Sometimes you write a book to fill a void in the market, because the book you want to read doesn’t yet exist, so you have to do it yourself. This was the case for Yen-Rong Wong, who found a dearth in literature about sex, intimacy and relationships from the point of view of Asian Australian women in Australia. Me, Her, Us, hence, is a collection of memoir-style essays that explore the intersection of sex and race.
The book is divided into three sections. ‘Me’ focuses on shame, pleasure and kink; ‘Her’ offers an insight into Wong’s background and canvasses how growing up in a conservative, Malay-Chinese, Christian family in Brisbane shaped her dating life (home was ‘an environment where saving face came at the expense of genuine emotional engagement’), while ‘Us’ broadens the perspective wider to take on subjects about the tired tropes of Asian fetishisation (‘yellow fever’), including examinations of being called a race traitor and the objectification and commodification by the Western male gaze.
The voice throughout is conversational and matter of fact. There’s no prissy shying away from the joy, mess, confusion and fantasy of sex – orgasms, masturbation, erotica, toys, rope play, S&M, consent – it’s all written with unapologetic, confessional candour and research gleaned from a raft of sources that include snippets from writers, philosophers and medicos as well as from novels, theatre, games and other art forms. The book roams widely and is a testament to the author’s voracious reading and curiosity about the world.
There’s a definite sense that Wong simply wants Asian women across the diaspora to normalise talking about sex in all its lurid and and forbidden colours, a topic that obedient, pious Chinese girls are discouraged from doing let alone engaging in – particularly before marriage. At one point she says she can’t speak to her mother about sexual matters because she doesn’t even know how to say the word “sex” in Mandarin. This book, hence, is a cathartic means to broach and muse on topics she felt uncomfortable to talk about in her youth or even in adulthood: ‘I’m releasing all these things that have been left unsaid.’
A seam of frustration and anger runs through the book. For instance, the fact of struggling with the stereotypes of being regarded as either a submissive or alternately hypersexual ‘Oriental flower’ or ‘the tiger mother or the dragon lady’ is a commonplace condition afforded to the average female Asian in Australia. Wong says this reductive, essentialist categorising means ‘there is no in-between for Asian women, no space for us to be normal or mediocre or complex or just be‘.
Whether it talks about the disparity between the treatment of men and women’s pleasure, the difference between being a sexual being and a sexualised being, the origins of the loaded word “Oriental”, or rampant depictions of Asian women in video games and pornography, Me, Her, Us is a break from both self-governed shameful silence and unspoken but internalised rules about what should be freely discussed in the open.
This is the type of book Wong wishes she had had as a young adult, navigating the perilous path to sexual maturity. She dedicates it to all young Asian women: ‘It’s for those of you who feel stifled by familial expectations… It’s for young women who look different, for women who have “foreign-looking” names, for those who have complicated relationships with their parents. I want you to know: you are not alone.’
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Me, Her, Us is an important and defiantly provocative debut that blends memoir and cultural criticism in its collation and expression of stories that foregrounds the Asian female identity: her discourse with both her own body and with the oppressive weight of others’ expectations.
Me, Her, Us, Yen-Rong Wong
Publisher: UQP
ISBN: 9780702266201
Pages: 272 pp
Publication Date: 28 August 2023
RRP: $32.99
