Liu, Catherine 1964-

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LIU, Catherine 1964-

PERSONAL: Born 1964, in Taipei, Taiwan. Education: Yale, B.A., 1985; City University of New York, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, 350 Folwell Hall, 9 Pleasant Street S.E., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0195. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, assistant professor of French and Italian.

WRITINGS:

Oriental Girls Desire Romance, Kaya (New York, NY), 1997.

Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2000.

(Translator) Du bon usage de la colere erotique, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2001.

(Reviser and author of notes) Victor Hugo, TheHunchback of Notre Dame, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Suicide of an Assistant Professor, The Other Press; Stars and Superstars.

SIDELIGHTS: Catherine Liu was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1964, but moved to the United States with her family when she was four years old. Liu has been interested in writing ever since she was young, although her parents did not approve of such a questionable career. An online interviewer in Voices from the Gaps surmised that Liu's parents "believed that by exposing oneself through writing, one certainly becomes vulnerable to the possibility of persecution." This attitude may have stemmed from their experience of being exiled from mainland China. The interview stated that "for this reason, Liu decided to try to find a compromise between familial demands and personal desires by studying literature . . . instead of writing fiction." Fulfilling her parent's desires to have a solid career, Liu was able to realize her dream of writing fiction by completing Oriental Girls Desire Romance while attending graduate school. She followed this fictional piece three years later with her nonfiction, documentary-style Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton. In her interview with Voices from the Gaps Liu noted that "writing teaches patience with oneself because it is not about speed, but time."

In Oriental Girls Desire Romance "Liu explores the feminine experience by telling a coming-of-age story of a young woman who makes many mistakes throughout the novel," explained the Voices from the Gaps interviewer. "Because mistakes are now characterized as deadly in our society, [Liu] believes that an important aspect of the novel is that the narrator learns from her mistakes, albeit at a great price." The critic surmised from Liu's writing that "one cannot, and perhaps should not, always make a safe choice."

Trey Strecker in Review of Contemporary Fiction, wrote that "each of the novel's twelve discrete sections is strong enough to stand alone by using fragmented, minimally connected text to represent her narrator's fragmented world." Liu "clearly demonstrates her considerable promise as a young novelist and her aptitude as a critic of contemporary culture," Strecker added. Sarah Schulman in Lambda Book Report found Liu's work "an enchanting, maddening first novel" and described the book as "the beginning of a new genre: smart, angry, Asian girl refuses to repress smarts or anger. . . . Liu's book is intelligent, fierce and sad."

In Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton Liu writes that the difference between the human being and the mechanical replica of the human being is a predominant issue in the world today as humans advance more and more. She takes readers from the earliest advent of the Automaton starting in the eighteenth century throughout the years of invention and examines mankind's reactions to what may in fact be their obsolescence.