For English readers

What this is

A reading room for Chinese-speaking queer and trans people. Not an archive (transchinese.org keeps the archive), not a support group. Just reading: once you have survived, what can you sink into, and how can you live.

Most of it is in Chinese, because most of it was written for a teenager in China who needed it. But some of it crosses.

Start with the glossary

Words That Don’t Cross is bilingual. Each entry is a word that does not translate cleanly between Chinese and English queer life, and what gets lost in the gap: 同志 (the revolutionary “comrade” turned queer self-name), 药娘 (the girl who takes medicine), 搭伙过日子 (getting through the days together), 性/别 (the slash as a wound). If you read one thing here, read that.

What you can read in English

Taiwanese queer literature has been partly translated. These are the ones that crossed:

• Pai Hsien-yung, Crystal Boys (孽子, 1983), tr. Howard Goldblatt. Where it all begins: the boys expelled from home who gather in Taipei’s New Park.
• Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (鳄鱼手记, 1994), tr. Bonnie Huie, and Last Words from Montmartre (蒙马特遗书, 1996), tr. Ari Larissa Heinrich. She died in Paris in 1995, at 26.
• Chu T’ien-wen, Notes of a Desolate Man (荒人手记, 1994), tr. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin.
• Chi Ta-wei, The Membranes (膜, 1995), tr. Ari Larissa Heinrich. Queer science fiction.
• Yang Shuang-zi, Taiwan Travelogue (台湾漫游录, 2020), tr. Lin King. National Book Award for Translated Literature, 2024.

The scholarship in the “想” (think) section is largely in English already: Howard Chiang, Petrus Liu, Hongwei Bao, Lisa Rofel, Tze-lan Sang, Fran Martin. Start with the field map.

What is coming

A podcast, 酷爱 (Queer Love). Chinese episodes here; English episodes on Why Be Happy, introducing Chinese queer work to English readers.

If you are looking for people rather than books, write. There is no group here.