“Beijing will entertain and amuse many readers, even people who aren't gay or who don't often read about travel. Reading this book felt to me like being told a story by a friend.”
—Gillian Kendall, coauthor with Mark O'Brien of How I Became a Human Being: A Disabled Man's Quest for Independence

Relax, I told myself. You're having an adventure.

Escaping his ghosts, AIDS widower David Masiello accepts a one-year position at a Western medical clinic in Beijing. Lonely but excited, he sets out to explore the city—both its bustling street life and its clandestine gay subculture.

David chronicles his adventures in China as he wrestles with cultural dislocation, loneliness, and sexual and spiritual longing. After a series of both comic and poignant encounters with gay Chinese men, he meets Bosheng, a handsome young artist. Though the attraction is strong, a difficult courtship ensues, during which Bosheng returns to his ancestral village to marry the girl his parents have chosen for him. Eventually, and quite unexpectedly, David and Bosheng reconnect and share an idyllic spring together. As the year ends, David must decide whether to say goodbye or face the uncertainties of a long-distance relationship.

Gambone's novel is peopled with a host of wonderfully memorable characters: Owen, David's forthright best friend back home; Auntie Chen, the clinic's office mom, who wants to fix David up with a girlfriend; Stewart, David's Beijing roommate, a graduate student doing research on Peking opera; Jiantao and Guoyang, two lovers who lecture David on the fleeting quality of American romance; and Tyson, the Australian doctor with a Chinese girlfriend, who hopes to teach David that love doesn't need any explanations or justifications.

Philip Gambone is an award-winning essayist, journalist, and fiction writer living in Boston. He teaches writing at Harvard University. His previous work includes Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and a book of stories, The Language We Use Up Here. This is his first novel.

“This debut novel is thoughtful and complex and often exquisite. It told me a great, great deal about fascinating people and places and, most important, human emotion. Beijing moves seamlessly between the funny and the utterly heartbreaking.”
—Scott Heim, author of the novels Mysterious Skin and In Awe