Georgia Straight - Calendar Boy 

Quill & Quire - Slant

Quill & Quire - Calendar Boy

Seattle Weekly - Calendar Boy 

The Sunday Age - Calendar Boy

Journal of Australian Studies - Calendar Boy

First Fiction on First Love Strong on Charm
By John Burns

Writing about love is hard, every word a contest between imagination and regurgitation. Writing about first love is doubly hard: generations of film and a million maudlin songs have already bemoaned the ingénu's half-choked, trembling et ceteras. And first fiction about first love...how sorry a lot is that?

Andy Quan-Vancouver-born, now in Sydney-puts his shoulder to love's wheel with Calendar Boy. (His first collection of short prosy poems, Slant [Nightwood Editions, $16.95], is also just out.) If it is his brief to charm and seduce through the cute-but-doesn't-know-it sighs and quiverings of his various nicey-nice narrators, he has succeeded and can doubtless look forward to much book-tour nooky. Literary achievement, however, is more elusive.

These are short pieces-16 in just over 200 pages-and whether told in first person or third, almost all the stories address the inner conflicts of an insecure, young, Asian-Canadian gay man. Love falls from the sky, or at the clubs, passive yearning rewarded with brief attention, and sometimes sex. For characters upset to be considered nonsexual in an unconsciously racist world, they are themselves weirdly coy: "I remember him lifting me up in sex the first time we were together, the ease with which my weight rose into the air above his arms" is as nasty as Quan gets. "The first time we were together"? Titter.

Stories arc toward maturity, coming-out, acceptance. The best rise above look-at-me gay pride to track anger or (too rarely) other characters. One feints to strength: "I'm checkerboard. Through and through, two-tone abstract art, multi-coloured swirl painting. Plaid, baby, I'm plaid, so out of fashion I'm in fashion and so stylish I'm on my way out. I don't go with anything you own." He's showboating, sure, but at least there's passion.

Innovative structures-intertwined narrative and a recipe for perfect rice, or a two-step between then and now-show glamour, and Quan, in his weakness for simile, sometimes scores: "The wind blows against my face like a hand dipped in ocean waves." But arousal and escape from passivity don't endure. Passion spent: put it down to youth.

(Georgia Straight is Vancouver's weekly entertainment magazine. I was horrified by this review, especially when I realised that the nicey-nice characters that he criticised are not the ones in the book but the person who left him a message on his answering machine requesting that he consider my book for a review. How dare I do that? A friend thought it was just a regular smart-alec review but it really felt like a personal attack at the time. And he misses the point in a way that feels blindly privileged to me - rather than recognising the character's insecurities as caused by racism or homophobia, he demands them to be tougher. Rather than a search for identity and acceptance, sexuality all becomes "first love.")

$15.95 paper 0-88971-179-8
112 pp., 5 3/4 x 8 1/2, Nightwood Editions, June
Reviewed from the finished book.

The title of this debut poetry collection is an evocative pun on author Andy Quan's varied perspectives - that of an Asian-Canadian whose eyes are "slanted"; of a gay man whose sensual interest is "bent" or slanted away from the norm; and most importantly, of the slant view that the combination of these identities affords its author.

Other poets have made vivid use of minority experience as a way to analyze the world and their own place in it - Li-Young Lee comes to mind, as do Mark Doty and Dionne Brand. But all too frequently minority writers rely too heavily on the fact of their marginality rather than how that marginality sheds light on the world. Identity politics without the politics is really only narcissism disguised as soul-searching.

The problem with Slant is that, apart from a few complaints about customs officials and other brutes, little of substance is said about either the gay experience or the experience of being Asian in North America. Contrary to what Quan may believe, men dancing together are not inherently interesting, and his lyricism rarely transforms this by-now-familiar subject matter into the truly evocative. Quan has a responsibility to make his images and scenes more than reportage, but his poems rarely fulfill this mandate.

One exception is in the travel/love poems that appear in the final two sections. Here, Quan finds a lyric impulse that transcends the journal-entry style that hinders some of the other poems. The combination of subjects - lost love, unfamiliar landscapes, the feeling of foreignness - brings out the best in Quan, as in "Last Europe", which closes with "All these cities burnt into my eyes/like a chance eclipse, I feel your hand/touch my face, the whorl of your/fingerprints, my breath becoming short."

- Adam Sol, a Toronto poet and reviewer.

