The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Oriental Girls Desire Romance by Catherine LiuTrey Strecker
Catherine Liu. Oriental Girls Desire Romance. Kaya, 1997. 354pp. Paper: $13.95.
The narrator of Catherine Liu’s first novel, a smart, young Chinese-American woman drifting among the addictive excesses of 1980s New York City, feels trapped in “a perpetual state of internalized exile” and struggles to find her “bearings” by mapping out her multifaceted identity. Although its plot includes descriptions of her Ivy League education and a visit to Beijing, most of the novel unfolds against the clashing privilege and poverty of New York’s glitzy nightclubs, its art world, and dingy strip joints. Structurally, each chapter focuses on specific people (her uncompromising Communist father and depressive mother, her teachers and lovers, drag queens, and artists) or experiences (her childhood dominated by the passive, subservient ideal of Chinese womanhood, her experimentation with drugs, a series of temporary office jobs, and a stint as a stripper) that the narrator regards as essential components of her identity. While nearly each of the novel’s twelve discrete sections is strong enough to stand alone by using a fragmented, minimally connected text to represent her narrator’s fragmented world, Liu creates a static, impressionistic portrait of a woman who appears less an active subject than a still-life object. Lia’s inquiry into the complex nature of fantasy and desire, including the importance of addiction in American consumerism, the dynamics of the sex industry, and the politics and aesthetics of drag, clearly demonstrates her considerable promise as a young novelist and her aptitude as a critic of contemporary culture. [Trey Strecker]