Fiction. Asian American Studies. New York of the eighties: a time and a place where money is the most powerful intoxicant, glamour demands the embrace of excess, and cocaine evokes only the shadow of a risky proposition's sharp high. While fortunes are being made in Soho galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transients—drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors/models/wait staff—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 a family of Maoist ideologues, she is also a recovering theory junkie who prefers her hits of reality straight up. Navigating the demimonde of New York as 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.

"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

Author City: IRVINE, CA USA

Catherine Liu is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies, Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to directing the UCI Humanities Center, she is completing a book manuscript which addresses the abuse of populist mistrust of elites and its relationship to anti- intellectualism in American cultural politics. Her research and teaching focus on the intellectual history and formation of cultural criticism, psychoanalytic theory, political economy of cultural revolutions and the work of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin. She has published art criticism, museum history, cultural policies and neoliberalism.