Cinema Love

by Jiaming Tang

There’s a reason High Mountain kids don’t play hide-and-seek, and it’s not for lack of imagination. It’s simply too easy to vanish. Too easy to climb into the leaves and forget that life exists.

She’s sick from days of running around, asking for favors. It turns out death isn’t merely sad. It’s obnoxious, too.

The cinema is a place where a certain kind of reality pauses.

In the cinema, you don’t have to worry about your parents’ demands. The pressure of a father wanting to further the bloodline (for what purpose?), a mother obsessed with grandbabies.

He wants love—there’s no question—but fear always returns like a reflex.

A year passed, and their feelings were fresh as spearmint. It was like sucking a lozenge that never lost its flavor. Theirs wasn’t a jealous love. Nor was it angry, paranoid, or afraid. Each man was lightened by it and moved through the world with new eyes.

Like him, Bao Mei hid her deepest emotions with clownery. And Hen Bao knew how fake tears could express a hurt that real tears couldn’t.

Same with the screening room, where men loved, and loved, and loved. The cinema was open ten hours a day, but the loving felt endless. Infinite.

They come back to love and be loved; they come back to hear and be heard.

“Because I don’t have the courage to love someone like that. Someone who loves other people as much as they love me.”

The men who’ve heard the ghostly whispers attribute this phenomenon to something they call “the Spirit of the Cinema.” The one they claim protects the place despite having no altar. It’s this ghost that asks the men questions. It’s this ghost that asks for their stories and listens to them, actually listens, while the men speak-laugh-cry about a China that refuses to love them back.

We wanted love so badly, so desperately, that its absence felt like heartburn. A stomachache that never went away . . . It’s why we sighed with relief whenever an offered cigarette led to hand-holding, which led to kissing and body smells and, at the end of the night, surprise.

“A boy, searching in the forest for love. “His father’s fist and his mother’s spit—the spit hurting more.

I’d seen men kiss their wives, and friends touch their girlfriends. I’d wonder: Why couldn’t I do that? How come my wife elicited nothing but family-love from me? Why were our kisses nothing but saliva in the mouth? The Workers’ Cinema, it let us feel what other men felt in the daylight. Our love wasn’t flowers but the sprouting of old vegetables.

They wouldn’t care that the violence that once uprooted them also existed in the bodies of others. And because they are old and stubborn, they guard their hurt like dogs over a chewed bone. The cinema’s destruction is theirs.

Because it was exhausting—was it not?—to live in a world where incorrect loving was worse than no loving at all.

“Uneducated people don’t have words to record their hurt. That’s why they have children. Their children are their memories.”

Shun-Er loved her—this much was true—and he was considerate of her mind, her thoughts, even her dreams. But was he considerate of her body? Did not causing her pain make up for not giving her pleasure?

They have been married five years, but Yan Hua feels nothing for her husband. Yes, he is kind at times, and yes, he is patient. But the love she feels for him isn’t spouse-love, or friend-love, or even sibling-love. It’s more like a tolerance that sometimes creeps toward friendship.

That’s the phrase his grandmother used to describe spouse-love. She was the only person in his family who’d married for it, and she told Frog that it was the only feeling worth living for. Nothing compared to it.

Kevin was gone. That was what happened. Fled, this afternoon, because the reality of his life was leaking like water from a cracked jug.

They’d both married men who loved men and were haunted by the feelings those men had.

She’d gotten it from her father, who believed that all people had tiny holes in them, and shadows beneath the holes. As you got older, the holes lengthened into rifts, and some of them were large enough for you to fall into. At which point you’d say a strange or dangerous word, perform a silly or mysterious action.

“I remember how my first husband wanted to talk about him. His lover. I could see it in his eyes: a certain kind of glow and eagerness . . .” “Why are you telling me this?” “Because now I realize how lonely it is not to talk about the people you love.”

Because even though he understands how juvenile his love is, and that his feelings for Kevin are purely physical, Old Second still wants, needs, male affection. At the same time, he’s afraid of it.

This wasn’t, despite what Frog said, a “silly” or “childish” desire. No, Yan Hua thought. It was the only thing her mother ever wanted. The only thing she allowed herself to be selfish about.

And while Bao Mei stared at the stooped curve of the woman’s back, the defeated, sack-crumpled shape of it, she understood, finally, the horrible contradiction that breathed life into the Workers’ Cinema. Yes, it was a place for love, and yes, it was the only place where a certain kind of man could love. But it was also—was it not?—a place for betrayal.

Those memories came and went, and Yan Hua experienced their potency in waves. Some months she was haunted by them and walked around like a woman possessed. Other months she fell into a depression that she brushed away, as if feelings were nothing but a trail of ants marching across her body.

His cowardice prevented any act that was too forward, any conversation that was too lewd, but he discovered that his love-desire could be satiated by many small and simple kindnesses.

Surprise that the flirting he believed was innocent was actually selfish after all.

She understands, suddenly, why Old Second has spent all those days remembering by the window. He wasn’t being foolish. He was surviving. Protecting himself from a reality that could knock you clean off your feet.

KEPT SECRETS CAN wear a woman out. Like depression or anger, except the tiredness starts in the bones.

Because now they had two broken people in their home: one too afraid to go outside, and another who refused to leave the comfort of the floor.

He was afraid of going outside, of stepping beyond the boundaries of his apartment. It wasn’t just the sickness that was floating around. Old Second was bothered by the meanness of strangers, their laughing looks and their hidden intentions. Years of working in America, in takeout restaurants and dim sum parlors, had Old Second convinced of one thing, and one thing only: the nastiness of other people.

From the safety of the floor (a place from which Bao Mei can’t fall), she imagines, then rearranges, scenes from her past.

She’d always known that the cinema was a utopia for gay men, but she’d neglected its other reality, experienced by the wives. And now, lying inside a nest of blankets on the floor, on a pillow too flat to support her neck, she sees the heart of the thought that prevents her from standing up.