himself by binding himself to the authorities, while Xiaohei cuts a lonely figure as he walks on on a quest. He will continue to be someone who loves men, and someone who knows the complications of such a choice. By his own choice, he breaks his bond to authority to become a gay orphan and chooses to endow meaning to his love of men, refusing to reduce it to a minor affair in his life. The pain is acute, but he remains desiring, not only desiring love from his lover, but also a self who does not give up desiring love. This prodigal is bidding adieu to his lover the good son, and chooses to keep

404 Dao, “Frog, III,” Ch. 10. 405 Dao, “Frog, III,” Ch. 11.

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wandering without going home, without knowing where his journey will end. As importantly, if not more, he is also leaving behind his other self, that good son inside him.

Emerging from Xiaohei’s failed romance is a gay orphan defining himself as a desiring subject. His desire for a lover and a romance is at that moment dispelled, but this only brings him to see the other aspect of his story: as much as it is about a quest for love with another man, it is more a quest for a self who keeps desiring even when that love is not realized, and that self is one that is true to itself. Thus now he is a desiring subject who chooses to stand alone against the nameless crowd, a homeless prodigal, a drop of oil in a sea of humanity refusing and unable to dissolve in. At the moment of the failure of his romance, he now narrates the story of himself.

He is the hero who went to the dangerous realm to seek a true self and returns affirmed, despite deep wounds, and from this trip he gathers the strength to refuse atonement with his grace figures. If Lan Yu had to die so that his story can have an ending, Xiaohei will live on and keep wandering outise the door because he has found another story—that of himself—that will continue.

The only victory Xiaohei could claim at that moment is, perhaps, that he is the one to narrate his own story while Zhang gives up his own. Keeping narrating on after the failure, the story of love becomes the story of the self. To narrate one’s own story, then, is to make a different choice, explicitly, for a different life, even if it comes with pain, loneliness and disorientation. Narrative is thus a means to desire a new life and a new self, and a means to fabricate a gay identity.

Xiaohei is only one of a group, however, and he is joined by Fuxi’s first-person hero and

Xiao from “Battlefield”, and many, many others of that very generation. From where Jet’s first-

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person hero dashes into the newly opened cyberspace comes Xiaohei’s new self with a story of overcoming an ordeal. These images of Xiaohei and his kind are where all gay narratives appearing in this period merge into one: one by one, the prodigals walk out from their failure, silently, scathed, out from the mob to become themselves. He is lonely, heartbrokenly bearing the failure of his love, but he is the narrating subject that the generation of the internet could conceive with the agency they mustered at that very unique time, out of all the confinements they faced. The connectedness of their stories, in the form of hypertext, composed a new collectivity which shared this loneliness and pain. And it takes the long journey of narratives we have trekked in this whole study to connect the two men quoted at the beginning of Chapter One and the gay orphans represented by Xiaohei.

Where will his desire lead him? Will he go back to his grace figures? Or are there other options for him? These questions remain open and beg for answers, as Xiaohei and Zhang’s story ends here along with other gay narratives sprouting up in the same period.

5.10 Coming-out or Not?

The parallel, as well as discrepancy, between the Chinese prodigal story and its Biblical counterpart and their implications are intriguing. The proposition of this chapter, that prodigal romance is the prototype of the early Chinese gay web story, also leads us to compare it with the coming-out story—that of the Western gay prodigals, given the prevalence of the latter both in and out of China.

In the West, the coming-out story has become the prototype of a gay life story. Despite its modern rhetoric, the story’s Biblical origin is evident. More than a passive pattern describing or representing life, each case of coming-out is a speech act of becoming a gay subject: when one

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“comes out,” declaring it publicly, recognizing one’s nature, one is “born again,” in a way similar, perhaps ironically, to a very necessary and clear way to convert to Christianity in baptism. Backed by larger social support from decades of gay movements, individualistic coming-out has become the default means of articulating one’s sexual identity to the grace figures and negotiating political status with social authorities. The accumulative effect of many cases of coming out has made a strong association between the story and the open arms of the father.

In China, coming out has been advocated by many from the West and some natives, who believe that coming out is the ultimate way to be true to oneself and significant others, and that each case will increase social visibility, gain greater mutual support, and contribute to gay liberation at large. This, however, has been met with great objection by many Chinese writers and activists, who doubt the feasibility of coming-out as a means of achieving these goals in the context of China. Most gay men in their life, as reflected in the many narratives we have discussed through this study, find it extremely difficult to reveal their homosexuality to their parents. In most cases coming-out, voluntarily or not, becomes a trial in which dormant concepts awaken, and grave emotional attachments and obligations turn men into sinful prodigals and the grace figure of the father erupts in deadly wrath.

