🏳️🌈 LGBTQ+ Asian Literature
Quiet Power. Bold Stories. Unforgettable Voices.
Queer stories in Asian literature don’t always shout; they often whisper. These are stories of tenderness, survival, identity, and grief. Some are bold and defiant. Others unfold slowly, through shared silence, longing, and family not defined by blood.
This is a curated selection of novels and poetry by Asian and Asian diaspora writers, each offering a unique perspective on queerness, from trans joy to gay love, from chosen family to quiet resistance. Read slowly. These are books that stay with you.
📚 Featured Reads
🖋 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
A queer Vietnamese American man, a caregiving bond with an elderly woman, and a life stitched together in the shadows of grief and addiction.
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🖋 When Haru Was Here by Rainie Oet
A ghost, a friendship, and a queer love that lingers. This gentle YA novel explores loss, memory, and identity with aching honesty.
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🖋 Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park
Funny, raw, and deeply personal, a novel about a gay Korean man navigating love, sex, and illness in Seoul.
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🖋 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
A letter from son to mother becomes a meditation on trauma, queerness, and language. Heartbreaking and beautifully written.
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🖋 Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Poetry that mourns, remembers, and reclaims. Vuong’s debut is a queer immigrant’s hymn, tender, brutal, unforgettable.
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🖋 Walking Practice by Dolki Min
A transgressive, genre-bending novel about a shape-shifting alien navigating gender, hunger, and otherness. Queerness as metaphor and reality.
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🖋 Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan
A surreal, multi-generational epic featuring a transmasc character in rural Korea. Gender, power, and reinvention blur in dreamlike prose.
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🖋 Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
A comforting novel with a quietly affirming portrayal of Eriko, a trans woman and parent figure. Loss, food, family, and queer joy.
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🖋 Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
A Korean mother grapples with her daughter’s queerness, her partner, and the caregiving job that exposes her to further marginalization. A powerful, quiet novel about shame, resistance, and love withheld.
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