Why Does Queer Theory Need China?

The Advent of the Modern Queer Novel

The first two queer novels in Chinese were published in the 1980s, and both were written by authors in Taiwan. Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys (Niezi), published in 1983, is commonly recognized as the first full-length modern queer novel in Chinese. It is the first canonical novel that explicitly represents male homosexuality as its main theme — as opposed to earlier works that contain recognizably homoerotic undertones. Pai’s close friend Chen Ruoxi wrote Paper Marriage (Zhihun) three years later, but Chen’s work has not received the same kind of critical attention from queer scholars.¹ Chen’s story has nevertheless been made famous worldwide through a loose cinematic adaptation, Ang Lee’s 1993 feature film The Wedding Banquet.² Both Crystal Boys and Paper Marriage are transnational tales that problematize “Chinese identity” in important ways, and the fact that modern Chinese queer literature emerged through, and as an interrogation of, the meanings of Chineseness suggests that no account of sexuality is complete without a consideration of geopolitics — how nations are formed and their borders policed, how these institutions sustain and constrain the possibilities of lives. As the novels depict it, queer identities are as much about private sexuality as they are about the political tensions, cultural exchanges, and economic inequalities between China, Taiwan, and America. Indeed, Paper Marriage adumbrates the beginnings of “transnational queer politics”: a mode of mobilizing one’s distance from heteronormativity as a critique of the nation-state. Chen’s queer novel thus shows that the geopolitical identity and future of China is not contingently related to sexuality. Rather, the “queer” and the “Chinese” bear on each other at all times, incessantly changing the ways each term is debated in public culture, represented in literature, and imagined in thoughts private or public.

In the current field, most scholars who work on queer issues in Chinese focus on tongzhi wenxue, a major queer literary movement of the 1990s inaugurated by writers such as Chen Xue, Lin Bai, Chu T’ien-wen, Cui Zi’en, and Qiu Miaojin.³ The fact that Chen Ruoxi wrote her novel almost one full decade before queer literature became mainstream is one reason for her exclusion from the well-established list of queer Chinese writers, but an even more important reason is the political reception of her work during the Cold War. In Chen’s early days, she was first and foremost known, internationally, as an acclaimed anti-Communist writer who launched her literary career through the “China question.” In 1966, Chen, a native Taiwanese, made the shocking decision to relocate from Taiwan (then called “Free China”) to mainland China in order to support and participate in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 1973, disillusioned with Maoist politics, Chen left Communist China and, like Arthur Koestler and other “ex-Communists” had done for Stalinism, she became a bona fide interpreter of the “real China” to Western observers. In the opinion of the influential China historian Frederic Wakeman (who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and served on a number of advisory boards for the U.S. government), Chen’s fictional stories served as “an insider’s voice” from the “lost years” of Chinese historiography.⁴ Her literary writings in the 1970s, based on her experiences in China, were eventually translated into English in 1978 as a collection titled The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.⁵ Although some of her earlier works (including Spirit Calling) also became available in English, Paper Marriage was never translated and its reputation was eclipsed by her anti-Communist stories in The Execution of Mayor Yin series. Marketed in English as stories “from” (not “about”) the Cultural Revolution — a word that is not used in the Chinese original — The Execution of Mayor Yin presents Chen as a survivor of what Howard Goldblatt describes as “a society gone terribly wrong.”⁶ As an “authentic native” whose writings were largely interpreted as historiography and reportage, Chen alone “comprised a significant part of what Western readers knew about...