BEIJING COMRADES

By Bei Tong

Translated by Scott E. Myers

383 pp. Feminist Press, paper, $16.95.

Perhaps the best-known work to arise from China’s gay, or “comrade,” literature (tongzhi wenxue) movement in the 1990s, “Beijing Comrades” (or “Beijing Story”) elicited enormous admiration — and outrage — when it was published online. It has never appeared in print in mainland China, and the author’s true identity has never been established. Which is no surprise: The novel’s extreme candor extends from its long and unabashed sex scenes to its matter-of-fact descriptions of the Tiananmen massacre and the rise of the “princeling” economy, in which the sons and daughters of elite Communist Party cadres built state-protected business empires in the 1980s and ’90s, establishing much of the oligarchy that controls China today.

“Beijing Comrades” is a familiar, almost archetypal love story: Chen Handong, a princeling in his late 20s, possessed of enormous wealth and almost equally enormous sexual appetites, loses his heart to Lan Yu, an alluring teenager who has maneuvered his way into college in Beijing, even though he comes from an impoverished family in remote northwestern China. Not content with the conventionally discreet existence of a Chinese gay man, Handong buys a house in the suburbs, where he hopes he and Lan Yu can build a new life together; eventually, however, his family discovers his secret and, his happiness sabotaged, he finds himself driven to marry a manipulative, selfish woman. After a short while Handong’s marriage ends in a pitiless divorce, and he manages to find Lan Yu again, but their hard-earned contentment is short-lived.

“Beijing Comrades” (which was made into a film, “Lan Yu,” by the Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan in 2001) has lingered in the margins far too long. Scott E. Myers’s translation demonstrates that it’s one of the most significant Chinese novels of our time.

HALF A LIFELONG ROMANCE

By Eileen Chang

Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury

379 pp. Anchor, paper, $16.

Originally published in 1950 as “Eighteen Springs” and both revised and retitled 18 years later, “Half a Lifelong Romance” is the most mature and fully achieved novel by the midcentury writer Eileen Chang, whose work was beloved by readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, yet banned in mainland China until the 1990s. Somewhat mysteriously, it’s also the only one of her novels she herself did not adapt into English. Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing, was born in Shanghai to an aristocratic family in 1920 and moved back and forth between China and Hong Kong during the chaotic years of her young adulthood, finally settling in the United States in the 1950s. She drew equally on Chinese and Western novels for inspiration and considered her work to be a hybrid.