Crystal Boys, is widely known as the first gay novel in twentieth-century literature written in Chinese. First published in 1983, it was issued twice in traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan, seven times in simplified Chinese characters in the People's Republic of China, and pirated once in Hong Kong while in serialization in Modern Literature, a journal founded by Pai in the fifties. Hugely acclaimed and critically canonized, Crystal Boys was filmed in 1986, made into a television series in 2003, and adapted into a play in English in 1997 and in Chinese in 2014 (this version teleplayed by Taiwan Public Broadcasting in 2015). Besides this English rendition by Howard Goldblatt, the novel is available in French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese translations.