Cinema Love, Introducing Jiaming Tang

We are pleased to welcome Jiaming Tang, a Chinese writer from Brooklyn, America, on a UK visit.

Pachinko meets Brokeback Mountain? Cinema Love is a sweeping debut novel about gay men in rural China, the women who marry them, and the secret cinema where their husbands cruised for love.

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

While classic war films played, Old Second and his fellow countrymen found intimacy in the privacy of The Workers’ Cinema’s screening rooms. Elsewhere, in the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men – guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when secrets are unveiled, they set in motion a series of haunting events that propel Old Second and Bao Mei towards an uncertain future in America.

Spanning three timelines – post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York – Cinema Love is a tender epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden and frustrated relationships as they grapple with the past and their unspoken desires.

Chaired by Hongwei Bao, who writes non-fiction about LGBT life in China, and poetry drawing on his Chinese migrant experience.

Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, and his stories and essays have been published in AGNI, Lit Hub, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere.

Refreshments included.