Many criticize the Western-centric discourse comprised in appealing to the coming-out model and set out to explore tactics that pertain to Chinese contexts. Chow Haw-shan, for example, suggests an implicit strategy:

1. Non-confrontational and harmonious relationship: introduce same-sex partner to parents in a step-by-step manner;

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2. Non-declarational life activities: achieve implicit compromise in quotidian details;

3. A healthy personality not centred around sex.406

But a tactic like this depends on the parents’ eventual acknowledgement that, as we have seen in the many narratives, is very hard to come by. A reticent method that has to wait until

“they know” can serve to maintain a self-imposed ambiguity that silently eliminates the chance of composing, narrating, and realizing a story one wants to live out and instead, lets the dominant script play itself out within one.

This criticism, however, has to come from a real appreciation of the power of the

Confucian concepts of family and the relational self. Chow’s and similar tactics are an authentic response to the dilemma men in China face. Without understanding the complication of the modern concept of choice of sexual identity and the deep underlying traditional foundation that is strongly evoked on this issue, and placing it within an authoritarian party-state, any claim might simply become foreign and eventually fail.

So where is the solution? If the image of the Biblical prodigal throwing himself into the father’s open arms makes such a stark contrast to that of the funeral singer being beaten to apparent death by the father’s whip, have the parables already foreordained the destinies? That is to say, not so differently from the prodigal who has to die symbolically and be reborn a good son to return home, gay men in China must give up their sexuality to open the door; and, as much as the Biblical prodigal is met with his father’s open arms, gay men in the West can remind their grace figures of their obligation to forgive and accept? This question becomes all

406 Chou Hwa-shan, Houzhimin Tongzhi 后殖民同志 [Post-Colonial tongzhi], (Hong Kong: Xianggang tongzhi yanjiu she 香港同志研究社, 1997), 387.

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the more acute for the whole generation of the internet, as some of them are wandering outside the door to seek a way of bringing home an identity defined by homosexuality.

However, the coming out story becomes the Western gay story arriving alone with a history of mutation. Before coming-out stories gained currency, many men and women were rejected as sinners. It took decades of the gay movement in the West to open the grace figures’ arms to accept a gay son or daughter as a prodigal. Religion has been the greatest power against homosexuality in the West, yet paradoxically it also renders visibility as opposed to ambiguity regarding discussion and mention of homosexuality, as the Father’s arms are also the open arms of the all-loving, all-forgiving God. One’s heavenly father allows one to stand up against one’s earthly father. The image of God as the final arbiter is transferred to the personal conscience in liberal individualism and at least for some people, allows them to believe in a justice that understands or at least forgives them. It is by repeatedly evoking the Biblical parable in the modern context, in many cases implicitly, and engaging larger social contexts that gay men can narrate their life stories in such a way as to demand that their parents to open their arms just like the father in the Bible. Homosexuality, when it is accepted in that context, is tolerated as a difference, and judgement of it is the business of God.

The inspiration of the coming-out story is that it is not a closed and set but an open narrative, subject to mutations that bring new interpretations. More importantly, we see a similar pattern in Chinese gay prodigal stories. Our study so far has revealed that narratives of men desiring men have emerged from a silent and prohibitive ambiguity, then experienced great shifts to graffiti, to anti-story, to legitimate bachelor’s story, and finally, to online prodigal romance.

This whole string of narratives evolved out of an ever-changing environment, each availing itself

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of the new conditions, encompassing the former, but adding new elements to open up new horizons. Each shift of the paradigm of gay narrative is the conjunctive effect of individual and collective agency, social context, and sudden change. What seems to be predestined, after all, might not maintain the same potency when new circumstances arise.

Compared to its Western counterpart, the greatest problematic, and the most formidable obstruction, are how to accommodate homosexuality within the primacy of a relational self constantly linked to parents. The “immortal relationship” between the son and the parents, in a secular culture, places the parents as the judges of their son’s life as well as the bearers of his deeds. Accepting the son’s homosexuality requires the parents themselves to take a journey to the realm of the unknown and return a different self, rather than diferring one’s judgement to what considered as an individual difference.

