What do gong and shou mean in danmei?

Open a danmei listing and the summary will tell you, before it tells you the plot, which of the two men is the gong and which is the shou. New readers ask what gong and shou mean, get told "top and bottom," and then watch an argument break out under the answer. The argument is the interesting part.

What gong and shou mean

攻 (gōng) means to attack; 受 (shòu) means to receive. In danmei they label the two halves of the main couple by their sexual role: the gong is the insertive partner, the shou the receptive one. The terms came from Japanese BL, where the same characters are read seme and uke, and Chinese fandom kept the kanji and changed the pronunciation. Every pairing gets written gong-first: a listing that says "Shen Wei x Zhao Yunlan" has told you who's who by word order alone.

What the words carry in Chinese

Inside the fandom the labels are a taxonomy. There's the 强攻 (strong gong), the 弱受 (weak shou), the 忠犬攻 (loyal-dog gong, devoted and a little dumb), the 女王受 (queen shou, in charge of everything except that one thing), the 渣攻 (scum gong, who'll end up in the crematorium), the 互攻 (reversible couple, which sends some readers running and others cheering). A Chinese reader scanning a summary uses these the way a romance reader uses "grumpy/sunshine": a fast description of the dynamic, not a rulebook.

Which is where the trouble starts. In the source fandom, gong and shou describe a bedroom role and, loosely, a flavor of personality. They don't automatically mean who's taller, older, richer, or in charge. A shou can be the emperor and the gong his bodyguard; a gong can be the one crying.

How translators handle it

Most keep the pinyin. "Gong" and "shou" appear untranslated in fan translations, in tags, and increasingly in licensed editions' glossaries, on the theory that readers who've found danmei have already learned the words. It's accurate and it sidesteps English's baggage; the newcomer, though, sees two nonsense syllables and has to look them up, and the lookup usually says "top/bottom," which brings the baggage right back.

Some translate as "top" and "bottom." Clear, immediate, and widely understood. The problem is that English gay slang packs those words with assumptions, dominant and submissive, masculine and feminine, that the Chinese doesn't. A reader who learns "shou means bottom" will then be confused by a shou who runs a crime syndicate, and may decide the translation got it wrong, when it's the label that's loose.

A few use "seme" and "uke," borrowing the Japanese that English-speaking BL readers already knew. This works for readers who came through manga and jars for everyone else, and it erases the fact that the book is Chinese.

Why English readers argue about it

Because English readers came to the words with an idea already attached. Western fandom had spent years fighting over whether top/bottom labels are reductive, and danmei's gong/shou looked like the same fight in a new alphabet. So some readers refuse the labels entirely, some insist they're only about sex, and some, mostly newer readers, treat them as the personality shorthand the source fandom never quite intended and get upset when a book breaks the pattern.

Both sides are half right. In the source culture the labels are lighter than English makes them, and heavier than "just sex," because the tag taxonomy really does describe temperament. Gong and shou are a fandom convention, and the books worth reading tend to break it.

What we'd choose

Keep the pinyin, explain it once, and never let it leak into the prose. The words belong in tags, glossaries and summaries, where readers expect them. Inside the story, the characters should be described by what they do, and the role should show in scenes rather than labels. A made-up summary line, "Iron-fisted general gong x soft-spoken physician shou," tells you the shape; the chapter where the physician sets the general's arm without asking permission tells you the truth.

How to read it comfortably

Treat gong and shou as the direction of one arrow and nothing else. Then let the book surprise you about who's holding the bow. For a translation that keeps the labels in the tags and out of the text, so the characters get to be people on the page, read it in Crossleaf.