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>ORIENTAL GIRLS DESIRE ROMANCE
>a new novel by Catherine Liu
>
>I couldn't put ORIENTAL GIRLS DESIRE ROMANCE down, read it in two nights;
>halfway through I realized it was more than just a "good read," it's astute
>social and political commentary. Liu's passion--conveyed with an
>intelligence that is in no way egotistical--illuminated histories through
>which I've lived. I thank her for this book.--Kathy Acker
>
>Vamping past the familiar ground of "Bright Lights, Big City" and "Slaves
>of New York," Catherine Liu's first novel, ORIENTAL GIRLS DESIRE ROMANCE,
>describes the seedier side of eighties New York with the deadpan alienation
>of a young Chinese American woman on the make. The unnamed narrator of
>ORIENTAL GIRLS DESIRE ROMANCE, a sharp and eloquent wit, skirts the edges
>of privilege and privation in New York's "floating world" of drag queens
>and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors/models/wait staff
>that serves as the city's background color, cheap labor, and sleazy
>entertainment. A refugee from the neuroses of an Ivy League education and
>feudal obligations to an immigrant family, she is a theory junkie strung
>out on sexual and intellectual highs.
>        Like the mail-order bride advertisements that give the book its
>title, the narrator's own search for "romance" is a mixed odyssey of irony,
>idealism, and fluid sexuality that takes her from an obsessive lesbian
>relationship to anonymous brushes with businessmen in a topless bar. She
>basks briefly in the corporate glitz of Wall Street and Soho's pricy
>sophistication, but it is the Lower East Side, with its snap queen glamor,
>that draws her again and again. Through the defiant grace and fierce wit of
>her black drag queen friends, she discovers a culture of survival and
>resistance within the greed-driven excesses of the Reagan-era mainstream.
>As she navigates the demimonde of New York in the guise of slacker, temp,
>and exotic dancer, she outmaneuvers the easy answers of Prozac or reform in
>a voice that is at once perceptive, hilarious, and refreshingly unhinged.
>
>CATHERINE LIU is an assistant professor of French at the University of
>Minnesota, Minneapolis. During her graduate studies at City University of
>New York, she was a regular contributer to ArtForum and Flash Art. Her
>fiction has appeared in the late New York literary magazine, Between C and
>D. She is presently at work on a book of essays on critical theory, Copying
>Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, and a second novel, Suicide of an
>Assistant Professor.