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with her “girlish coyness” and “natural grace” (13). As such, Ling Jingping represents a physical
standard of female and feminine that contrasts the gender personality traits of Lan Yu and Zhang
Jian. She epitomizes the naturalization of femininity within heterosexuality, but her
hyperfeminized character also deconstructs and denaturalizes heterosexuality by reversing the
gender roles of seducer and seduced. By seducing Han Dong with her femininity, she awakens
him to his true homoerotic desires where he finally realizes that he “likes men because they are
male” more than he “likes women because they are female” (5). The failure of his first marriage
allowed Han Dong to “gain the evidence that [he] … was undoubtedly a homosexual” and that
“no woman [would be] suitable for him” (21). This dystopic heterosexual experience dismantles
the heteronormative sexual ideal, illustrating that presumptions about distinct bodily differences
in sexual relationships are mere surface stylizations through which gender is performatively
constructed.
In the case of Lan Yu and Zhang Jian, woman and feminine might just as easily signify
and embody a male body as easily as a female one. This blurred boundary between male and
female challenges the conventions of gender and sexuality to claim that gender cannot be limited
to just one particular sex: there is no clear distinction between what defines feminine or
masculine. As such, the Comrade text contests the exclusive opposite-sex attraction of
heterosexual romance enforced by the Chinese patriarchal system, creating a space for tongzhi
sexual orientations to come to the fore.
Another major theme in “Beijing Story” addresses the extreme pressure Chinese gay
people face in a society led by Confucian values of the nuclear family. In recent years, scholars
analyzing Comrade Literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong have pointed out that the virtue of
filial piety ( 孝 xiao) is a frequent theme in tongzhi stories (Jian 1997; Martin 1999). Filiality is
central to the traditional Chinese patrilineal family model where children, once economically
Chapter One | 38