Ricardo_Ramos's Full Review: Quentin Lee - Dress Like a Boy
Moving with his family from Hong Kong to Montreal when he was 15 and starting at Berkeley two years later, independent film-maker (Shopping with the Fangs, Drift, Ethan Mao) Quentin Mao's 2000 novel features a boy from Hong Kong, Edward, whose father died and who was shipped off to San Francisco by his beautiful mother to her brother who disapproved of her narcissism. Edward shared a room with Victor, his nephew who is two years younger than Edward. Victor's punitive, emotional distant father banned Victor from playing with the neighbors (whom he deemed bad influences). Having grown up in the US, Victor in some ways played older brother to his older-in-years cousin and in some ways was an admiring younger brother. Victor seems to view and have viewed Edward as a brother, whereas Edward always felt alienated by Victor's stern father and viewed Victor as a cousin rather than a brother.
Because of parental suspicion about those who don't "share blood," many Chinese youth are thrown together with relatives, and there seems to be a higher rate of homosexual incest among Chinese than among Anglos (especially WASPs). Boys will be boys... except when dressing up as girls, at least. The title Dress Like a Boy made me think that the novel would be a sort of Chinese-American variation on the Belgian movie "La vie en rose." It is not. No one ever says "Dress like a boy!" and none of the male characters cross-dresses regularly or even often. (One does one time—primarily to annoy his family members.)
The transgression—beyond being gay that violating filial piety and cuts off the supply of descendants to respect and worship forebearers—is hustling, which two of the characters do for the thrill of transgression and the feeling of being desirable enough to be paid rather than for any need for money. In addition to the one instance of dressing up in drag and the dipping the toes into hustling is performing fellatio on someone who is driving. Like hustling, this combines danger and sexual stimulation.
Like many a youth, Edward feels pain and wants to feel more deeply: preferably ecstasy, but, if that is not available, pain. Edward wants "a consuming relationship that will engage him day and night. Something destructive and passionate. Some guy around his age who is devoted and suicidal." (Reading that, I thought, " Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!" However, his also being "sticky rice"—suppressing any attraction to anyone not an Asian male reduced the likelihood of this wish being realized.)
I have simplified the chronology by specifying Edward's high-school living arrangements first. The novel opens in Berkeley with Edward writing the Chinese character for "Wong" with cooling semen on the belly of David Wong, a bisexual Berkeley junior with whom David is in love during his senior year at Berkeley. This is probably the most outré touch (literally touch!) in the book—the sort of aggressive "I'm here and I'm queer, get used to it" attitude of the "Queer Nation" generation. (There are enough references to male-male sex to put off many straight possible readers and they are too vague for many gay ones.)
Edward is as apolitical as it is possible for an openly gay English major at Berkeley to be, although he is far from being unusual in regarding doing his "cultural work" as being all the political engagement that is necessary. Edward enjoys shocking one part of the bourgeoisie in particular, his family. And he persistently presses David and Victor to put aside the pretense of bisexuality (and in Victor's case early in the novel, heterosexuality) and to proclaim themselves as being openly gay as he has very recently become. Unlike them, Edward has never had sex with a female, but came out first as "bisexual." (for Victor "being gay was so naked, so personal, so unnamable"!!! It would seem that being not just namable but naming is what Victor and many cower at.)
The novel juxtaposes Edward's frustrations that neither David nor Victor loves him enough or in the way he wants with flashbacks to growing up in Hong Kong and San Francisco. Edward also revisits Hong Kong at the winter break and helps launch a gay rights organization in the still British colony of Hong Kong. There are no cell phones. Odder still, no one communicates by e-mail, so one might think that the unspecified time is even earlier, but Edward's favorite song is "Bizarre Love Triangle" by New Order, which dates from September 1994, so that Edward's senior year cannot be earlier than 1994-95.
Like the author, Edward is an aspiring film-maker. The author went to film school at UCLA. Edward was apathetic at his interview and was rejected (though accepted into other programs). Like the author (and character's in Lee's movies), Edward is "a horror movie junkie" (this is Lee's characterization of himself from a 2001 NAATA interview). And much of Lee's film output as well as the novel focused on insufficiently satisfying love relationships winding down. In the same interview, Lee said that "'Drift' [2000] is quite a personal film (much more autobiographical-like than "Shopping for Fangs" per se), because I wrote the script after breaking up a three-year relationship that has meant a lot to me."
He was (and I presume is) annoyed to have his fictional work read as direct autobiography, however: "As a person of color making works with and about people of color (and being gay too), there's a strange compulsion for people to believe that those particular works are autobiographical. Remember how the publisher of Maxine Hong Kingston's first novel had published Women Warrior under autobiography for marketing? I'm always fighting this compulsion of ethnic authenticity over fictional imagination." I can certainly relate to this in that some people have thought that the first, first-person narrator in my novel Flipping is autobiographical (in fact, the second one closely resembles me in some ways). Someone as versed in post-structuralist theory as Lee is, knows that what he wrote is mimetic, even if it is not strictly autobiographical. (And I began by distinguishing some key differences between the author's and the protagonist's experiences of moving to North America.)
