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 epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships, the weight of secrets, and the persistence of memory.
Spanning decades, from post-socialist China to contemporary New York, Cinema Love is a tour de force about gay men and the women who marry them.
Thirty years ago, in rural Fuzhou, Old Second and his wife Bao Mei frequented the Workers’ Cinema: a rundown theater where gay men cruised for love. While classic war films played, Old Second found intimacy with closeted men in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets, guarding the secrets of the cinema and even finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But once Old Second’s passionate affair with his male lover was exposed, a series of haunting events unfolded, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.
A tender novel of love, care, and survival, Cinema Love announces Jiaming Tang as a major new talent.
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.
