Jaime Woo

Jaime Woo focuses on the intersection between queerness, culture and technology. His book Meet Grindr, which dissected the infamous hookup app's design and explored the impact on its users, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Best Nonfiction. He is based in Toronto.

January Nonfiction: "The Birthday Banquet" by Jaime Woo

I think of my grandmother sometimes and wonder what hypothetical good it would do to come out to her at this point. “It’d probably kill her,” my partner says. The truth is that I am not ready for another version of my grandmother, one who might reject me, just as she is not ready for another version of me.

My grandmother turned 100 last year. The celebration was, like most years, dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Day. The number of tables has grown as my cousins and I now bring partners and, for some, children. Four tables of four generations, spanning a century of living. We marveled at what she’d seen in her lifetime, from her childhood in rural China, where she awaited a marriage proposal by crafting paper flowers, through the Cultural Revolution and her arrival in Canada half a century ago.