Crystal Boys: A Novel

Front Cover
Gay Sunshine Press, 1990 - Fiction - 330 pages
"Crystal Boys is the first Chinese novel on gay themes. A-qing, the adolescent hero, comes from an impoverished family. His father casts him out after learning that his son is gay. A-qing drifts into New Park, a gay hangout in Taipei, and begins his life as a hustler. He meets other boys living on the street, also forsaken by their families: Little Jade, who is constantly searching for his unknown father; Mousey, an orphan and petty thief; and Wu Min, a shy and tender kid, who attempts suicide when discarded by a middle-aged man. These four boys become fast friends and are taken under the protection of Chief Yang, a fiftyish gay guru in the Park. The boys begin to build a family of their own. Meanwhile, A-qing meets Dragon Prince, whose passionate and fateful love for Phoenix Boy has become a legend in the Park.. The second part of the novel deals with the Cozy Nest, a gay bar run by Chief Yang, where the boys and other homosexual exiles have found a refuge. The bar is sponsored by Papa Fu, whose young soldier son had shot himself when his homosexuality was exposed. In Taiwan, the gay community is known as the buoliquan, literally 'glass community,' while the individuals are called 'glass boys' or 'crystal boys'"--

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Contents

Translators Note
7
15
103
Biographical Note
329
Copyright

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About the author (1990)

Son of one of the military leaders of the Nationalist Revolution and high government defense official during the war against Japan, Pai spent much of his youth in wartime Kweilin in southwest China, which has provided much of the material for his subsequent fiction. After the war ended, he resided for a time in Shanghai, and then resettled with his parents in Taiwan when he was of middle-school age. He attended the prestigious National Taiwan University. He published his first short story in September 1958, having just completed his freshman year. Pai came to the United States in 1963 and since 1965 has taught Chinese at the University of California at Santa Barbara while continuing to publish fiction. His style is among the most polished of any modern writer in Chinese. He depicts his characters with vivid realism, and often chooses themes that describe the pain of exile, showing the once powerful reduced to humble or humiliating circumstances. Such themes are particularly evident in his highly acclaimed collection of stories, Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream: Tales of Taipei Characters (1971) which he dedicates to his parents and "the tumultuous age in which they lived." With his novel Crystal Boys (1990), he has become the first modern Chinese writer to explore the theme of homosexuality in a story about gay life in the city of Taipei.

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