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Calendar Boy

by Andy Quan

Andy Quan’s preferred style in Calendar Boy, his debut collection of short stories, is the confessional. It’s a voice that is especially popular in queer fiction, in part because many queer writers are interested in questioning how sexuality informs personal identity. In the hands of a writer like Edmund White (A Boy’s Own Story), the confessional allows for a fascinatingly tangled psychological portrait. Quan is more transparent: his narrators are almost all Chinese Canadian, gay, and desperate to be desired.

Their dilemma is that they don’t fit in. As gay men they are isolated in Chinese communities; as Chinese they are isolated in gay communities that idealize the muscled white man. The book’s title story (one of the few that isn’t in the first person) sees self-conscious Gary gain confidence through body-building, though he’s unable to persuade the city’s gay Asian association to support a plan to cobble together and sell a calendar featuring erotic pictures of Asian men.

As Gary well knows, images of gay Asian men are few and far between. The same need to represent gay Asian lives drives these stories. Quan is genuine and earnest about this need, but he’s rarely subtle. Instead, he chews on the problem until it’s flavourless (“When has he seen an Asian man as an object of desire, as part of a club, the club of people who fall in love and lust and have sex with each other?”), or resorts to melodrama (“I felt as if made of glass, and whatever it was I really wanted slid off my surfaces. Nothing could grab hold.”).

The strongest story in the collection, “Almost Flying,” is, interestingly enough, the only one focused on the lives of a straight couple. Here Quan’s language is more relaxed and filled with colour and nuance. Ayumi, a Japanese woman hoping to put the misery of unfulfilling jobs and a suicide attempt behind her with a new life in Australia, is more alive than any of Quan’s confessional stand-ins. Freed from the burden of speaking for a community, Quan is quite a writer.

 

Reviewer: Mark Pupo

Publisher: New Star Books

DETAILS

Price: $20

Page Count: 232 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-921586-82-5

Released: June

Issue Date: 2001-7

Categories: Fiction: Short