Oriental Girls Desire Romance

The first-person tale of a young Chinese-American woman recently returned from an extended stay in China to New York in the 1980s, this muddled debut reads more like a rough draft than a coherent novel. Hers should be an interesting story--a grad student and go-go dancer who wants to ""live outside my life'' but is caught between two cultures. Yet Liu's episodic chapters often lack a necessary grounding in time and place; worse, her narrator's oddly self-pitying and arrogant voice fails to provoke sympathy, or even understanding. Scenes with her boyfriend Bruno, for example, never explain how long--or why--the relationship has lasted. Although she talks about the relationship's effects, she rarely seems to pay attention to Bruno himself. This problem is symptomatic, as the narrator's self-absorption repeatedly dulls our interest in what should be a fascinating subject. (Oct.)