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About Cinema Love
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.
Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer. He holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, and his writing has appeared in AGNI, Lit Hub, The Masters Review, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a 2022-23 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Cinema Love is his first novel.
Qian Julie Wang is the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood, which was a Today Show Read With Jenna pick and named a best book of 2021 by the New York Times, President Obama, NPR, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, and more. A graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College, Qian Julie is managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, a firm dedicated to advancing educational civil rights for marginalized populations. Her writing has been published in major publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more, and she has appeared on the TODAY Show, NBC, PBS, and NPR, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.