Top Asian LGBTQ+ Reads for Lunar New Year
Culture
Here are a few must-read books for the Lunar New Year holiday period about some of the cultural complexities and struggles endured by LGBTQ+ Asian people around the world.
We Are Totally Normal, by Naomi Kanakia
In this queer contemporary novel, Nandan’s perfect plan for junior year goes awry after he hooks up with a guy for the first time. Nandan’s got a plan to make his junior year perfect, but hooking up with his friend Dave isn’t part of it, especially because Nandan has never been into guys.
Still, Nandan’s willing to give a relationship with him a shot. But the more his anxiety grows about what his sexuality means for himself, his friends, and his social life, the more he wonders whether he can just take it all back. Is breaking up with Dave, the only person who’s ever really gotten him – worth feeling “normal” again? Read it to find out.
A World Between, by Emily Hashimoto
A college fling between two women turns into a lifelong connection, and spells out a new kind of love story for a millennial, immigrant America. In 2004, college students Eleanor Suzuki and Leena Shah meet in an elevator. Both girls are on the brink of adulthood, each full of possibility and big ideas, and they fall into a whirlwind romance. Years later, Eleanor and Leena collide on the streets of San Francisco. Although grown and changed and each separately partnered, the two find themselves, once again, irresistibly pulled back together.
The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen
In this debut graphic novel, fairy tales are the only way one boy can communicate with his Vietnamese immigrant parents. But how will he find the words to tell them that he’s gay? Tien and his mother come from different cultures. She’s an immigrant from Vietnam still struggling with English; he’s been raised in America. However, through the fairy tales he checks out from the local library, those differences are slowly being erased.
But as much as Tien’s mother’s English continues to improve as he reads her tales of love, loss, and travel across distant shores, there’s one conversation that still eludes him; how to come out to her and his father. It’s hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tien, he doesn’t even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he’s going through? Is there a way to tell them he’s gay? A powerful read about family, identity and the enduring magic of stories.
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
This national best seller and winner of the 2022 Stonewall Book Award, is about a runaway a trans girl, a harvester of souls for hell, and a family of refugee alien doughnut makers who collide in unexpected and wondrous ways. Katrina Nguyen is on the run. She’s escaped her violent father and crashes in Los Angeles with a queer friend, except now that she’s actually here, he’s not exactly as welcoming as she'd hoped. But she’s got her laptop, her hormones, and her violin; everything she needs for now.
Shizuka Satomi is looking for her next student. The world knows her as a legendary violin teacher, sometimes called the Queen of Hell. What no one knows is that she’s had 49 years to actually deliver seven souls to hell. Now her time is almost up, and she wants her last soul to be someone special. Lan Tran and her family run Starrgate Donut, but they too have a secret: Their doughnuts are replicated, not baked, and they are alien refugees from a galactic war. Used to rejection and hatred, Katrina can’t bring herself to trust the offer of private violin lessons from a striking stranger. But as her life gradually begins to intertwine with the lives of Shizuka, Lan, and other colorful, well-drawn characters, everyone receives unexpected gifts of tenderness. Musicians selling their souls to hell shouldn’t fit in the same story as alien doughnut makers building a stargate, but somehow all these elements combine to create something wild and beautiful.
As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found. Filled with mouth-watering descriptions of food and heart-swelling meditations on music, this novel is often described as an "unexpected gift."
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir, by T Kira Madden
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.
With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawaii to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.
The Walking Boy, by Lydia Kwa
The Walking Boy is a quest novel set in early eighth-century Tang Dynasty China, in the final days of the rule of the first Female Emperor Wu Zhao. The ailing hermit monk Harelip sends his disciple Baoshi on a pilgrimage from Mount Hua to Chang’an, the Western capital; Baoshi is the “walking boy” charged with locating Harelip’s missing former lover Ardhanari. Baoshi lives with a secret only his Master knows, and he is filled with fears of being discovered. On his journey, Baoshi crosses paths with both commoners and imperial officials, as well as others who take delight in their queer identities; in doing so, he is released powerfully from his past shame.
Lydia Kwa's novel is a book of quiet subversion, upending classical Chinese tropes with contemporary ideas around gender and feminism. Filled with psychological complexities, magic and poetic allusions to classical Chinese literature, The Walking Boy explores the intrigue of inner alchemy while exorcising the ghosts of history.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father, despite his hard-won citizenship, Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
Crystal Boys, by Pai Hsien-Yung and translated by Howard Goldblatt
Published in 1983, Crystal Boys is often credited as the first gay novel written in Chinese. Whether or not this is true, it is a deeply formative novel in the Chinese-speaking world, and has taught me so much about subverting ideas of nation and citizenship. Set during the period of martial law in Taiwan, the book follows Ah-Qing, a young Taiwanese man who is brutally exiled from his father’s home after being caught having a romantic tryst with a fellow student. He flees to Taipei, where he discovers a community of gay men in New Park, creating a new home and sense of belonging among them.
Crystal Boys is full of humor and love and desire and pain and myth – it’s not only about forging a new space of possibility, but about the limits of that process, too. It highlights the cyclical nature of generational violence and the enduring love between friends.
If you prefer watching films, you can also check out these must-watch movies that explore the struggles that many Asian LGBTQ+ people face around the world.
