Cinema Love
A Novel
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3.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Winner of the Ferro-Grumley award for LGBTQ Fiction
Finalist for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick
“Part ghost story, part love story, and part tale of hardscrabble immigrant life.” —The New Yorker
A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them.
For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager 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 theater where gay men cruised for love.
While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found intimacy in the screening rooms. 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 Old Second’s passion for his male lover is revealed, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.
Spanning three timelines—post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York—Cinema Love is an “exceptional" and "moving” (Alice Hoffman) epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships; the weight of secrets; and the way memory forever haunts the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This resonant and textured debut traces the secret lives of gay men and their wives in 1980s China and their loneliness in contemporary New York City's Chinatown. As a young man, Old Second leaves his village in shame after his family discovers his sexuality. In the city of Fuzhou, he falls in love with a man named Shun-Er, whom he meets at the Workers' Cinema, which is known for showing war films to a gay clientele who meet for sex in the screening rooms. Out of convenience, Old Second marries Bao Mei, a woman who works at the cinema's ticket counter, and they immigrate to New York City in the 1990s. A parallel narrative follows Yan Hua and her marriage to Shun-Er, who dies by suicide in 1989 and whose ghost continues to haunt her after she comes to the U.S. as a "puppet wife" to Frog, the "discount-bin husband" her family paid in exchange for her green card. Tang laces the narrative with Dickensian details of Chinatown's underground economy (Frog and Yan Hua live in a cramped, six-dollar per night "motel" room shared by many others in bunk beds), and lyrically portrays Old Second's longing for same-sex intimacy ("A barrier has been erected around his heart, and though he can look past it like clean glass, he finds there are certain thresholds he can no longer cross"). Tang announces himself as a writer to watch with this unshakable novel.
