The best books inspired by history with queer Chinese protagonists

This book is a fantastical retelling of the Hongwu Emperor’s rise to power, with the emperor re-imagined as a non-binary afab person. It’s billed as Mulan meets The Song of Achilles, but I vastly preferred it to both those narratives; the nascent emperor, Zhu Chongba, becomes gloriously ruthless in a way that defies their gender. There’s also a gay eunuch point-of-view character with an incredibly tragic backstory, who almost steals the show.

It’s very character-driven, which helps temper its epic scope. I don’t usually love stories with this much military/political scheming, but I absolutely loved this book. It’s a duology, with the second book expected in 2023.

I’ve been reading Malinda Lo for over a decade, but this is my all-time favorite of hers. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is set in 1950s San Francisco, during the Red Scare, and has a coming-of-age plot with a Chinese American girl (Lily) falling in love with her white baby butch classmate (Kath). Lily wants to work in STEM, which is almost as impossible as her budding sapphic desires for an interracial relationship. The titular Telegraph Club is a lesbian bar where Lily and Kath find people like them—representation that’s still precious and revelatory, even 70 years later. 

This is the only book on the list that doesn’t have a fantastical bent, but you won’t miss it, because the 50s were weird enough. It’s a beautiful Bildungsroman that made me grateful for the societal progress we’ve made, but it’s also a warning about how governments still use paranoia and fear of the others to divide communities.

One Last Stop is an example of why I rarely read blurbs, because I’m allergic to spoilers, but it’s impossible to talk about this book without spoiling the premise (which is on the blurb), so here it is: a floundering Southern plus-sized bi white girl meets a Chinese butch on the train in New York, and said butch turns out to be displaced in time from the 1970s.

It’s a new adult sapphic rom-com, with fated love, grumpy x sunshine, and found family tropes, plus the whole “teaching a time traveler about the internet” thing. It was cute and heartfelt, like everything from McQuiston, with a side dose of queer history lessons.

China only ever had one empress regnant: Wu Zetian, who reigned from 690 to 705CE. Iron Widow recasts Zetian as a mech pilot, battling misogyny from the cockpit of a giant, transforming robot.

Iron Widow is a YA science fantasy with an FMM poly triad. It’s joyously high-energy, and at points, you have to turn off your sense of disbelief and just go with it, because it’s YA. Historians treated Zetian more harshly than her male counterparts; I’m grateful for this homage that literally puts her in the pilot’s seat of her own story.

Jessamyn Teoh was raised in the US, but when her family moves back to her birth country of Malaysia, she’s forced to deal with culture clash, her extended family, being in the closet, and getting haunted.

Set in contemporary Malaysia, Black Water Sister invokes history via dreams from Jess’s ghostly grandmother, who has passed on a bunch of intergenerational trauma. Cho writes much of the dialogue in Manglish (Malaysian English), which was so nostalgic for me—disapproving aunties surround poor Jess, showering her with both their expectations and their love.

The Black Water Sister herself is a deity of female vengeance and rage, and that theme echoes throughout the book. It’s a new adult urban fantasy that made me feel so seen as a Third Culture Kid.