Book Review: "Cinema Love" by Jiaming Tang

“Theirs is the kind of love that can change the weather. A radio forecast predicting rain switches its tune the moment Old Second sees Shun-Er. Clouds part, a breeze picks up, and the sun becomes so yellow it looks delicious. Just peel the skin, remove the seeds, and bite. Not hard but soft, the way Shun-Er touches Old Second.”

Within just a few sentences, I knew that Cinema Love was a beautifully written book. Jiaming Tang’s word choices convey so much, creating a layered story full of emotion, pain, and hope.

To see Bao Mei and her husband, Old Second, walking through New York’s Chinatown, you’d assume they were a typical Chinese couple. But the two contain multitudes—before they came to America, they both frequented the Worker’s Cinema in Fuzhou. Bao Mei worked as the ticket seller, while Old Second, like many of the cinema’s patrons, was looking for illicit encounters with other men, as old movies played.

Bao Mei works at the cinema knowing who its patrons are, and she appoints herself as a protector of these men, chasing nagging wives and others away who might be looking for their husbands or sons. She herself has a relationship of sorts with the projectionist, who is the cinema owner’s son. But they all know this idyll cannot last, and when a series of events occurs that exposes the truth, it leads to tragedy, as well as some fleeing to America.

This is the story of Bao Mei and Old Second, as well as others who have come to America, and while the ways that these characters are interconnected might not be obvious at first, it all falls together nicely. The book shifts narration as well as timeframes, between the past in China and the present in New York.

While I felt that the pacing of the book was a bit slow and there are places where you are left to formulate your own answers, this is a moving story about how, even years later, we are indelibly affected by parts of our life.