The Rice Queen Diaries: A Memoir

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

“Rice Queen” is a pejorative term for men who are attracted to men
of East Asian descent. It signifies a certain fetish, but also implies
an unequal relationship between the men in a biracial relationship.
There has been significant work, much of it Canadian, done in dissecting
this discourse and Daniel Gawthrop, who has previously penned two books,
has taken this framework into consideration when analysing his own
experiences in pursuit of East Asian men. Beginning in Vancouver, other
Canadian cities, and Amsterdam, he finally took his sexual interest to
Thailand and Vietnam as a sex tourist and then as a resident of
Thailand. Over the years, he travelled widely within this kingdom,
meeting dozens of men, sometimes for one-night stands, occasionally
living with one for months at a time. Gawthrop has now settled down in
Vancouver with a Burmese man.

This autobiographical work has the aim of putting the author’s
desires under the microscope in order to deconstruct and demystify not
only the label, but also the discourse. His work is thus infused with
personal experience but also a thoughtful analysis of his own actions
and his love objects’ reactions. There is plenty of sex depicted in
this volume, but always with a dose of retrospective theorizing

These recollections of many sexual experiences over a dozen years on
three continents— enough to fill a book—tell us more about the
author than about East Asians, as Gawthrop admits. However, they do
inform the discourse on rice queens, a caricature perhaps, but powerful
in its impact on our perceptions. This book thus helps to ground the
theory in personal experience, sometimes validating but also challenging
it. Well written and thoughtful, Gawthrop’s work is bound to engage
readers, even those who do not share his specific interest.