This study does not intend to answer how the narratives will evolve, but one thing we can believe is that new stories of gay men will keep evolving from the old ones, and that change takes courage and great costs in real life, and it is in these stories that new life will reveal itself from the ashes of the old, and that that is where the authentic meaning of life, no matter how bitter or sweet it is, is derived. To be accepted at the core of the jia as a son, rather than superficially as an individual, remains an awesome undertaking that the Chinese prodigals have yet to accomplish when a coming-out story finds its end.

5.11 Conclusion

This chapter suggested that prodigal romance is the prototype of the early cyber gay narratives. By adopting two major established literary conventions, the prodigal story and romance, gay men gained momentum to overcome the prohibitive ambiguity to tell their stories.

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Even though this often comes at an unconscious level, the two archetypes of narrative forms contributed to the proliferation of gay narratives and constituted a new narrative reality for gay men, together with the features of the internet as a medium which we discuss in the last three chapters. The familiar narrative patterns invoke the cultural and historical complications of the literary genres that deal with individual desire and familial duties in close proximity to gay men’s experiences. Love between prodigal sons thus packs a sensibility within a story that is particular to the problems men face in China, weaving men’s experiences together, making them meaningful and understandable, and giving consistency and coherence to gay experiences. But in the meantime, narrating new stories within and against the pre-existing narrative patterns is a means of engaging new meanings of one’s sexuality.

The most distinctive characteristic of Chinese gay narratives is that men first and foremost see each other and themselves as sons obligated with attachment and duties to their parental grace figures. The growing social space of the market economy, further greatly expanded by the internet, in the meantime, awakened a gay desiring subject who can no longer subdue his homosexual desire within a legitimate bachelorhood but instead seeks romance as the anchoring story of his life. The gay prodigal is thus caught in constant debate between desire and duty in his quest for love in a world that now often stretched beyond the pull of the family.

The family complex of gay men—the fixation on the attachment to the jia in constant conflict with homosexual desire in the new “new China” —is the key conundrum in and around which the meaning of homosexuality is generated.

Two sets of conflicts become evident in prodigal romance: first, within the prodigal framework, the homosexual desire of the prodigal son with his grace figure in the jia; second, his

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conflicts with the authority in the world, especially the nation and the Party. But while these conflicts engender external collisions, more often they manifest themselves as the ones between the gay orphan and the good son, and one more level down to the internal struggles within each of the two heroes:

Time, duty, related self, good son, prodigal/home-going

Space, desire, desiring subject, gay lover, romance/wandering

These two sets of conflicts cause a tension between the temporal pull of the prodigal narrative pattern and the spatial pull of the romance pattern. If the classical prodigal romance can offer restoration (when the hero returns or weds) of the breach caused to the tempo-spatial coordination by the hero’s departure, the modern gay prodigal romance, however, can never reconcile the breach, and becomes a dilemma in that one can only choose between being a good son or a gay orphan. Different solutions to the dilemma cause the separation of the good son, who completes his prodigal loop by returning to his duty and established symbolic order; and the prodigal, who breaks the loop by wandering out of the door and continuing to seek for his desire outside that order. At the moment this split pronounces the failure of prodigal romance, it also declares the birth of the gay subject, who despite failed love, still defines himself by his homosexual desire rather than his duty.

The image of the gay orphan wandering in a desolate world seeking for love is the anchor image of gay men in China. He is the image of the generation of the internet who together have written part of the script for a new life as no one before them had. More importantly, at a critical

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moment when new possibilities arose, the new gay prodigal son made use of it and his story awaits the writing and rewriting of new endings.

Prodigal romance is the story of the generation of the internet, and like its narrators, it is crisscrossed with characteristics of the times. At the threshold of the transmutation of homosexuality from the temporal confinements designated by the prodigal story to the spatial expansion of the romance, instead of fabricating pure romance with a happy ending, it combines the prodigal and the romance, the narrative patterns of the fishery encounter and cyber love, and gives birth to a gay subjectivity. From nothingness, to appalling perverts in negative stories, to rehabilitated sons in legitimate bachelor’s narratives, to the appearance of the gay subject from the ruins of failed romance, the odyssey of the gay prodigal is truly one of narratives, turning from the seeking of a lover to that of the self, and at the moment perishing and parting, pending a painful rebirth. It is by narrating their own stories of failed love that gay men narrated another story of themselves, one that was about the desiring subject who desires itself. Desire for love is essentially and intrinsically that for narrative, for love needs order, signification, ceremonies, and celebrations to consummate, and before anything, a subject who dares to love. At the end of the gay narrative fever of the early internet in China, a new persona appeared.

