My brain being too fried for anything heavily words-based this week, I thought I would put together a collection of baihe audio drama art by the artist Nongmin Shanquan (农民山泉), whose distinctive and instantly recognisable art style sets her work apart from what the cookie-cutter prettiness that dominates much of the genre.

( pictures under the cut )

Check out the artist's Weibo here for sketches, fan art, private commissions, and general updates.

Note: The artist's handle is almost certainly a riff on Nongfu Spring (农夫山泉, pinyin: nongfun shanquan), China's most popular bottled water brand. If I had ten pence for each time someone associated with Chinese GL decided to name herself after a well-known domestic beverage brand, I would have twenty pence, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice (the other namer-of-self-after-popular-beverage-brand being, of course, the actress/cosplayer formerly known as Wang Laoji, star of an absurd number of GL mini-dramas, who these days is officially credited as Wang Xuexi (王学习) and known to her fans as Jiji (吉吉)).

This post is meant to provide a brief introduction to baihe as a literary genre and a starting point for those seeking to get into it. I consider baihe to be a distinct genre of its own, though I'd be hard-pressed to articulate its precise contours (or even general contours). Certainly I have a sense of baihe as being distinct from what I would classify as 'serious queer/lesbian literature', though here I'm hampered by my lack of knowledge about queer literature written in Chinese. Yan Geling's (严歌苓) novella White Snake might conceivably count as one, but I'm simply too unfamiliar with the genre as a whole to provide any sort of sensible comment. I also have a sense of baihe as being in conversation with its Japanese counterpart yuri, but again I'm woefully ignorant of yuri as a genre.

Baihe often seems to be regarded by international fandom as a sort of distaff counterpart to danmei (m/m romance), but my sense is that mainland baihe readers (and potentially other Sinophone audiences in Asia) do not really see baihe and danmei as having particularly close links beyond the fact that they deal with same-gender romance. In fact, I I've seen more mainland baihe readers say they also read yanqing (f/m romance, whose popularity runs rings around both danmei and baihe) than baihe readers say they also read danmei. There is also limited overlap between baihe and danmei in terms of their authorship. There are more authors who write yanqing+baihe than authors who write danmei+baihe, and I can think of no major danmei author who also writes baihe, or vice versa. To date, the only author I can definitively point to who writes both danmei and baihe (as well as yanqing) is Xiao Wu Jun (小吾君) who, while not unknown, is not exactly a major author. There seems to be limited overlap between baihe and danmei in terms of popular subgenres as well. Again, I'm not very familiar with danmei as a genre, but my sense is that a good number of the popular works are historical novels or xianxia novels, while a significant proportion of popular baihe novels are contemporary romances (which would, I think, be legible to a reader of Western genre romance as such). In terms of sheer audience numbers, baihe is very much regarded as a niche genre relative to danmei (quite popular) and yanqing (massively popular).

Having impressed you with my vibes-based ramblings and multiple admissions of ignorance, let's get down to what I do know about the genre. Under the headings below, you'll find information about where baihe novels are published, a list of major baihe authors (plus a few who specialise in specific niche subgenres), a list of notable works that I think provide a useful foundation for understanding the genre, and information about adaptations of baihe novels. A major caveat is that I'm focusing almost exclusively on works by mainland Chinese authors, both because these make up the greatest proportion of baihe novels and because I'm most familiar with them. There are also baihe novels by authors from elsewhere in the Sinosphere, most notably Taiwan, but I am much less familiar with them, so that will need to be the subject of another post (preferably by someone who knows the field much better than I do!)

( Baihe novels and where to find them )

( On the state of baihe novel translations )

( Top 10 current baihe authors )

( 10+ baihe novels that are helpful for understanding the genre )

( A note about adaptations )

I am grateful to xiaozhu for providing valuable input (and making sure I didn't say anything too obviously wrong) into this post. Read their translation of baihe showbiz tragedy Burn here. Special thanks to superborb for doing the thankless grunt work of proofreading and checking each link.