(Not a horrible review but not a good one. The "one exception" to the weaker poems is the whole last third of the book. How can a third of a book be an exception? More annoying is the analysis of identity politics. What counts as "substance" when talking of a life experience? And how could someone, whether gay or Asian or neither of those, evaluate what constitutes an intrinsic part of belonging to that particular identity? My brother pointed out that the Jewish identity is always political and the reviewer looked at my book through this lens. But I dislike the imposition of another cultural political identity on my own. To require someone, because they are identified in a particular way, to be political is an odd form of tokenism, and reduces that person to only one part of their identity is a way that is unconsciously racist or homophobic. You're Chinese so your poem about your Chinese grandmother must examine the Asian cultural experience. Your poem about your ex-lover is inherently political because you are gay. How about being gay and Asian, without apology and without having to explain myself? I'd rather report my particular journey and a larger human one than somehow being required to S-P-E-L-L things out.)

Calendar Boy
by Andy Quan
ISBN 0921586825
New Star Books

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.

-Mark Pupo, a Toronto writer and editor.

(This review drove me crazy. It was the same one as the poetry one above but with different words. The first paragraph sets up the category of writing that I fit into, gives examples of award-winning well-established writers who I compare badly with, and then points out some minor promise. Compare me to other young writers, not Edmund White's whole oeuvre.

He says "freed from the burden of speaking for a community, Quan is quite a writer." Wait a minute. The last reviewer said that I didn't take on the burden of speaking for my communities enough. I decided that the reviewer was some straight white dude who couldn't connect with the voices in the stories, whether they are gay, Asian, both or neither.

What irked me most was that the two examples from the text that he chose to illustrate how flavourless and melodramatic my writing are were sentences from the book on which my editor and I had disputed. The first, I had suggested taking out but he'd thought it important to keep for the plot. The second, he had highlighted and written "melodramatic?" So, what really annoyed me was that someone had read my book so closely but not really liked it.

In the same issue, my friends Shani and Francisco get glowing reviews of their new books by grad students. Why couldn't I have gotten a perky grad student, I whined to someone. To top it off, while breezing gay magazines at a bookshop, I find out that the reviewer is the editor of a Toronto gay-zine. He IS gay. He just didn't like the book.)

CALENDAR BOY
by Andy Quan (New Star Books, $16)

SOMETIMES life's a beauty contest. In Calendar Boy, Andy Quan's collection of short stories about gay men, we're reminded that in the Darwinian environments of dance clubs, it's what's outside that matters most in the primal chase: If you're hot, you score the muscle boys. If you're not, you merely observe others and go home alone.

Throughout more than a dozen stories, Quan's protagonists seem the same: All except one are gay, Chinese-Canadian, college-educated, and insecure about their bodies. Even the star of the titular story, who's ballsy enough to publish nude pictures of himself, is consumed by feelings of inadequacy. It's enough to make him go to the gym every day and mark his progress on a calendar, writing "Chest and Arms in some boxes, Legs and Back in others. Abdominals are every day, they go in each box." And as any fashion slave knows, beauty is often about conformity. In "Hair," the narrator, aptly named Samson, muses on the gay trends of bodybuilding and shaving: "I started to wonder why they looked all the same, as if put through an assembly line to make parts of cars: hubcaps perhaps, or fenders."

Such details have the makings of a funny book, but unfortunately, Quan misses the opportunity for levity. Rather than going with the humor and bounce that would have allowed his characters to be more likable, the author dwells on the idea that being Asian is another cross to bear. The protagonist in "On the Paris Metro" is convinced that being a minority has made him timid. "I realized that I have never stared at anyone in the street. Perhaps because I was slight, perhaps because I was Asian usually in non-Asian environments. . . . "

Quan's ethnicity is certainly an important aspect of his writing, but why must he always portray his Chineseness as a handicap? The back of the book says that the author was born in Vancouver and currently lives in Sydney. From his stories, one could safely assume he's spent time in Europe. It would be interesting if Quan ever traveled to Asia. Perhaps he would realize then that even when you fit in lookswise you may still be rejected on the basis of your dull personality.

Soyon Im

(The nasty review in the Georgia Straight somewhat prepared me for this. Here's an Asian reviewer who just doesn't get the "gay" thing. However, she's so fixated on the issue that all the characters in the book become the same - even though many of the characters are not identified racially, nor are all of the gay Asian characters the same. They're the same to her though. She has so many problems connecting with the characters that she can't see any personality... except she thinks they're not proud enough. Also, they're not funny enough. Ha HA! How did she manage to miss all the things which the good reviews commented on? And what is this trouble I have with reviews in weekly entertainment magazines?)

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