Eng-Beng Lim is interested in many things, and they are all here in Brown Boys and Rice Queens. Inspired by the work and mentorship of lesbian feminist theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case (author of the classic “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic”),Footnote 2 Lim's book tours Bali, Singapore, and the United States to explore “queer globalization and colonial afterlives” (p. xi) told in staged stories of “migration, memory, and misfits” (p. xiii) and brought together in the “dyad” (Lim's favorite word) of the white man/native boy but with special emphasis on the latter—the “superfluous … neglected” (p. 9) half of the queer dyad missing in the work of senior scholars such as Joseph Boone, Michael Taussig, Naoki Sakai, and Vincente Rafael.
Lim is absolutely correct that the brown boy “brings to bear the historical valences of an originary colonial encounter” (p. 11). In chapter 1, his first and “prime example of the tropic spell” (p. 17) is Walter Spies's tourist attraction of the all-male Balinese kecak “Monkey dance,” but that is just a warm-up for chapter 2, where Lim moves on to Singapore, where the dyad is now the father-state and the gay boys who perform for him/it, and its equally touristic “tendentious investment in pink-dollar capitalism” (p. 26) in which fused “Occidental and Oriental influences are inscribed on the bodies of the island's transcultural Asian boys” (p. 28). (And may I add, of late, the Yale-NUS College student body?) The script calls for the local “substitution of the Asian communitarian father for the colonial white daddy [that] sets the path for the heteronormative Singaporean to come out as a good Asian” (p. 30), but the production goes on the road around the world.
Singapore, Lim discloses, is both saturated by queer theater and terrorized by “the retention of the colonial-era statute 377a” (p. 93). Alfian Sa'at's Asian Boys, Vol. 1 can somehow both make a spectacle of “gay lives, all tentatively defined in colonial, global, and virtual Singapore” and at the same time stay on this side of the Censorship Review Committee's dictate that “homosexuality onstage may be explored but not promoted” (pp. 103–4). All this, Lim reminds us, is watched by the West, which “cannot help trolling the world for the signs of Western queer culture while expressing incredulity at what similarities can be found” (p. 121). Here Lim waxes at his most stylistically elaborate. (There seems to be no adjective of which he is not fond.) If the boys of the queer Nation Parties (banned since 2004) were the PG version of the native boy, the X-rated version “involves the gay boys strapped on top of the postcolonial daddy, moaning and groaning for national ecstasy on the Singapore Sling with all the requisite tools and toys”:
Why, for instance, are ubiquitous images of protein shake-drinking gay boys decked out in designer tank tops and feather boas necessarily proof that Western queer cultures are the signs of progress and modernity in globalizing cities around the world? (pp. 134–35)
Exactly. In his third chapter, “G.A.P. Drama, or the Gay Asian Princess Goes to the United States,” Lim's take on David Hwang's M. Butterfly may provide an answer to his rhetorical question. “[T]he biggest ‘revelation’ of M. Butterfly turns out to be a mundane conceit: the native boy is like a native girl,” and everyone is “simultaneously spellbound and repulsed by this Asian boy in drag” (p. 140). Justin Chin, in his queer remake of The World of Suzie Wong, turns Lomax into a sixty-year-old rice queen who ends up dumping Suzie for a Thai boy. So why would “the native boy go to the United States of America as the desperate Asian housewife?” (p. 151). For the same reason the Asian woman, who is “queered” in Lim's account by the brown boy, does. I once went to a gay dinner party in Boston where all the guests were dyads of the older white gays with younger Asian males, followed by a faculty dinner party in Cambridge the next night where all the couples were older white straight guys with younger Asian wives and girlfriends. The answer to Lim's query is tragic (or angry, as in Chin Woon Ping's Details Cannot Body Wants), in the most theatrical sense, producing at times a Theater of Wounded Feelings scripted by brown boys, yes, it has to be said, usually residing in the United States.
Eng-Beng Lim concludes that he has “explored … the native boy and his transmogrifications in the queer Asias attuned to Orientalism, colonial homoerotics, and dyadic performance” (p. 168), and that he has. Alongside Katsuhiko Suganuma's Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012) and Hoang Tan Nguyen's A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), the queer Asian male is now getting to talk back. And he is not done.
