April 20, 2007
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
eveningsout
Many different views of queer life in the East
by Anthony Glassman
Ohio is most definitely in the West. Despite a large number of universities with significant numbers of Asian students, it would be difficult to mistake Cleveland, Columbus, Athens or any other city for anywhere in Asia.
Ohio has no Vancouver or San Francisco. Its only Chinatown, the one in Cleveland, is at best an area with a higher concentration of Asian restaurants and shops, not like those in other cities, where English is the minority language in store windows.
For Westerners with an interest in Asia, or for Asians finding themselves surrounded by blonde hair and blue eyes, books often function as a sort of lifeline to the East,
a
conduit
through which
THE RICE QUEEN
that other world may be reached.
And, as with most subjects, those tomes come in two general varieties: the personal and the technical or academic.
Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, edited by Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue (Duke University, $21.95, trade paper) falls solidly in the latter group.
in any way possible except the one intended by the author.
That is not the case with Daniel Gawthrop's The Rice Queen Diaries: A Memoir (Arsenal Pulp Press, $16.95, trade paper).
Ooh-a slur! Rice queen!
For those that don't know, a rice queen is a non-Asian male who prefers, generally to an excessive or exclusive degree, Asian
men.
Mobile Cultures
Examining the rise of the internet as a gathering place for LGBT people in Asia, as well as representations like anime and manga (Japanese cartoons and comic books), the book is an interesting look into the sociology of queer identity and representation across Asia.
Much like in most Western literature, "Asia" can be read predominantly as "Southeast Asia," although there is some mention of South Asia, mainly India. That divide, most especially regarding terminology, is a peculiarly American construc. In England, for instance, "Asian" more often refers to people from the Indian subcontinent. Of course, England was far more involved in colonization in South Asia than the United States could ever have hoped to be, and they found it far more effort than it ultimately was worth.
Much of the book is taken up with dry examinations of web lists and websites that have connected disparate queer communities in what, to Americans, are exotic locales.
A few of the essays, however, delve into more esoteric topics, like Taiwanese director Shu Lea Cheang's I.K.U.: A Japanese Cyber-porn Adventure. It is a dizzying pansexual journey into a land where the equation penis + vagina = sex is proven so antiquated that when it finally comes down to the female main character having sex with a man, it is a post-operative transsexual man. His surgically-constructed penis is plainly visible, which would never be permitted in Japanese pornography.
Of course, for every intellectually titillating article, there must be one filled with sentences like: "Cybernetic rice is both a linear and a nonlinear system of representing information organized around 'rice' as a signifier for diasporic New Asian gay and lesbian sexuality." This is in Audrey Yue's "Paging 'New Asia': Sambal is a Feedback Loop, Coconut is a Code, Rice is a System," one of the most un-self-consciously oblique pieces of queer writing in the book.
It would seem that the prerequisite for being in academia is the ability to write a simple sentence in the most complex way imaginable, so that readers may interpret it
Daniel Gawthrop is a rice queen.
His book, however, is more than the lush travelogue of an Orientalist, and he invokes Edward Said's Orientalism, a study of post-colonial interplay between Asia and the West.
Gawthrop traces his sexual history from the time he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia through trips to Asia and England, while an increasingly large percentage of the men with whom he is involved are Asian.
An interesting point that he makes is that, while his grandfather was responsible for the internment of Cana-
dians of Japanese descent during World War II, his own welcome to Asian immigrants and their sons was far warmer.
Gawthrop analyzes his position as a white male, picking apart his role as an exploiter of people in positions of less societal power. A perfect example is during his stays in Thailand,
where male prostitution is commonplace. At first, he was so self-conscious about being seen as a Westerner trying to exchange his money for the lithe bodies of the natives that, he eventually realized, he was offending these young men by wanting their company without being willing to pay them
which is what they wanted from him. Of course, he eventually swung a bit in the other direction, becoming so debauched that he ceased to enjoy it, and then he took a break to refresh and renew.
It ends with his boyfriend getting ready to finish up the paperwork and pay the requisite bribes to live legally in Canada, and Gawthrop notes, "A few weeks later, I will contemplate my fifteen-year journey of Rice Queendom-the places it has brought me and the lessons I have learned-as, standing in the waiting area at Vancouver International Airport, I finally set eyes on the face that can bring the entire mystery, and this story, to an end."
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