CINEMA LOVE

Tang chronicles the complex connections among a group of Chinese immigrants.

In the beginning of this novel, readers will find themselves ushered into a movie theater they’ll come to know as the Mawei City Workers’ Cinema. “The customer knows the cinema like the lines on a lover’s face,” Tang writes, and that comparison resonates in a few ways—not least of which is the theater’s role as a pickup spot for gay men in 1980s China. In the chapters that follow, Tang introduces a number of characters with ties to the Workers’ Cinema who have since left for the United States, including Old Second (who found a place where he could be himself) and Bao Mei (who communed with the ghost of her brother there). Tang moves deftly across the years, finding parallels between the government and business interests looking to destroy the Workers’ Cinema and efforts to save the East Broadway Mall in 2020s New York City. Slowly, tensions from the past return to the present, mainly via the character of Yan Hua, who immigrates to the U.S. as the “puppet wife” of a gay man. She’s a complex character; her second marriage, to a man named Frog, is described as “a tolerance that sometimes creeps toward friendship.” And she, too, has a connection to the Workers’ Cinema, albeit one that’s left her with a growing sense of guilt over the decades. Tang has plenty to say here—with intimacy, sadness, and aging being frequent subjects. The prose moves from omniscient to highly focused with ease, as when Tang zeroes in on an aging Old Second, noting that his “main issue, now, is his inability to disregard pain.”

A haunting story of shared pasts and troubled memories.