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Conclusion

6 «»

This study proposes that at a moment when a historical gap between two different media appeared, by shifting to the new means of connection afforded by the internet and by narrating the new life that came along, a generation of men desiring men lifted themselves out of the heavy mantle of ambiguity against homosexuality in China, and rushed into a new realm where living a life in accordance with their sexual desire became a real life choice. By elaborating the messages carried by these narratives, this study is itself a narrative of the story of the emergence of a gay desiring subject, a gay collectivity, and a gay China.

By 2005, as the internet itself became quotidian, fading initial enthusiasm together with the convergence of the CCP’s internet control policies caused many of the first gay websites to disappear and give way to more sexual-oriented new sites. The gay online network became fragmented. The wave of narrating gay life and self also faded to give way to commercial gay writing and personal blogging. Many authors mentioned earlier were lost in the roiling amnesia of the internet’s expansion. After 2005, when this study ends, the ambiguity against homosexuality, while breached on the web and challenged offline, continues to maintain its dominance in that offline world. This social movement of innumerable narratives became an immediate history that was immediately forgotten.

As the web spread, many men, including those who were excluded earlier, gained access to the computer and the internet. They, too, found their place in cyberspace to expand their erotic and social life. The younger generation also came of age growing up with or in the

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internet. For these later readers, the early narratives might not carry as much excitement, novelty, and turmoil as they did for the generation of the internet at the threshold of a completely new world. The intertwining between narrative and life loosened and the generational characteristics of those first pioneers became indistinct. Despite this, however, the net remains the major venue for gay life and identity. Men still narrate, share, and re-narrate their stories online.

Qualifications, then, apply to our argument. The social movement of gay narrating was virtual, and the identity and collectivity that came about as the result are internal, private, informal, and restricted. The internet, paradoxically, while opening up a new avenue of articulating and consolidating homosexuality, also served as a digital closet in which gay men, at the very moment of making their presence known, hid without confronting the authorities in the offline world face to face. Because of the duality of the sharedness and the privacy the internet offered, the social upsurge, despite its large scale and great impact on gay men, went on and passed by without being noticed on a larger social scale. As long as the ambiguity and the authorities’ imaginary moral boundaries are still maintained in the offline world, the movement of gay identity will remain an incomplete project. The gay identity and collectivity that arose from cyberspace are still to be tested and confronted. The desiring subject walking out of this movement still has ordeals to endure.

While I have argued for the greater inclusiveness engendered by the internet, the vernacular, and the shared experiences of the generation of the internet, the very generational characteristics also meant exclusion. Many men, even some from the same generation, who had no access to computers and the early internet, were left behind by the digital divide and not part

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of this social movement. Like the good sons in the prodigal romances, they sought recourse in the traditional bachelor’s narrative and adopted a heterosexual lifestyle.

On the other hand, the cyber vernacular that brought about the gay identity and collectivity might have also led to a more profound and broader social trend in China.

Appearing as informal, non-confrontational, and apolitical, the gay narrative movement could serve as a case study demonstrating the power of the cyber vernacular that might carry some crucial portents of the future. In many cases of online politics, the cyber vernacular has already shown its power as popular online jokes, parodies, and satires interfered with, and refracted the authorities’ exercise of power. In the future, we might even see larger social movements arise from this avenue, as they already have in many cases, that will have the power to challenge, or at least complicate or twist, the rule of the authorities.

A great portion of this thesis is dedicated to contextualizing homosexuality.

Homosexuality is contingent upon the cultural, societal and historical settings around it; and in gay narratives homosexuality engages these conditions as well as seeking new breakthroughs.

The main course of the evolution of the stories of gay men in China, as I argued, is within the context of an authoritarian country with powerful and resilient Confucian concepts about family and the self. Emerging from silence, to non-narrative graffitiing signification, to ethnographic

“their stories” told by scientists, journalists and mainstream writers, to underground legitimate bachelor’s stories in the pre-internet times, to online prodigal romance, and finally, to thread narratives, the evolution of gay narratives is concomitant with social changes and the shift of media modes. This study shows how homosexuality is at the same time bound to as well as a revolt against social confinements in an authoritarian society that is experiencing dramatic

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changes, and at each juncture, new stories engendered by new conditions added new elements to the story. The pain, the pleasure, the hardship, liberation, the struggles and the excitement in narrating these stories carried the authenticity and honesty of a desire for a truthful self and life.

