“I just don’t want to deal with you anymore,” his first text read. Then, excruciating ellipses. “I did it for as long as I could.”
I read Ray’s words over and over, scouring for hairline cracks, for any grip-hold to argue my way back into coparenting Appa, the gentle, doe-eyed puppy we adopted together during the panini. Before Ray and I split for good. But like the laundry list of other incidents, all conspiring to make 2022 impossible for me, my pleas fell flat. My calls and texts went unanswered. There was no justice to be had.
Earlier that year, my gung gung (maternal grandpa) passed. In our grief, we carried out his last wishes through a minefield of strangleheld resentments and familial relationships strained by decades-old frictions left too-long undiscussed. Sudden health complications landed me in repeat ER visits. And most notably, my drag event was stormed by far-right extremists, seizing viral headlines. After, I was inundated with transphobic death threats, love letters, trauma dumps, and journalist requests to relive the experience over and over.
Less than a month after the hate crime, Ray, a divorcée, informed me that he had fallen for someone else, but padded the revelation by promising that I would always get to see our dog, Appa.
That is, until months later, when he told me via text that I would never see Appa again.
In this special shade of heartbreak, my debut middle-grade novel, The Queen Bees of Tybee County, was acquired by Quill Tree. A story about a Chinese American seventh grade basketball star who learns to embrace his queer identity and Chinese American heritage by competing in a southern pageant in drag.
A story about hope.
Of course I was stoked(!), but I’d be lying if I told you that the timing of this news felt like a cruel joke. How in the hell was I supposed to conjure hope for children at such a wretched time in my life? In the aftermath of personal and viral calamity?
Well, as you might’ve guessed, books helped me claw myself from bedrot. I dove into the page, and now have ten stories to thank for resurrecting me from my despondency. For helping me to feel again.
***
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by Muriel Leung
One would expect a sort of punk rock nihilism from a post apocalyptic tale about ecological ruin. Instead, in How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster. I found a fierce, unexpected hope from the radical act of turning toward and naming one’s pain.
In this story, acid rainstorms have mutated New York City into a toxic hellscape. After a devastating breakup, Mira, a Chinese American woman, returns to her childhood home to start a radio show in hopes of finding new connection. Meanwhile, she forms unexpected bonds with her building’s many inhabitants—cockroaches and ghosts alike—who all yearn for meaning and connection amidst the world’s imminent collapse.
This unflinching debut taught me about connection enduring not in spite of disaster, but through it. To me, this feels something like hope. The tough love salvo I needed to get up in the morning.
We are Okay follows Marin, a college freshman who has fled her San Francisco home for a snowy, near-empty New York dorm after the sudden death of her grandfather—the only family she had left. She arrives with nothing but her phone, wallet, top ramen, and a photo of her mother, cutting off all ties to her past, including with her best friend and former girlfriend, Mabel.
This story is an aching meditation in the isolation, nonlinearity, and the uncertainty of grief. Because despite our impulse to map it, this state has no rhyme, reason, or structure. Marin’s story gave me tacit permission to feel loss in all of its waves, and reminded me that the path forward often appears in the ones who stick around, who claw back the edges, refusing to let us disappear.
Since I Lay My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell
In Since I Lay My Burden Down, DeShawn, a Black, gay punk from Oakland, returns to his rural Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, prompting a reckoning with the ghosts of his past. Through flashbacks, the novel explores queer identity, family dynamics, and all of the messy intersections of race, queerness and Southern culture.
This story was fiercely, boldly honest. When I read it, I was running away from feeling, and it was a rude awakening that eventually, we will be brought to a stop. DeShawn reminded me that, in our pain, we do not owe anyone neatness. That if you insist on owning your story in your own terms, then confronting even the most painful, messy parts of our pasts can end up fortifying who we are today.
Murray Out of Water by Taylor Tracy
In Murray Out of Water, Twelve-year-old Murray O’Shea, who has a mystical connection with the ocean, is displaced inland when a hurricane ravages her Jersey Shore home, severing her bond with the sea and prompting a journey of self-discovery. Now staying with her aunt and uncle, Murray forms new friendships and frontiers as she begins to explore her burgeoning queer identity.
A salt-water salve for anyone in the throes of violent change, this radiant novel-in-verse explores preadolescent self-discovery and resilience in a way that cradles you, like a raft on uncertain tides. Murray shows us a path forward, illuminated by the joy we seek and the belonging we find in one another, even if the tides pull us far from home.