I find the characters believable. The omniscient narration is more convincing—and far more detailed—about what Edward is thinking. There are scenes in which Edward is not present and some attempts to narrate what Victor is thinking, and a few desultory stabs at the inner-thoughts of some other characters. I think that it would have been better to have written the novel from Edward's perspective in the first person. It is mostly Edward's perspective in the third person, and was going to be seen as autobiographical on the basis of being about a gay Hong Kong-emigrant Berkeley student regardless.
I accept that Berkeley English-major undergraduate drama-queens think and talk in the jargon Edward uses (for instance, "He's only trying to possess your subjectivity" or "Being intellectual is a more democratic form of elitism that is not based on an inborn exteriority, you know, like looks and money" or "I feel so delegimitized" or "Why do you condemn me to this silence?" are utterances that might come out of the mouth of someone like Edward). It is considerably less plausible in the mind of the San Francisco State University science student— that is, Victor, whose position the narrator explains as "because Edward was his ideological enemy, he felt the necessity to resist. In order for him to be normal, he must view his older cousin as the other" (emphasis added for ways of looking at life for someone like Edward or Quentin Lee, but not Victor). And "they feared each other's normality"? It seems to me that if there is going to be omniscient narration, it should not sound so much like the immature young man crammed with subaltern (etc.) literary theory. That is, how Edward expresses himself is too similar to the external omniscient narration. Also, I doubt that straight men (Edward's stepfather on first seeing him) think of other men as "cute" ("pretty" rather than "handsome," perhaps, but "cute"? That seems to me confined to gay men's conceptions of males.)
As a long-time Bay Area resident, there are some details that would not be noticed by readers from elsewhere, but grate on my highly strung nerves. For instance, the AIDS Walk is not during the school year, but is the Sunday after the San Francisco Pride Parade. I'm puzzled that an architecture student has a studio of his own in "Kroebar Hall." The art and anthropology departments share Kroeber Hall, and the architecture department is across the way in Wurster Hall. It makes no sense for someone "on the highway" in San Francisco missing a turn-off for the Bay Bridge, since the freeways in San Francisco either run away from or onto it. And, surely, flights are form Newark to Oakland (that is, the airports) or New Haven to Berkeley (the starting point and ending point of academics in motion) not New Haven to Oakland.
Also, would someone administering HIV tests refer to them (as in the popular misconception) as "AIDS tests"? Do straight men (Edward's stepfather on first seeing him) think of other men as "cute"?
It bothers me that someone so enmeshed in "subaltern" discourse does not know that "Filipino man" is redundant and that "Filipino woman" is wrong. It is perhaps evidence of Edward's phoniness that he does not learn or use the name of the "Filipino [sic.] maid" who works for his mother in Hong Kong. She is Filipina, d____ it!
I guess that in one way or another Edward disparages everyone for something or another (most usually not adoring him sufficiently). He strikes me and, I think, will strike other readers as quite racist (as many Filipinos and Chinese are). There are two servants from the Philippines and a Korean "do-me queen," but in a novel set in very multiethnic San Francisco and Berkeley, no African Americans, no Latinos. Only one white/Anglo character is not presented (usually through Edward's eyes) as despicable. There are only Chinese and oppressive white ghosts,
I'm not actually going to cede Quentin Lee the last word, but in reading the interview form which I have already quoted several times, he also said "'Drift,' like 'Flow,' is in the genre of works that I love like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-the very self-reflexive genre about an artist's identity and about the process of creating art. As someone with a strong poststructuralist training and fascination, I'm of course interested in works that explore and examine the process of creation besides the act itself." Dress Like a Boy is a portrait of a young man alienated from his family (with the exception of a doting, rich and widowed grandmother) and disaffected with his love life, but in the novel is creating nothing—or nothing but a clone in-your-face artily transgressive angry young queer before he goes off to graduate school. Well, I nearly forgot that at one point Edward thinks he can write a novel about hustlers after tricking for money twice. Nothing comes of this, however. There is also nothing about what he might be learning in classes. (How can he just be getting around to reading Edward Said's Orientalism in his senior year, BTW?)
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Although I was entertained by this relatively short (180 pages) novel about late-adolescent angst, I doubt that it would much interest our beloved Epinions gay uncle, Ed Grover. Ed's writings have been a beacon shining the light of encouragement on gay writing, both in Epinions and in the writings he reviewed in In-Step and in his own epinions that invited readers in to share his appreciation of a wide range of stuff, not just writing by or about gay people. I humbly add my soft voice to this month's appreciation of Ed Grover and for his unstinting encouragement of me and many others. For others see Eplovejoy's write-off homepage that also links to many of Ed's splendid epinions.
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