Circuits/Cycles of Desire

Among contemporary Chinese American writers, Russell Leong strikes me as one of handful most readily identifiable with diasporic sensibility, if the term is taken to refer to conventional definitions of diaspora derived from the Babylonian exile of the Jews (e.g., Safran).2 In his poetry collected in The Country of Dreams and Dust (1993) and fiction collected in Phoenix Eyes (2000), Leong writes with exquisite sensitivity about the global displacements of the Chinese in recent history, often in an elegiac tone.3 In Phoenix Eyes, on which I will focus in this essay, most if not all of the stories are predicated on profound sense of loss and involve restless translocal movements of various kinds, all meticulously historicized. To quote David James, Leong's work is a triumph of the diasporic imagination, in which the relations between different contexts in which identity is formed—sexual, familial, linguistic, geographical, religious, political, and so on— are reconfigured across macro-political trans...