This story single-handedly restored my lost faith in Jersey boys (where Ray was from).
The Long Run follows two South Jersey high school seniors—Bash, a bi runner grappling with alienation, and Sandro, a gay field athlete hailing from a chaotic and emotionally-distant Italian American household. Bash and Sandro cross paths at a busted party one night, and soon foster a bond that challenges them both to confront their vulnerabilities and redefine what strength truly means.
The Long Run balances a raw, honest—and often, gutting—exploration of toxic masculinities, family dysfunction, and dauntless vulnerability, with a levity and tenderness that cuts to the marrow. This story was a kaleidoscopic world of feeling. I was mesmerized. Sandro and Bash reminded me that sometimes the bravest act can be just letting someone in.
La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
La Movida is a genre-defying poetry collection told through the voice of a “lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler,” speaking to themes of anti-colonialism, queer punk aesthetics, and Wikipedia-rabbit-hole-inducing Chicana feminist thought.
Best read in the glow of a burning cop car, this tapestry of poems bottles the paradox of healing through the ebb and flow of head-on confrontation and letting go. La Movida offers us worlds both as immense and glorious as a crashing empire and as intimate as whispered pillow talk. It reminds me that even amidst global calamity, there can also be connection, transformation, humor and the will to keep on keepin’ on.
The 57 Bus recounts the real-life public incident between two San Francisco Bay Area teens: Richard, a Black teen, who sets fire to the skirt of agender teen, Sasha, on public transit, in Oakland, CA in 2013. Uncovering both Sasha’s identity and life as a nonbinary teen, and Richard’s journey, profoundly impacted by systemic challenges and personal loss, The 57 Bus explores how local community response, restorative justice, and enduring empathy, compelled understanding and resolution in the aftermath.
Thoroughly researched and deeply nuanced, this story is a humanizing portrait of two individuals in constant dialogue with the ruthless structures crowding them in. I devoured this book mid-lockdown, when my window into the world was reduced to my phone screen. The 57 Bus reminded me of the lives lived before and beyond sensationalist headlines, and the transformative power of human connection.
King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender
Some middle grades are so expertly woven that they replant you firmly, viscerally, in the soles of your younger self. Such is this tale, set in a small Louisiana town. In King and the Dragonflies, Twelve-year-old Kingston “King” James navigates the sudden loss of his older brother, Khalid, and finds quiet solace in the belief that Khalid has become a dragonfly. As King grapples with fresh grief and his emerging sexual identity, his former friend, Sandy, who is rumored to be gay, soon goes missing. King soon faces a moral dilemma to turn away or face rekindling their lost friendship.
King and the Dragonflies is a story of grief, emerging queer identity, and a self-acceptance shining ever-brighter than the societal expectations that hem us into throwing each other out. Rich, complicated and honest, this novel shows us the transformative potential of empathy across generational and ideological divides. These characters helped me believe in people again.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Set against mid-century San Francisco, Last Night at the Telegraph Club follows seventeen-year-old Lily Hu, a Chinese American teenager navigating her blossoming queer identity amidst the oppressive constraints of the Red Scare era. Lily’s absconds to the Telegraph Club, a lesbian bar in North Beach, where she begins to understand and embrace her sexuality, and her feelings soon bloom for a girl from the other side of town.
This treasure of historical fiction offers everything I’ve ever asked for: Chinese American history, runaway queer romance, and the enduring human spirit in spite of Red Scare raids and widespread sinophobic and homophobic prejudice. This novel is a gift to the world, offering language for so many feelings I’d since dismissed as nameless, or thought forgotten in the prism of teenaged memory.
Michelle Tea’s Valencia follows one chaotic year in the life of a young lesbian poet in San Francisco’s Mission District. Through a battery of flashbang relationships, this SF classic feels like a motorcycle ride, and floats us like cigarette smoke through themes of love, identity, and self-discovery, against the gritty backdrop of punk bars, poetry readings, and 90s queer life.
This novel was what first inspired me to write. As a teen, I remember reading this and thinking, “Books can be like this??” After mostly reading the forced “classics” in school, this story made me realize literature could actually reflect my life, instead of regurgitating stilted dead white dude tropes. I reread this in 2022, and read it back whenever I need to jump the car of my imagination and will to live.
