Queer historical fiction always feels particularly powerful to me because it’s the author saying we have always been here. It’s laying claim to the canon. It’s a tether to the past and all those who have come before you. It also tends to ask about intersectionality. By often taking place in significant historical moments–in this list, there are independence movements, occupations, racial segregations, and martial laws–it can explore how the characters are shaped by multiple sets of politics and identities.
My first adult novel, When They Burned the Butterfly, is about the rapid transformations of postcolonial Singapore in 1972–just a few years after independence in 1965–and the increasingly throttled Chinese secret societies who, in this alternate history, draw magic from gods. Specifically, the book follows a girl gang called Red Butterfly who follow a fire goddess, and the schoolgirl that becomes entangled with one of its leaders after the violent death of her mother.
It’s a coming-of-age and creation of an identity for both the nation and for Adeline, the lesbian schoolgirl, who loses her only parent but gets adopted into a found family and falls in love, even as the pressures of the underworld and the changing city threaten to take all that away, too. It’s a love letter to my home as much as it is a critique and an exploration of its survival anxiety; it’s also a nod to queer history and reclaiming the nation-building story, in a way.
I’m particularly interested in histories featuring queer Asian women — a trifold intersection that’s difficult to find. Even putting together this list required some excavating, as I realized I had to especially search for books that featured a wider range of settings and cultures.
Here are thirteen other works of historical fiction featuring bisexual, lesbian, and otherwise sapphic Asian characters, ascending through time, space, homeland, and diaspora.
1360s China: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan
This military epic genderbends and retells the rise of Zhu Chongba, who overthrew the Mongol Yuans to become the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. In this version, Zhu is a daughter who assumes her brother’s identity and claims his gloriously prophesied fate. Zhu–who’s possibly better described as non-binary–falls in love with a woman she meets along the conquering campaign, and the other principal character, the Mongol general Ouyang, is in love with his crown prince. It moves through taut battles and court politics, grappling with fate and power and how people keep or betray themselves for the roles they feel responsible to play out, gendered or otherwise.
1920s, New York: The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
As a teenager studying The Great Gatsby, I became intrigued by Jordan Baker and the slightly queer position she occupies in the original text: androgynously named and described, sort of aloof from the entanglements of her companions. Enter Nghi Vo and an explicitly bisexual Vietnamese adoptee Jordan Baker living it up in a literally demonic Jazz Age, even as the equivalent of the 1924 Immigration Act makes it illegal for Asians to come to America. Adopted into the white, wealthy circles where she meets the beautiful Daisy, and yet never quite a part of them, this Jordan’s various complex in-between positions takes the original novel’s themes of class and illusion in a vivid new direction. There’s a fabulist element, where Jordan can make doppelgangers from paper cuttings. It’s evocative: the book asks how much of all their identities is similarly fragile, who gets to keep pretenses, and for whom was the 1920s truly a “Golden Age”.
I’m only officially listing one book per author, but Nghi Vo’s sophomore novel, Siren Queen, crosses coasts to feature a sapphic Chinese American actress in pre-Hayes Code 1930s Hollywood, where studios are fae deals for your name and identity and the silver screen has a price for your soul, especially if you’re an outsider to begin with.
1938, Taiwan: Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi
If ‘found footage’ is a trope, Yang Shuang-zi introduces ‘found translation’ in this book, where Aoyama Chizuko travels from Nagasaki to Taiwan longing to experience its authentic life and cuisine. She travels all over the island with a young Taiwanese woman hired as her interpreter, and becomes infatuated. A fascinating nesting-doll of structure, translation, power dynamics, and colonial examination: A Taiwanese translator adapts the book to ‘the ultimate colonial language of English’ by consulting the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel which in itself is pretending to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novelist’s travelogue, set in Japanese-occupied Taiwan.
1950s, South Africa: The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif
Amidst burgeoning Apartheid, The World Unseen focuses on the relationship of two women in the South Asian community in South Africa: an unorthodox cafe owner and a young, traditional wife who begins to question her own conventions amidst their unexpected attraction. For a book set in Apartheid, I do wish it dealt more meaningfully with the African community and characters. But it’s still a poignant capture of an incredibly underrepresented diaspora, and how they were affected by the segregations.
1954, San Francisco: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Dedicated to butches and femmes, the book is a love letter to both Chinatown and the lesbian bar scene of San Fransisco in the 50s, and follows Chinese American teenager Lily as she discovers the scene and begins to fall in love with a classmate. But of course the time period enacts its pressures on this first love and queer safe havens: from not just bar raids, but the ongoing anti-Communist Red Scare amidst the Cold War. Intersections of race, gender, and sexuality are a fundamental part of this coming-of-age; we see how love, identity, and duty interplay not only for Lily but earlier generations of her family, and their entire community.
1960s, Mumbai: Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel
In this one, the ten avatars of Vishnu are reflected in a young woman planning a revolution in an alternate India that was never liberated from the British in 1947. The novel follows Kalki over a decade of this rebellion, exploring both the impact of Empire as well as the difficult questions, violences, and sacrifices of revolutionary movements. Calling it an exhortation to keep fighting, Patel dedicates the book to her great-grandfather, who was an Indian freedom fighter. Struggle is long and belongs to all: the cast spans queer, religious, and caste lines, as well as focusing significantly on the women in the movement, one of whom Kalki has a complicated romantic relationship with.
