Taking his cue from Foucault's 1977 History of Sexuality, in Cong Yanshi Dao Xingshi Wai Siam Hee intends to demonstrate first of all how China's own narratives of sexual histories began in the late Qing. Hee does not apply Foucault's argument in an uncritical fashion to account for the history of Chinese sexuality. Instead, Hee contends that late Qing yanshi, or amorous histories, were embodied in backstreet fiction and courtesan culture, and could only reside outside of the mainstream, in the shadow of homophobic official histories. At the same time, the performativity of obsession (pi) in such underground cultures challenged official homophobic narratives (p. 14). Hee also concentrates on exploring the genealogy of “Tongzhi,” and proposes the dyad between Old Tongzhi (comrade) and New Tongzhi as a supplement to the more conventional pairs of wen-wu and Yin-Yang to understand the transformation of modern Chinese masculinities. Lastly, this work sheds light on the mechanism that disguises and suppresses queer desire throughout China's modern sexual histories, though Hee does not often refer to the word “queer.”

In the first two chapters, Hee analyzes the rationale behind the efforts of many scholars to reformulate Chinese masculinities by discussing the works of Wang Tao and Zhang Jingsheng. As a typical libertine scholar, as well as a pioneer of Chinese nationalism in the late Qing, Wang Tao believed that Chinese modernity could only be achieved by masculine subjects, in a prelude to the exploration of ideal Chinese men and national anxiety. After the New Culture Movement, sexologist Zhang Jingsheng conceptualized masculinity based on European sexology and eugenics, and critiqued the absence of gender differences in China. Moreover, Zhang essentialized masculinity as a product of males’ and females’ sexual drive during fertilization, and posited a “third kind of female fluid” as necessary to produce racially strong children (p. 117). Thus, in Hee's view, these scientific discourses facilitated the process of coding Chinese bodies in the name of sexual liberation. Like many of his European peers, Zhang was not as “liberal” as he may have appeared, as seen in his public objection to homosexuality, given that his sexology aimed to serve the nation.

Next, Hee moves to the modern period to interpret the complexity of life experiences and representations of Tongzhi, by conceptualizing Zhuangzi's ancient philosophy of penumbra-and-shadow as a theoretical framework to understand the (non)subjectivity and queerness of Tongzhi. Because of the illegality of personal desire and lust, Hee argues, a Tongzhi can merely present himself through the presence of a nationalist comrade, as the subject, and express his desire through the rhetoric of friendship or brotherhood, as the shadow (pp. 138–44). Hee demonstrates, via Guo Moruo's biography and literary works, the ways in which same-sex love had to be desexualized and integrated into an imagined political relationship. Guo's life trajectory illuminates how same-sex desire is oppressed by successive powers, from the nationalism during the May Fourth Movement to the ultranationalism of the Nationalist and Communist governments (p. 177). In his early life, Guo audaciously disclosed his same-sex desires toward his peers. Later in his life, under the context of nationalism, he reimagined these desires as ideal relationships between a strong and a weak subject, thus shifting his attention to the search for a weak Other in order to achieve his own modern masculinity. But in the ensuing revolutionary period, Guo was forced to reinvent his own memory and self. Since he could no longer explicitly express his same-sex desires as before, Guo turned to the nationalist discourse of comradeship to express his desire toward Chen Mingyuan (p. 213).

Moving on to the contemporary period, Hee compares Lilian Lee's novel Farewell My Concubine and its cinematic rendition by Chen Kaige, and suggests that the androcentric angle of Chen Kaige's film implies a fear of male-male attachment. This is revealed in the fact that Chen Kaige can only represent male same-sex desire by framing it through a triangular homosocial structure, in which the female protagonist mediates and sublimates the relationship between the two men. Lilian Lee's original novel, however, posits said desire as a (fake) woman's uncontrollable yearning for another man, since Dieyi is just an impersonator—the performance, but not the reality, of a woman. There is nowhere in which to locate queerness. According to Hee, audiences are unable to see a complete configuration of the penumbra's real subject, because the presence and representation of a New Tongzhi also signify his absence (p. 248).

The last chapter epitomizes the new role of capital and class in the expression of same-sex desire and in the construction of masculinities by comparing the nineteenth-century novel Pinhua Baojian (A Precious Mirror for Appreciating Flowers), and the 1998 Internet novel Beijing Gushi (Beijing Story). In the late Qing period, the conflict between passion (qing) and lust (yu), the former seen as superior over the latter, used to work as the norm to regulate daily sexual practices. However, in the late twentieth century, this was gradually replaced by the conflicts of capital, ownership of which grants people not only access to the Tongzhi community, but also full self-expression. The cross-historical comparison, however, does not clearly show how the comrade/New Tongzhi dyad applies to the analysis of the characters in A Precious Mirror for Appreciating Flowers, and that feels like an unfinished task at the end of the book.

Overall, this interesting book contributes to the exploration and deconstruction of the possible logics that shaped Chinese sexual histories, and also to the construction of Chinese queer theories from a local philosophical perspective.