Queens borough

Queens borough is both a meeting place and a measure of changing fortunes in the lives of Lillian Kagwa, Brian West, and Apollo Kagwa. The novel first presents it amid the 1968 garbage strike, then returns to its streets and homes as the setting for the family’s beginnings, Apollo’s childhood, and his later reflections on what makes a place feel like home.

A borough of arrivals

In 1968, Lillian Kagwa had emigrated from Uganda, while Brian West had come from Syracuse. They met in Queens borough during a citywide sanitation strike that left New York City’s sidewalks piled with garbage for eight days. The disorder forms the backdrop to their encounter: they had traveled from different places to find one another, though neither could anticipate what their relationship would set in motion.

Their meeting places the borough at the intersection of migration and ordinary work. Lillian was twenty-five, new to New York and initially without anyone she knew there. Her command of English helped her find work, while the strike’s heaps of rubbish made the city an unlikely setting for a new beginning.

Glamour Time and working-class Queens

The agency where Lillian and Brian met, Glamour Time, operated from a windowless second-floor office near Queensboro Plaza. It was far from a center of high fashion but conveniently situated to attract aspiring models from working-class Queens. The business collected fees for headshots taken in Pavel Aresenyev’s small studio; he also offered some young women after-hours photo sessions alone with him.

Lillian answered the phones and gave the operation an appearance of competence, without knowing that it was a scam. Brian, who visited because he was monitoring Pavel, became increasingly focused on Lillian. His frequent presence disrupted Pavel’s business; after Pavel fired her, Brian pursued the parole violation that returned Pavel to jail. Queens is thus not just the setting for a romance but also the specific urban workplace where economic vulnerability, a fraudulent enterprise, and Brian’s official duties collide.

Flushing and the Kagwa household

After Brian disappeared from their lives, Lillian reverted to her maiden name and legally made her son a Kagwa. In the fall of 1989, Apollo was a junior high school student at IS 237 in Flushing. The family’s life in Queens continued through Lillian’s work and education: she became a legal secretary and took a better-paid job in midtown Manhattan, but the longer hours sometimes kept her away until eight in the evening. Apollo grew up as a latchkey child, self-contained and watchful.

An earlier home in Flushing also shaped Apollo’s sense of class and domestic space. He remembered living there with Lillian in a two-bedroom apartment and asking why they did not live in a house. Her answer—that houses were for owning, not renting—stayed with him. The recollection makes the difference between an apartment and a house more than a matter of architecture: it records a child’s awareness of what his family could afford.

Ridgewood and the meaning of home

At thirty-seven, Apollo returned to Queens borough to visit a two-story row house in Ridgewood. By then he and Emma Valentine had an apartment of their own in Manhattan, yet the sight of the house still stirred his childhood admiration. He looked at its second-floor windows and roof gutter and recognized that, despite his age and changed circumstances, he still felt like the boy who had wondered why his family could not live in a home like that.

The Ridgewood visit sets adult independence beside an old measure of aspiration. Queens holds both the Flushing apartment where Apollo grew up and the house that once stood for a more secure kind of ownership. Its places therefore gather distinct moments in the family’s history: arrival, work, childhood, and the return of a childhood longing in adulthood.