1970s, Alberta: Prairie Ostrich by Tamai Kobayashi
In contrast, Prairie Ostrich is subtle and quiet, taking place in a rural small town in Alberta, Canada, and narrated by an 8-year old, bullied Japanese girl named Egg Murakami, whose family is still grieving after the recent death of her brother. Her parents are isolated and self-destructive, while her older sister Kathy is left to hold everyone together. The history of World War 2 and the deportation and relocations of Japanese Canadians haunts the backdrop as much as Egg’s brother does, and Kathy does her best to shield Egg from the world by changing the endings of sad stories that she reads. It’s through Egg’s not-quite-understanding eyes, however, that we observe Kathy navigating a romance with her ‘best friend’.
1980s, Taipei: Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
A seminal text in Taiwanese queer literature, set in the post-martial law era and published in a particularly significant period of fixation on transgressive sexualities in Taiwan. The main narrator is a depressed, loner lesbian named Lazi who enters a tumultuous relationship with a university classmate, and about Lazi’s group of queer friends. A second intertwining thread follows a crocodile who is terrified of being discovered as a crocodile and thus goes about Taipei disguised as a person. Already groundbreaking when it was published, it gained significant attention after Qiu’s death by suicide a year later. Today “Lala”, derived from Lazi, is a prominent slang for Chinese lesbians.
1980s, New York: Roses in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
In a similar vein to Telegraph Club, this follows a first-generation Pakistani Muslim girl growing up in 1980s Queens. It’s a bildungsroman in a classic sense, following Razia as she discovers the wider world and herself while navigating the ties of her family and community. Through it all are the close female friendships she comes into, even before she bumps into a beautiful schoolmate on the train, learns the word ‘lesbian’, and experiences first love. It’s a loving depiction of a culture even as she begins to reconfigure her relationship to tradition and the ways it does not love her back.
1980s, Los Angeles: The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li
Clearly there’s something particularly evocative about Hollywood, where performances and hidden selves abound. Moving between two timelines, The Manor of Dreams follows three generations of women in two intertwined Chinese American families after the death of matriarch Vivian Yin, who in this history was the first Asian actress to win an Oscar. As the families struggle over the inheritance of Vivian’s gothic floral manor, their buried secrets–and literal hauntings–emerge. It’s about putting down roots and the cost of the American Dream. It also follows two sapphic romances, one in each time period, and how they come to affect the family.
Another bonus mention here: Delayed Rays of Star by Amanda Lee Koe. Both Nghi Vo and Christina Li cited as inspiration the actress Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Asian film star. Delayed Rays takes this all the way, following three landmark women in film through the 20th century and imagining a brief relationship between Anna May Wong and the famously bisexual Marlene Dietrich.
1987, Cairo: The Philistine by Leila Marshy
In the late 1980s, a young woman leaves her Scottish-Canadian mother in Montreal to track down her estranged Palestinian father in Egypt. She ends up cancelling a flight to stay longer than intended–because the reconnection with him is slow, and because she falls into a relationship with an outspoken local artist (who, in turn, aspires to study abroad). It’s a journey of self-discovery and there’s a lot of desire for connection: with this woman, with her Palestinian heritage, and with her father, who moved to Egypt to be closer to the cause, and whom she has to learn to re-know. The book paints pictures of Cairo’s colorful urbanity, the Palestinian community there that Nadia encounters, and their displacements from the occupied territories–complicating ideas of what it means to be home and away.
1990s, California: America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
Though set in the Bay Area in the early 90s, the book is steeped in the context of the violent Marcos regime in 1970s-1990s Philippines, from which the protagonist Hero de Vera–who was part of the resistance–joins her uncle in California after being released from a prison camp and disowned by her parents. With vivid texture, especially on food, language, and Filipino pop culture, Castillo charts the experience of these migrants in the region across three generations of women, one of whom (Hero) is unapologetically sexual, bisexual and has a main romance with another woman. It’s a love letter to the diaspora community as much as it questions and engages with the narrative of ‘coming to America for a better life’.
1990s, Seoul: Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin
I’m pushing “historical fiction” a bit here, because it was written as a contemporary but only translated 20 years later (by Booker-shortlisted Anton Hur), prompting a retrospective author’s note. There, the author describes the experience of revisiting a politically turbulent time in Korea, when “stories of women were being systematically discriminated against”. Starting in the 70s, Violets introduces the main character with a violent childhood rejection from another girl, the first time she makes a bid for love. When we find her again as an adult–one insignificant individual in the big city–San is isolated and repressed, cut off from her own desire even as her yearning for connection comes out palpably in her writing, her observations of the other city lives, her grappling with male attention, and her burgeoning intimacy with the woman she works with at a flower shop. This isn’t an easy or cathartic queer book, but it is one of devastating clarity, and I think that’s part of the acknowledgement of historical lives as well.
About the Author
Wen-yi Lee likes writing about girls with bite, feral nature, and ghosts. She is the author of YA horror The Dark We Know and has published fiction and essays in venues like Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Reactor, and various anthologies. Her work has been supported by the National Centre of Writing in the UK and the National Arts Council of Singapore, where she is currently based. When They Burned The Butterfly is her adult debut.