Gay novelist's double life as family man

When did you first realise you were attracted to men?

At the age of about 10, I found myself attracted only to boys in my class. In primary school before I realised the real reason, I once asked the teacher to put me in a group of cute boys for my after-school activities team. When I was 17, the Cultural Revolution broke out, and during the 'up the mountains and down to the villages' campaign, I was sent to a remote farming area in the forest of the Greater Hinggan Mountains in Inner Mongolia . I went with a good friend of mine from school. We were two spoiled children from high-ranking families which were being devastated during the revolution. Consequently, we empathised with each other. On the night of the first Mid-Autumn Festival we spent there, we both got smashed on some strong homemade liquor, then everything you could imagine happened. That was really my first love.

Did the relationship survive?

He returned to the city while I stayed on at the farm until the revolution was over. You needed to get special approval to go back home, and he got the approval before me. We cried together almost every day before the departure, but that is how the story ends. We still catch up sometimes, but we only joke about each other. He is married too - actually he is straight - and has a prosperous career and a happy family.

Why did you get married if you are a homosexual?

The word 'homosexual' was not adopted on the mainland until the middle of the 1980s. When I got married in late 1978, people still regarded my inclination as a 'psychological problem', a perversion that needed to be corrected, if not a crime. Actually that belief still prevails among most people in today's China. Anyway, under those circumstances, I was made to believe that it was just a hobby, or a sexual amusement, instead of something lifelong that people are born with. When I reached marriageable age, I was still in Inner Mongolia and people matched me up with my future wife. Not long after I got the special approval to return to the city in 1978, we registered our marriage and had our son the next year.