Oriental girls desire romance

by Catherine Liu

New York of the eighties: a time and a place where money is the most powerful intoxicant and glamour demands the embrace of excess. While fortunes are made in Soho galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transients - drag queens and dandies, strippers and artists - circulate through the streets, serving as the city's background color, cheap labor, and sleazy entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Oriental Girls Desire Romance, a young Chinese American woman, is a sharp and eloquent wit who skirts the edges of privilege and privation in this, New York's own floating world. 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. Learning from the defiant grace of her snap queen friends, she navigates the demimonde with a wit that is at once perceptive, hilarious, and refreshingly unhinged.