reviewed by Mary Anne Mohanraj

Geraldine Kudaka has put together a beautiful book. The book covers a dizzyingly wide range of cultures -- Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, East Indian, Pakistani, and Amerasian descent. (Please note the lack of Sri Lankans. Ahem.) One might ask, with so many different cultures, why even try to put them all together in one book? Is there really so much correspondence between the Chinese and the Pakistani experience? But if you keep in mind that this is really an American book, a book of expatriates and immigrants and their children and grandchildren, then you may be unsurprised at some of the commonalities that emerge.

The book opens with a foreword by Russell Leong, "Unfurling Pleasure, Embracing Race". Leong makes many interesting points in this article, which is undoubtedly a better introduction to the book than I could give you here. He delineates some of the connections between racism, racial exclusion, and interracial relations in these stories, and gives you a detailed historical perspective on the problem. A fascinating essay.

What really struck me though, when reading through this book, was how many of these stories dealt with family. I've recently been talking to some publishers about what a multicultural erotica anthology should look like -- what are some of the connections you'd expect to see? In looking at the South Asian experience, at any rate, it seems that sexuality is often inextricably linked with family -- with parents and siblings and uncles and aunts (oh, those aunties...). Every act, no matter how private and individual, acts within a broader social context, and that fact is very evident in many of the stories from Asian Americans. In my own life, that knowledge has been unavoidable (and often annoying).

It's hard enough to negotiate the tricky terrain of sexuality -- it can be exceedingly frustrating trying to do so with your parents and relatives and their friends all looking on and offering advice and warnings. This experience is of course not exclusive to Asian Americans. Some of my Jewish American friends have spoken of having exactly the same concerns and correspondences, for example. But, perhaps because of the still quite common practice of arranged marriages, I do think that Asian Americans are probably more family-conscious during sex than most. And that comes out in many of these stories.

The book is jam-packed with tales. It's divided into eight sections: Sexual Awakening, Blood Links, Embracing the Female Body, The Size of It, Mating, Colors of Love, Betrayals and Infidelities, and Mind Sex. Each section has several stories, from many of my favorite authors (such as Ginu Kamani and Cecelia Tan, Julie Shigekuni and Bharati Mukherjee), as well as many authors I hadn't read before but will now look for eagerly. I don't think I could pick a favorite story; they're so many and so different. I will warn you that the anthology changes in character as you progress through -- the stories more often end happily at the beginning of the book. Towards the end, upsetting emotions left me more often upset than aroused at the end of a story.

However, you shouldn't let that scare you away. The upsetting stories are just as good as the happy ones...maybe even more so. The conflicts and ambiguities these characters experience are so painful, so real. This isn't a book to race through. This is a book to read story by story, with pauses between to think about what you've read. It may teach you something about family, or about relationships, or about what happens when duty and desire conflict. It may expose you to cultures you've never encountered. And it'll probably even turn you on.