Beijing Comrades: A Gay Chinese Love Story

Abstract

[Translator's Introduction] To those who know it in the English-speaking world, Beijing Comrades by Bei Tong is more likely to be known as A Story from Beijing by Beijing Comrade. Others may know the contemporary Chinese novel as Lan Yu, as Beijing Gushi, or as Someone Likes Lan. The pseudonymous author, whose real-world identity has been a subject of debate since the story was first published on a gay Chinese website over a decade ago, is known variously as Beijing Comrade, Beijing Tongzhi, Xiao He, and Miss Wang. But while Internet chat room users have long speculated about the gender identity and sexual orientation of the author (believed by some to be a tongqi, a heterosexual woman with the misfortune of unknowingly marrying a gay man), these ambiguities also raise more fundamental questions about what bearing, if any, the extratextual identity of an author has on the way we read a story. In this English translation, the title as well as the author's nom de plume were agreed upon by translator and aut...