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

Cynthia Wu's Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire provides a daring and innovative genealogy of Asian American canonical literature through a queer analytic. Wu's book analyzes five texts: John Okada's No-No Boy, Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die, H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging. By analyzing the intraracial male intimacies in each of these texts, Wu argues that 1) these intimacies may offer a pathway to facilitate coalition building and bridging of Asian America's internal divides and 2) embracing intraracial same-sex desire can possibly recuperate Asian American tendencies towards assimilating to normative US desirability politics. Although these are Wu's stated interventions, she also concludes the book by cautioning readers against immediately moving to recovery and recuperation for intraracial erotics in the face of US racism. Rather, the intraracial intimacies that Wu traces can also be read as maintaining a status quo of hierarchy and status within Asian America, privileging certain ethnic, cultural, and economic positions over others.

This book would be useful for academics engaged in Asian American studies, queer of color studies and also for LGBTQ activists who are thinking about coalitional politics as it pertains to intraracial and relational racial dynamics.

By using the term "sticky rice" as the book title, Wu centers her analysis on gay/homosocial/homoerotic Asian American male dyads. "Sticky rice" as a gay slang term sits alongside "potato queen" and "rice queen." This triad reflects the complicated, vexed, and fraught relationships between Asian/Asian American men with each other and Asian/Asian American men with white men—such relationships as explored in the book are contextualized within a history of Western colonialism and imperialism in Asia and the Pacific. Wu intervenes in the normative Asian–white male coupling through her articulation of what she calls "sticky politics." For Wu, "sticky politics" denote contesting Asian American men's abject social positions while also reconfiguring Western standards of physical attractiveness and intraracial Asian American dynamics.

Heeding the call from Amy Sueyoshi's "Queer Asian American Historiography," Wu explicitly locates and attends to queer Asian American male subjects who have historically been elided by Asian Americanists.¹ Sticky Rice builds on the work of scholars who have theorized and explicated the political potentials of queer Asian American male subjects. Such work includes Nguyen Tan Hoang's 7 Steps to Heaven and A View from the Bottom, C. Winter Han's Geisha of a Different Kind, and Eng Beng Lim's Brown Boys, Rice Queens.

Sticky Rice is structured around the five texts, each of which receives a chapter-length treatment. Wu contextualizes the historical moments that each book emerges from and the larger intellectual, cultural, and political conversations that the book enters. Wu advances a queer reading methodology that seeks to disrupt linear temporalities—citing Dana Luciano's chronopolitics and Elizabeth Freeman's chrononormativity—and to uncover/recognize seemingly invisible Asian American male homoerotics. The latter objective is the most daring because Wu reads into existence a set of queer male couplings into certain Asian American canonical texts where previously there was no recognition of any such thing. This is Wu's critical intervention into Asian American literary and cultural studies: explicating the oft-overlooked queerness of intraracial dynamics.

Wu reads into existence homoerotic, homosocial intraracial intimacies in chapter 1 "Veterans and Draft Resisters" and chapter 3 "Rebellion and Compromise." In chapter 1, Wu makes some ambitious claims about the possibility of homoeroticism between Ichiro and Kenji, two of the main characters who share a deep friendship in Okada's No No Boy. In chapter 3, she asserts a similar claim about Vincent and Bradley, who navigate a tense mentor–mentee relationship in Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die. I group these two chapters together because they comprise the only texts in Wu's archive that have been widely read and...