"I love Cantonese," proclaims Fiona Yu. "I can express myself at a whole new level of crudeness and vulgarity that I can't with English."
Managing nonetheless with English profanity that would do credit to Henry Miller, Fiona — a Yale law school graduate who appears to be the evil twin of her creator, Angela Choi — begins this foulmouthed but wickedly funny first-person polemic with an attempt to take her own virginity using "a silicone dildo coated in two-percent Lidocaine gel," a common anesthetic. "It's part of being Chinese-American, having to deal with insanity," Fiona explains.
An abundance of titles can be found, by novelists like Amy Tan and Lisa See, underscoring the predicaments of women in Chinese, and Chinese-American, familial and social hierarchies. But Ms. Choi's unbridled screed appears to have been influenced by Jewish-Americans like comedian Lenny Bruce, author Phillip Roth ("Portnoy's Complaint") and Sarah Silverman, a TV comedian with a well-deserved reputation for pushing the envelope on vulgarity.