4.0
Oriental Girls Desire Romance
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesOriental Girls Desire Romance Reviews
4.0
“Really interesting read. This book was written in the '90s about the '80s but it feels very modern. If I didn't know better and someone told me the book was published like last year I'd believe it. Like a lot of current literary fiction is also no plot just vibes stories about academically inclined young women over-intellectualizing and figuring out the world. The way the novel explores concerns about class and race and identity and womanhood and relationships are still quite relevant today. It even does the no quotations marks thing which is so associated with Sally Rooney now lol.
I did quite enjoy getting into our unnamed narrator's head and seeing how she sees things. She def took some time to grow on me, I found her kinda pretentious at first but I came to like her as more of her past and her vulnerabilities got revealed. The narrator is definitely the star of the show there are a few side characters here and there but no one really sticks out. The plot is very meandering and non linear, just random stories from the narrator's life, and it usually worked but it did feel a little unfocused at times. Ending felt somewhat abrupt.
I'm glad I was assigned this for a class because I don't think I would've even heard of it otherwise. It seems to have flown under the radar which is a shame since this is quite good and definitely deserved some renewed attention. It seems Catherine Liu is more known for her research and theory though so at least she's recognized there.”
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