Chapter 1

Author: Anonymous

Translator: David Fung

PLOT:
Internet novel Beijing Story was published anonymously in 1996 and spread like wildfire among China's gay population, becoming the most widely read text ever to emerge from the underground there.

The novel is a sexually explicit, unapologetic gay love story and unlike anything that had ever been publicly available in China before. Its author adopted the ironic moniker Beijing Comrade (the Chinese word for comrade, "tongzhi," having become a slang term meaning gay) and Beijing Story pioneered the idea of publishing illicit Chinese fiction on the Internet, setting a precedent that has since been copied by others.