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Baker, Tom

The Rice Queen Diaries: A Memoir

by Daniel Gawthrop

Arsenal Pulp Press. 252 pages, $16.95

Potato Queen: A Novel

by Rafaelito V. Sy

Palari Publishing. 267 pages, $14.95

A "RICE QUEEN" is generally defined as a white man who's attracted to Asian men, while a "potato queen" is an Asian man who's attracted to white men. The terms are often used disparagingly, with rice queens seen as sexual imperialists and potato queens as self-hating race traitors. For this reason, it takes some nerve for an author to come out as either on the cover of a book. But the authors of the two books under review have done just that: Daniel Gawthrop in a memoir entitled The Rice Queen Diaries; and Rafaelito V. Sy, albeit in the guise of a first-person narrator, in the seemingly autobiographical novel Potato Queen.

Gawthrop traces his interest in Asian men back to his Canadian boarding school days, when the physically late-blooming author was attracted to a precocious Chinese-Canadian classmate named Jackson. A similar case of classmate worship can be found in Yukio Mishima's autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask. When Gawthrop interweaves passages from the latter book with his own account of secretly witnessing Jackson undergo a sexual hazing, the result is intensely erotic. Gawthrop, like Mishima, is adept at invoking virile beauty--both men vividly recall the wondrous adolescent discovery of armpit hair--and the inclusion of Mishima's material slows Gawthrop's story down enough to add some delicious tension.

The disparate settings of the two scenes--1930's Japan and 1970's Canada--underscore the universality of the experience of budding desire. But Gawthrop candidly admits that he was slow to understand that not all aspects of sexuality are universal, especially when money and class come into play. In Vancouver, he enjoyed sex with numerous Asian men who were either middle-class, native-born North Americans or international visitors with the wherewithal for trips across the Pacific. In other words, they were his economic peers. Believing that interracial attraction is a matter of aesthetics rather than politics, Gawthrop sets off for a rambunctious and ultimately disillusioning tour of the bars and bedrooms of Thailand. Most of the men he meets are genuinely poor, while he is suddenly perceived as rich. Slow to realize that he's no longer on anything like a level playing field, he becomes a bull in the emotional china shop of several men's lives.

His attitudes gradually change as he gets to know his bed partners--his recollections of Ut, a financially secure, stallionlike Thai who may have died in the 2004 tsunami, are especially poignant--and as he sees uncomfortable visions of his possible future in the older, richer, more cynical rice queens he meets. We learn a bit about the countries Gawthrop visits--in easygoing Thailand, it's not unheard-of to be welcomed by one's boyfriend's parents, while in repressive Vietnam a disgruntled trick may threaten to expose one's "cultural infraction." But the book's main journey is toward Gawthrop's fuller understanding of himself.

In contrast, the protagonist of Potato Queen, Juancho Chu, does not go in for deep introspection. Born and raised in Manila, Juancho becomes a half-hearted habitue of the San Francisco bar scene. The son of a rich family with a college degree and a good job, Juancho suffers no class disadvantage. In his search for intimacy, he is more self-conscious about his appendectomy scar than about any racial characteristic. Late in the book, he takes offense at the image of an "Asian mail-order bride ... speaking Charlie Chan English" and putting on a kinky show in the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He grumbles that the film is loved by "everybody in America who had never been ... the butt of a racist joke." The only problem is that the previous fifteen chapters have not shown the effortlessly assimilated Juancho ever to have been the butt of a racist joke, either.

In the last few pages, Juancho visits Manila, compares it to San Francisco, and has an epiphany that I won't spoil here. But until that point, this unpolished novel has given little sense of what being Filipino or American means to him, having focused instead on drawn-out, soap opera-esque realignments of indistinguishable romantic partners. In this respect, Potato Queen treads mostly familiar territory rather than venturing across borders in the way that The Rice Queen Diaries successfully does.

Tom Baker is a contributor to the Time Out Tokyo travel guide.