Can queer voices be funny, feminist, and Chinese at the same time? This Vancouver-based troupe thinks so.

On a summer night in early August, UniCome, a Vancouver-based stand-up troupe, presented its fourth show. A special edition to celebrate Vancouver’s Pride Month, the event featured a series of sets performed by LGBTQ people, in addition to two drag shows. While queer-themed stand-up comedy and drag performances are not uncommon in Canada’s third-largest city, what makes the group distinctive is its all-Chinese cast, and that all jokes are told in Mandarin.

Founded in early 2023, UniCome is one of the many stand-up collectives formed outside China by and for the Chinese LGBTQ and feminist communities. As part of an emerging global trend, similar groups have sprung up in other North American and European cities, such as New York and San Francisco. But according to the founder of UniCome, who prefers to be called Qīqī 七七, her troupe is the first of its kind to label itself as “queer feminist.”

Self-identifying as a cisgender queer woman, Qiqi told The China Project that her goal with UniCome is to create a public space for Mandarin-speaking gender/sexuality-based minorities living in Vancouver, a city that has witnessed a surge of immigrants from mainland China since the COVID-19 pandemic. This new wave of Chinese immigrants has further enlarged Vancouver’s Mandarin-speaking population in tandem with its already flourishing Cantonese community.

A recent report shows that more than a quarter of the residents in Metro Vancouver — a metropolitan area that has a population of more than 2.6 million people — do not use English or French, the country’s official languages, at home. Instead, Mandarin is the most spoken language among them.

Despite the increasing size of the Chinese population, Qiqi, who had been living in the city for several years, still struggled to find a space to discuss China-focused social and political issues, or a place where feminists and LGBTQ people of Chinese descent could gather regularly. “The demand for this sort of space is rising especially after the ‘white paper revolution,’” she remarked, referring to the series of protests that erupted across China in November 2022 as an expression of dissent against the country’s strict COVID-zero policy, which later galvanized overseas Chinese people and international students to launch demonstrations.

“Our public space should be dedicated to the value of anti-censorship,” Qiqi said. “Humor is a powerful tool to express dissident voices in these spaces.”

This statement was confirmed by Gǒudàn 狗蛋, an actor who had zero experience as a stand-up comedian before joining UniCome in March. Since then, they have performed four times. Prior to UniCome, Goudan, an international student who identifies as non-binary pansexual and is in their early 20s, was able to make friends with English-speaking queer students from school, but was still longing for a Chinese-speaking community. “I don’t have any other safe space to go [as a queer and feminist] in Vancouver,” they told The China Project.

For Goudan, the sense of safety partially came from the affirmative response from the audience. “My performances are mainly based on real experiences, but there’s an element of exaggeration to them as well. Many of these stories are related to private and even traumatic things that happened in my life,” they said. “But when I deliver them as something funny, it becomes a healing process.”

In one show, Goudan shared the dismissive and judgmental comments hurled at them by some Chinese men when they first started using a dating app a few years ago in Vancouver. Despite a strong feeling of discomfort, Goudan was not able to clap back at the moment, which made them feel even more powerless afterwards. After recounting the experience on the stage, Goudan concluded that it was these men who turned them from a gentle person into a “radical feminist.” The story received warm applause from the crowd.

“I felt both affirmed and surprised by the reaction, given that feminism is considered to be a derogatory term on the Chinese internet. Adding ‘radical’ into the mix just makes things more complicated,” Goudan said.

Another UniCome member, Felicity, an actor who identifies as non-binary trangender lesbian, also found public storytelling to be a source of healing power. Having advocated for transgender rights in China for several years, Felicity moved to Vancouver in 2022. She introduced her performances as based on the “traumatic and absurd” experiences she had back in China, “such as my exploration of transgender identity, the experiences of being closeted and having to conceal my gender expression, the social pressure on marriage and childbirth that my partner went through, the harassment from police.”

Felicity doesn’t shy away from telling political jokes. She characterized her comedy as “interweaving gender issues and political perspectives together.”

“We need to bring up political issues within the queer and feminist community,” she told The China Project. “I was so used to avoiding these topics back in China because of censorship, but now I can speak out when living outside of China.”

In the past few years, censorship on LGBTQ issues and crackdown on social activism has escalated in China. After the suspension of Shanghai PRIDE and a clampdown on university LGBTQ student groups in 2021, Beijing LGBT Center, an important organization with nearly 15 years of history, announced its permanent shutdown in May.

Felicity’s interest in comedy began when she watched famous Hong Kong comedian Dayo Wong Tze-wah’s two-hour show prior to the city’s handover to China in 1997. She was impressed by not only Wong’s quips and wits, but also his skillful storytelling that accurately conveyed Hong Kong people’s ambivalent feelings about their future.

Later, she found inspiration from Chengdu-based group Xiang Dang Nv Zi (相当女子 Xiāngdāng Nǚzǐ), a main force in organizing feminist stand-up comedy in China. Among its members, Felicity was particularly drawn by Chinese feminist Zhèng Chǔrán 郑楚然, whose funny recounting of her frustrated sexual experiences with men, which was uploaded on Weibo in 2021 and went viral before being deleted by the website, struck Felicity as “unadulterated, sharp, and satisfying.”

However, none of these Chinese predecessors has a transgender perspective. Meanwhile, Felicity didn’t feel “seen” in English stand-up comedy, where Asian trans people have low representation. The lack of voices she could relate to made Felicity wonder about the best comedy style that suits her and whether the audience would have any interest in listening to her stories. But to her surprise, her jokes have been well accepted and welcomed on the stage of UniCome.

According to Qiqi, the “queer feminist” label shows the group’s determination to spark a dialogue about feminist politics through LGBTQ experiences. “There have been many tensions between the two communities. Certain feminists are quite transphobic, and queer space is often dominated by cisgender gay men, leaving less space for women, trans, and non-binary folks,” she explained.

Qiqi noted that at UniCome’s shows, the audience is not entirely made up of those who are well-versed in the topics of gender and feminism. After the recent Pride event, a parent in attendance shared her confusion with the troupe. “Is gender really this complicated? I’ve never thought about this question before, nor did I know gender is more than male and female,” Qiqi recalled the response. The mother added, “I also learned a new word, asexual. This is my first time hearing it.”

Qiqi deemed it a success. “We hope to raise awareness and to increase the visibility of marginalized groups within LGBTQ people,” she said. “Slowly, some foundational connections could be built between us and the audience.”

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Queer China is our fortnightly roundup of news and stories related to China’s sexual and gender minority population.