Taking it home felt like too much of a statement. I read all of it in one breathless afternoon, standing in the corner of the shop, then put it back on the table. It was an open door, one that was also an affirmation of my existence. It was beautiful, melancholy, as much about grief as it was about coming of age and falling in love. To be queer and a person of colour, even more so.īut there, on a table in one of my childhood sanctuaries, was a book by a Chinese American author, one that retold Cinderella with lesbian protagonists. The message was clear: to be queer was to be an aberration. How could it be otherwise, when the little LGBTQ representation there was in TV shows, films and books showed me mostly gay white men? (The few women were also nearly always white, and seemed to die or were punished with alarming frequency.) There was no reflection of what it was to be a person of colour and not straight.
Queerness was for white people, after all. I’d gone through my teenage years arguing with my parents about gay rights, but ignored any possibility that the way I looked at some girls – the way I felt about them – meant I could be queer myself.
I read the blurb, flicked through the pages, and realised it wasn’t just a darker spin on Cinderella, but was also a queer retelling. It was possibly the first time I’d seen a book by a Chinese writer (fiction, that is – Adeline Yen Mah’s autobiography and Wild Swans were not exactly cheerful escapes.) It was definitely the first time I’d seen a Chinese writer in the YA section. “Lo? That’s Chinese, isn’t it?” I thought. There is one afternoon in that lost year that is clear and bright in my head, because it’s the day I found Malinda Lo’s book Ash, on a table in the young adult section. I had no clue what I wanted from life, and to escape the heavy-handed hints from my parents about law school, I’d run to the shop and look through the shelves. After I graduated from university, my memories are mostly of endless afternoons spent reading in my local Waterstones.
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