Book review: Shanghai Lalas, by Lucetta Kam Yip-lo
The lives of lalas and transgender people in China have changed in some dramatic ways in the past two decades, with communities rapidly expanding with the help of the internet and support from established networks in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China
by Lucetta Kam Yip-lo
HKU Press
The lives of and transgender people in China have changed in some dramatic ways in the past two decades, with communities rapidly expanding with the help of the internet and support from established networks in Hong Kong and Taiwan. bars and events have become popular in major cities, and more couples are living together. But although homosexuality has not been classified as a crime or a mental illness since the 1990s, the pressure to conform remains strong - leading some to resist by migrating away from their hometowns or by marrying gay men.
(lesbian, female bisexual and transgender) communities are familiar to author Lucetta Kam Yip-lo, who was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, where she has long been a member of the ("comrade") activist community. She now works as an assistant professor at Baptist University researching Chinese female , who she says are treated like "sexual non-subjects [where] their same-sex desires and relationships are frequently trivialised, " even as they are "tolerated".
In this book Kam is upfront about her sexuality and how she needed to work to maintain her distance from her subjects: 25 whom she interviewed in Shanghai between 2005 and 2011.
