Oriental Girls Desire Romance

by Catherine Liu

Overview

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance—now reprinted by Kaya Press—is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781885030900
Publisher:	Kaya Production
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

The first-person tale of a young Chinese-American woman recently returned from an extended stay in China to New York in the 1980s, this muddled debut reads more like a rough draft than a coherent novel. Hers should be an interesting storya grad student and go-go dancer who wants to "live outside my life'' but is caught between two cultures. Yet Liu's episodic chapters often lack a necessary grounding in time and place; worse, her narrator's oddly self-pitying and arrogant voice fails to provoke sympathy, or even understanding. Scenes with her boyfriend Bruno, for example, never explain how longor whythe relationship has lasted. Although she talks about the relationship's effects, she rarely seems to pay attention to Bruno himself. This problem is symptomatic, as the narrator's self-absorption repeatedly dulls our interest in what should be a fascinating subject. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly