Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire by Cynthia Wu (review)

In Ray Yeung’s 2016 indie romance Front Cover, Ryan, an openly gay Chinese American stylist in New York, meets Ning, a closeted film star from China. In one scene, Ning asks Ryan whether his parents know and approve of his homosexuality. “They’re not Chinese in that way,” Ryan replies. The dramatic tension behind Ryan and Ning’s eventual coupling as “sticky rice”—a colloquialism used by LGBTQ Asians who prefer sexual and romantic partners that are also Asian—trades on the conflict between “traditional” Chinese culture, which supposedly avoids overt displays of queer sexuality, and “modern” Asian American sensibilities that have accepted it.

Cynthia Wu suggests that “sticky” stories like Front Cover have a deeper genealogy. In her aptly titled book, Wu interrogates the politics of intraracial same-sex desire through queer readings of five key works of Asian American literature and drama. Wu sets out to demonstrate that intraracial and intraethnic same-sex desire hold the potential to resolve conflicts and build coalitions within the Asian American community—though not without problems. She makes clear at the outset that Sticky Rice is not a “recovery project,” but rather one that “shows how a slice of the existing canon has always been queer” (19). Wu supplements close textual analysis of each work with attention to the histories of their publication and reception. The book engages broadly with questions about Asian American sexuality and masculinity that scholars like David L. Eng, Daniel Y. Kim, and Nguyen Tan Hoang have debated. In particular, it urges a reconsideration of characters that are typically portrayed as alienated or homophobic, as “agential envoys of queer thinking” (19) and queer connection instead.

Following an introduction that discusses Nguyen’s 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven (1997), each of the book’s five chapters examines a different set of conflicts. Chapter 1, on John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), explores reconciliation between draft resistor Ichiro Yamada and Army veteran Kenji Kanno. Wu reads Ichiro’s homoerotic desire for Kenji as signaling an embrace across the divisions among Japanese Americans created by the U.S. government’s loyalty oaths during World War II. Chapter 2 centers on Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003). Wu contrasts the unsatisfying and problematic liaisons between the protagonist, Binh, and two non-Asian characters, against Binh’s idealized encounter with another Vietnamese man. She argues that Binh’s relationship with his compatriot—later revealed to be Ho Chi Minh—is a call for reunion between South Vietnamese refugees and the Vietnamese state, as well as between pro- and anticommunist camps in the diaspora. Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (1988) is the subject of chapter 3. The relationship between two Asian American actors resolves intergenerational tensions between the younger Bradley’s cultural nationalism and the elder Vincent’s willingness to play stereotypical roles in order to earn a living. Wu problematizes this resolution by showing that Bradley’s attempts to connect with Vincent by looking past Vincent’s homosexuality risks an apolitical multiculturalism that is dangerous right at the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s. Chapter 4 pairs H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands (1937) with Paul C. P. Siu’s classic sociological study of Chinese laundry workers. The conflict to be reconciled here is an economic one. Wu analyzes passages depicting homosocial intimacy and figurative sexual contact between Tsiang’s protagonist and working-class Chinese men and finds that they pave the way for a “rejection of consumer capitalist fantasies for a labor movement that . . . mobilizes through a same-sex encounter within ethnic lines” (116). The final chapter examines Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s controversial novel Blu’s Hanging (1997). Wu argues that the seemingly progressive pairing of two Japanese women, Big Sis and Sandi, masks the structural advantages of being East Asian in Hawai‘i, and elides the effects of settler colonialism on the islands...