Just as the stories have kept evolving out of and within their environments, the story of gay men in China will certainly keep changing, incorporating new opportunities, and meeting new challenges.

At the juncture when this dissertation is written, where the narratives seem to be pending yet another change, while the prodigal wanders outside the door of the jia, we might offer some speculations for the future. My speculation is that it will take a generation for gay identity and group to be finally implemented in real life, disregarding any other factors. The gay sons of the internet generation of our study, born into a world of with existent gay identity and to parents who are aware of the freedom of sexual identities, will become the first generation to be able to live up to their homosexual desire in real life and engage in conversation with authorities, if their own parents’ opposition to homosexuality is reduced. The first internet generation entered their marriages in the mid-2000’s; their sons will reach the end of their legitimate bachelorhoods— their trial—thirty years later. Speculatively, it will be around one more generation before we will see a society with openly gay identities and a collectivity strong enough to directly challenging the authorities. Whether or not this will be the case, we can be sure of one thing: that new changes will arise, bringing new elements to stories, that prodigal romance will be a prototype from which new narratives will emerge and then depart, and that together with the mutation of narratives, life will change.

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As a member of the generation of the study, I must admit that my viewpoint is marked by closeness to and personal investment in these works. We are, after all, just a few years away from these works, and the situation of gay men and lesbians in China is still experiencing great change on a day-by-day basis, so that despite the “amnesia of the internet” mentioned earlier, what started in late 1990s still seems to be part of what is going on today.

It is not conventional to end a dissertation with a quotation, but I believe that narrative speaks more than any analysis, for there is an incisive beauty in a piece like Liu Huo’s gay parody of The Biography of Nazhe, in which the heroes, Yang Jian (杨戬) and Li Nazha (李哪咤

), two gods, struggle with their modern homosexual desire, carrying a generation’s dream, love, pain, and desperation, things that will be shared by many future generations. When they are both physically and psychologically distanced from their family, Yang Jian finally gathers all his courage to confront their sexuality to the first-person narrator, Nazha:

As the waves swept us to the beach, we were suddenly exhausted. We stretched out our arms and legs and fell face-up on the sand. One of his hands reached over to hold mine. We could feel the other’s pulse clearly. The sea sighed gently. I could hear his panting, and even the throbbing of his heart. And he could hear mine. The moonlight quietly dappled our faces. This very moment and this very scene brought to me the feeling of “The sky and the earth are dark and yellow; time and the universe are immense and desolate.” At the very beginning of the world, perhaps there had been only two people like us, and perhaps they had been gazing upon the moon in the sky just as we were doing. I shook, trying to break loose from him. His fingers remained on mine. “Little Li, suppose that one day, the two of us ran far, far away, not wanting anything, not thinking of anything, and not worrying about anything, to a strange place where nobody knew us, nobody was related to us, and only you and I were left, would you like me? 407 Just the two of us, you only having me, and I only having you. Would you like me? Or, suppose we would be reincarnated to become human again. Or not even becoming human, but

407 The original verb in Chinese is “xihuan” (like) rather than “ai” (love), which would sound more natural in English.

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fish, or birds, or caterpillars, or whatever, as long as no matter what you became, I became the same, and you would know for certain that it is me, and I would know for certain that it is you. If it is like that, would you like me? “Or, one day after a long, long time, one day in the future, we were to meet here. Maybe the forest of high buildings and the hubbub would still be here. Maybe it would be even more desolate here. But there would still be moonlight like this, sea like this, and only this patch of beach would still be here, only this tiny patch. And Little Li, then would you like me, would you like me just a little?”408

In one, this proclamation is melancholic; but in many, as echoed by Handong and Lan

Yu, Huizi and Xiaoyang, Liu Yuan and Liu Su, the Zhou Brothers, Laizi and Xiao, or each and every Chinese gay prodigal son with or without a name, this is a generation’s epic of desire and love. They were the first generation which was, at that very moment, just about to love, for the first time, like no one else and like everyone else.

408 Liu Huo, 2002, “Nazha Zhuan” 哪吒传 [Biography of Nazha], BBS Shuimu Qinghua Zhan (BBS 水木清华) , http://www.newsmth.net/bbsanc.php?path=%2Fgroups%2Fliteral.faq%2FMythLegend%2Fyuanchuang%2Fwe nxue%2Fzhongpian%2Fnezha2%2FM.1020730080.V0, accessed January 17, 2014.

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The Huaxia Digest 华夏文摘

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