Although all the characters in “New Year” are fictional, two of them are inspired by real people. Lily’s aunt Judy is inspired by Helen Ling, who was one of the first (if not the first) Chinese American women to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a computer. Helen became a supervisor and hired many more women, including other Asian Americans. You can read about Helen and the other women computers of JPL in Nathalia Holt’s book Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars.
The character of Tommy Andrews is inspired by the male impersonators who performed in San Francisco’s nightclubs—including many that catered specifically to lesbians—in the 1940s and 1950s. The Chi-Chi Club was real, and performers like Tommy were featured in the San Francisco Chronicle as male impersonators. For more about San Francisco’s lesbian and gay communities, read Nan Alamilla Boyd’s Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965.
Finally, San Francisco’s Chinese New Year parade was modernized in the 1950s by Chinatown leaders partly as a way to destigmatize Chinese Americans during the Cold War. The Chinese in San Francisco deliberately used Western stereotypes about Asia to render Chinese Americans as peaceful and nonthreatening, which was imperative during an era when Chinese were routinely harassed due to American fears of Communist China. I am grateful to Chiou-Ling Yeh’s paper, “‘In the Traditions of China and in the Freedom of America’: The Making of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Festivals,” in the June 2004 issue of American Quarterly, for many of these insights.