Rice Sticking Together: Cultural Nationalist Logic and the Cinematic Representations of Gay Asian-Caucasian Relationships and Desire

Interracial relationships often raise a complex set of cultural issues, and gay versions of these relationships are no exception. Any attempt to discuss the question of gay Asian-Caucasian interracial relationships, particularly within gay Asian and Asian diasporic communities, will produce a polarized debate framed by an us Asians-versus-them Caucasian rhetoric. It is this rhetoric that haunts my attempt to examine, in this essay, contemporary cinematic representations of gay Asian-Caucasian relationships and desire, what some would rather derogatorily call the "rice and potato" phenomenon. Here, I pay specific attention to gay diasporic Chinese films that carry this theme, many of which also happen to be English-language films.¹ This phenomenon also creates a sense of cultural anxiety that is urgent enough for many of these films to want to confront, assuage, or even consciously circumvent. To begin my analysis of the films, I find it necessary first to map out briefly the contours of this interracial dynamic in order to arrive at the narrative and representational motivations that underpin these works.

The notion of "rice and potato" rests on the foundation of ethnic stereotypes, what Laurence Wai-Teng Leong identifies as instances "of specialist tastes among gay men seeking other gay men of a particular ethnic stock."² The "potato queen" is an Asian gay man who dates white men exclusively, while the "rice queen" is his white counterpart who prefers only Asian men. The use of the food metaphors "rice" and "potato," because they are clearly racialist in their connotation, runs the risk of being co-opted into various racist discourses. These terms also face the danger of eliding the heterogeneity and differences within the constitution of the ethnic categories "Asian" and "Caucasian." Of course, this notion of ethnic/sexual labeling unveils only the tip of the "rice and potato" iceberg: the complicating intersections of racial and queer sexual discourses. In his sociological essay "Of Rice and Potatoes," Leong analyzes some of the dimensions of this problematic, which I would like to briefly highlight here so as to create a theoretical grid to locate my analyses of the films.

The gay Asian-Caucasian interracial relationship is a relatively common occurrence, not only in cosmopolitan cities like San Francisco, New York, or London, but also in Asian locales such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Bali, and Bangkok. Although the specificities of cultural and political interaction vary from couple to couple, and from location to location, Leong suggests that they do share some commonalities, be they stereotypes or actualities. The "rice and potato" couple is haunted by Orientalist discourses of cultural domination and power, what one could call the "Madame Butterfly" syndrome. The stereotype features a mature Caucasian gay man who seeks out a young or young-looking, submissive Asian guy to be his sexual "boy toy." Because the "rice queen" is generally "more financially secure than the younger Asian man in rice-potato dyads, it is argued that economic motives underscore such relationships."³ The cultural and financial domination of the Asian man often translates into the sexual dynamics of the bedroom where the Caucasian is frequently the "top" (the "man" of the relationship) while the Asian the "bottom" (the "woman"). This fantasy stereotype of the sexual passivity of the Asian male is reaffirmed in white gay porn featuring Asian men, as Richard Fung has demonstrated in his essay "Looking for My Penis."⁴ In addition, the forces of sexual "supply and demand" further influence the relational power dynamics in a "rice and potato" coupling: there is frequently a higher ratio of "potato queens" to "rice queens," particularly in Asian communities outside the United States and Europe, hence creating not just vicious competition between Asians for Caucasians, but it also gives an unfair numerical advantage to gay Caucasian men, which then translates into various forms of psychological and emotional leverage over their Asian partners.⁵

In light of these power imbalances, why do "potato queens" still desire and seek out Caucasian men? Leong posits a number of possible reasons. Firstly...