The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Two Dads and Three Girls
By Nick (Yu) He
Published by the author, 2019
Five stars

“If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred, and expand everyone’s lives.”

Recommended by a friend, I waited until I had a quiet couple of days to settle into this personal story of a gay Chinese man finding a new life and creating a family in the West. Nick He’s memoir might seem a little premature – since the author is not yet forty – but, clearly he was driven by a sense that telling his story was somehow imperative, that it was a story that needed to be shared.

I can’t say I disagree. There is something so startlingly innocent, so wide-eyed about He’s telling of his life story that it is hard to resist. The writing is stilted and makes no attempt at being literary, but its sincerity makes up for it. It is, after all the story that matters. A generation younger than I am (i.e. young enough to be my son), He’s journey from Hunan in China to Seattle in the American Northwest is both epic and intensely personal. The eeriest thing about it, to me, is the fact that, while every single thing in Nick He’s life is different from mine, it is also entirely recognizable and parallel to every single thing in my own life. Nick He and I are entirely different in every way – and yet somehow just the same. This is exactly why the life stories of LGBT people are so important: each of us is unique, but we share something that ties us all together.

Born He Yu in Hunan Province, Nick’s parents moved to Guangzhou for his education, pushing him relentlessly (in what has become something of a Chinese stereotype for Americans) to excel as a student. Success at the best university in China let him to a graduate degree and an American nickname at Duke University in North Carolina, and then to a career with Microsoft.

Throughout all of this, described with clear-eyed anguish, Nick is haunted by the specter of being gay in a world where it is not acceptable, or even imaginable. He ultimately flees from the culture in which he was raised, feeling that the only way to be free and happy is to reject everything he’s been taught as a Chinese man. It is only after he achieves something like happiness that he begins to realize that perhaps not everything his parents and his native culture taught him is wrong.

As a gay man who came out in the seventies and ultimately adopted children with his life partner (now husband) in the 1990s, it was stunning to feel such strong empathy with Nick’s story, in spite of how alien much of it felt to me at first.

Our stories matter. More gay men and women need to write memoirs, and more publishers need to step up and embrace these stories. Of course, self-publishing and (dare I say it) Amazon have change the face of the world of books.