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Informationen zum Autor Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer. He holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, and his writing has appeared in such publications as AGNI , Lit Hub , Joyland Magazine , and elsewhere. He is a 2022-23 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Cinema Love is his first novel. Klappentext "A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them"-- Leseprobe IN NEW YORK, in Chinatown, a man named Old Second remembers. He has freckles all over his face. Burn scars and blackheads, like barnacles on a whale. Trembling hands attached to long, hairless arms pick up and light a cigarette. A ceiling fan spins, and the open window offers a view of people marching. He watches them. They are mostly quiet, but sometimes they chant words he can’t understand, hold up signs he can’t make out. Still, he knows what this is for. They’ve come to him in the past, with cameras and notebooks and sputtering words. Hi, my name is . . . We’re here to get your signature . . . Do you mind if. . . And so on, until Old Second says, in broken Mandarin: “Sure.” Old Second grew up in the mountains, missing all but a year’s worth of school. It was the same for his siblings. The girls went for longer while the boys went straight to the fields. They preferred it, anyhow—They claimed it gave them freedom. Especially in the hot, damp, sticky summers. Instead of Mandarin, they learned how to fish. How to transform old shirts and water bottles into river traps. They’d wait in the stream with their buckets, their eyes gleaming and their bodies completely still. Then, suddenly, a shout. There! There’s one! Old Second remembers a thrust of the body. Gold, sinewy skin; the muscles taut and firmer than steel. He remembers, too, the weight of his brothers’ limbs as they leaned against him, not quite hugging but almost. Now, decades later, he watches a similar kind of love outside his window. He may not understand the words or the signs, but he’s aware of what’s going on. A rent strike. The marchers are trying to save Chinatown. Like the mall on East Broadway with the Fuzhounese kiosks and the decades- old restaurants on Eldridge Street. The marching started three hours ago— small. A trickling of Chinese protesters walked down the street like shoppers. Then a woman with a loudspeaker arrived, and youngsters in lion dance uniforms. Passersby joined in, and soon it became a crowd. From above, the marching resembles hugging. It moves Old Second, causes him to remember. Not just childhood and brother- love, but also the time he stood with thirty- seven men outside the Mawei City Workers’ Cinema. That was a long time ago, Old Second thinks. In August, it will have been thirty- five years. -- BUT FIRST WE MUST VISIT AN EARLIER TIME. NOT THIRTY- FIVE years back but forty. This is where the story begins, where a boy from the mountains learns that the wrong kind of laughter can kill. You’ve already met Old Second, but there are other characters, too. Family members and neighbors who will remain in the background, like cardboard forests in a play. Mother and Father. Big Sister, Little Sister, Old Third. The brother named Eldest matters more to our story, but only by a little. He’s the oldest son and works at a welding factory in Fuzhou. He’s also the darling of the family, the one destined to be killed, and he dies in a factory accident in 1980. The other important characters are Old Second’s youngest brother, Spring Chicken, and a neighborhood boy, age sixteen, who goes by the name One Meter Sixty- Five. None of the boys resemble their names. Spring Chicken has matchstick arms and medium- rare cheeks. Instead of tanning, his skin burns under sunlight. Blushes pink, then red, and the boils that form resemble the bumps on a plucked goose. He’...
