I grew to feel much sympathy for what his life must have been like-forced to navigate my reckless mother while also learning how to live in America during the 1980s and 1990s, when anti-Asian sentiments in the country were at an all-time high. My father was a complex figure for me growing up-a Chinese immigrant, and the only one from his entire family in the United States. “So that you could figure out what it meant to be an adult on your own.”), and then to South Korea not long after that. My mother, with whom I had a scattered and inconsistent relationship, hopped from job to job until she moved to Phoenix, Arizona, just before I turned 18, (“I did it for you,” she defended. My single father worked at NASA for almost my entire childhood and young adulthood, only recently retiring. I grew up in Clear Lake, a small suburb between Houston and Galveston, about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston. But it was also because, for all intents and purposes, queerness (especially as expressed by either non-binary, trans, or femme bodies) just didn’t exist in the world when I was a young person. Similar to how I often felt like an imposter in my own racial communities (as a mixed-race, half-Chinese and half-white person), I struggled with believing that I was queer enough, a feeling that stemmed, at least in part, from how late in life I came to realize something so core to my identity. Friends I made at that time took me to American Eagle and bought me my first flannel, and we swapped coming-out stories and childhood crushes. We asked one another across a booth at an all-night diner (at least, one that existed at the time) which L Word character we identified with most and which we’d be most tempted to make out with. The queers I was surrounded with at the time were the ones who showed me the ropes. When I first met and fell in love with the person who loosely inspired the character Juniper, I was what they called a “baby queer.” I was 30, I had long, straight hair down to my waist, I dressed feminine because that’s what I believed I was supposed to do as an AFAB, and I hadn’t yet come out to my parents, my siblings, my therapists, or anyone else close to me.
But this relationship, collaged for the novel, was far from my own experience as a teenager growing up in a suburb of Houston, Texas. When audiences ask me about the characters’ relationship, I say that, when writing this book, instead of envisioning a queer future, I instead envisioned a queer past-one in which I could have had such a romance when I was a teenager. The book centers a queer Asian romance between Poppy, a half-Chinese, half-Japanese queer teen and her girlfriend, Juniper, a self-identified butch Korean girl. For the last month, I’ve been on tour for my first book, Dear Twin, a queer Asian young adult novel about twins and childhood trauma.
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