Red Is Not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories (Asian Voices)

Anyone fascinated by the covert lesbian love affair in Anchee Min's Red Azalea will readily understand the poignant appeal of the stories in this groundbreaking anthology, in which women's love for each other must find (or lose) a place for itself in a repressive and closely guarded society. Editor Patricia Sieber, whose introduction could almost serve as a freshman course in contemporary Chinese culture, has worked with Chinese colleagues to bring together eight lesbian-themed stories from the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the stories were prizewinners in China or Taiwan, while one is published here for the first time. In Zhang Mei's "A Record," a young woman of ambivalent feelings is asked to accompany a film director and producer into the countryside to interview the last few of the "self-wedded women," part of a feminist movement of independent working women in Guangdong in the 1920s. In Chen Ran's "Breaking Open," two friends obsessively discuss the gulf between the sexes as a covert way of declaring their happiness with each other: "My friend Yunnan--she utters strange conglomerations of words casually. Her intuitively artistic way of expressing herself often causes me to sigh in admiration--the innate beauty of her words sets me aflutter with emotion and makes me feel that my lips are merely a pretty but ultimately useless ravenous red insect." An absorbing, often beautiful glimpse of same-sex relations in a rapidly changing culture. --Regina Marler