#2: asking about desire & asian identity
on "love me long time" by dorcas tang
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In Dorcas Tang’s Love Me Long Time, it’s the portraits that dazzle first.
Photographs of Asian women and nonbinary people that straddle the line between soft and hard, a willingness to be seen but a defiance, too. They’re in repose, wearing only their trademark red Calvin Klein underwear, or at their kitchen table with a bag of crackers clamped shut, mid-laugh. They lacked the stiffness that often appears when an interview subject’s asked to pose. They seemed to have let the photographer in. It made me wonder how the photographer had done it, instilled such ease in these people. Maybe, I thought, they were all her friends.
And then, there are the interviews.
Can you tell me how menopause has affected sexual pleasure? They ask Michelle, a 59-year-old Anglo-Burmese woman who is happy to oblige, even though, she says, with a laugh, “my son's probably listening to all of this.”
How’s the conversation with your mum about sex? They ask Ham, a 24-year-old nonbinary Korean Australian who tells a story about asking their mom if her new boyfriend is making her come. “She was like, ‘Oh my god, no! Oh my god — ahh! — don't ask me that!’ But I was like, mum, stop being cute. We’ve got to talk about this, this is so important.”
And then, a layer deeper with the audio: the surprise (at least to my American-centric mind) of the Australian accents, the intimacy of the stammers and echos and trailing-offs, the thrill of listening as two people veer away from what’s considered polite or acceptable conversation. I recognized something of myself in how Dorcas pried—how she risked asking such personal questions, sometimes carefully and tentatively. She seemed to understand that often, people are willing to share. They’re just waiting for the invitation of curiosity, of attention.
The audio and text snippets on Love Me Long Time, I later learned, are only the briefest windows into hourslong conversations that sometimes occur over multiple sittings, multiple years—one answer to my question about how Dorcas builds such trust. The omissions make you wonder what you’re missing, what we aren’t given access to but what must have transpired to get to this gem of a disclosure.
When I found out that Dorcas and I were in Philly at the same time last summer, I asked if I could interview them. She was doing a residency at TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, doing more Love Me Long Time interviews, running a reading group as part of the project. Their book list, btw:
Year of Blue Water - Yanyi
I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying - Youngmi Mayer
Stone Fruit - Lee Lai
Over spring rolls at a Vietnamese spot near her residency, as Chappell Roan blasted overhead, she told me the project “came out of a place of intense loneliness.” She had moved to Sydney after college in the Philly suburbs and it was hard to meet people. While some of the people in the project were already close friends of hers, many of them she met because of it. Some eventually crossed the threshold into friendship.
In an essay about the project, Dorcas, who is Malaysian-Chinese, writes: “In the moments spent together, I give and receive the fickle gift of connection.” A nod, they told me, to impermanence, to the “messy parts of being in relation to people.”
I liked this framing, especially from someone who seemed skilled in the practice of building intimacy; a refusal to romanticize being close.
Since the summer, Dorcas tells me she’s “returned to sydney to my desk job (lol) and trying to sustain the creative momentum.” She’ll soon be sharing Love Me Long Time interviews she did with people in Costa Rica and Philly and hopes to interview more people over 60.
Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our convo from that day when we met up. What is missing, notably, is what we talked about on our walk to the restaurant. As expected, I wasn’t safe from their prying. I squirmed a bit, sweating under the Philly sun, trying to answer questions about my transience between Manila and Philly I hadn’t figured out for myself yet, but wasn’t that what I had come here for? To see them in action, to ask and be asked. What I mean to say is I welcomed it.
You’re interviewing people about stuff that’s so intimate and personal, and it’s clear they were willing to go there with you. How do you approach that?
First of all, I send questions I might be interested in asking them. I don’t know if it’s overkill. I looked back at it recently and I was like, oh, maybe you can be more chill. But I’m like, here are all the questions I might ask. Questions about desire and sexuality that are more explicit, and then questions that are more general, like what do you want?
I’m up front about what I’m interested in. I chat with people for a bit before turning on the recorder, sussing out what the vibe is. Sometimes it is just not being afraid to ask a question.
I feel certain barriers around asking questions. You’re taught not to ask them because they’re taboo or too much but I find that more often than not, people are willing to answer them and it’s my personal block. I would personally love to hear someone talk about an abortion but I have not found the courage to ask. I’m trying to figure out how to get there.
It’s really surprising what some people say. There was one woman in her 60s, she was a professor, and she was like, I might talk about masturbating at work.
Yes! She was like, oh, my son might hear us talking about this, and you two were laughing about it.
I think my strength in this project is an ability to ask questions. I do so in my day to day life. It’s just kind of who I am, like I’m built around this curiosity about people. The more I do it, the better I get at it.
Why’d you decide to include audio in the project?
It started with my project about a Chinese diaspora beauty pageant in Costa Rica. I started that project in 2018. At the time, this project had come out about the Mississippi Delta Chinese by these photographers Andrew Kung and Emanuel Hahn. It was crazy to me to hear these Chinese people speaking in a deep Southern accent. So when I was in Costa Rica, I was like, I think it’s important to hear [the Chinese beauty queens’] voices speaking in Spanish.
More importantly, in this project, you get my questions and you get my stutters and my mistakes. A lot of these projects, you’re like, I am documenting you. There’s this power dynamic. But I think by including my own voice in it, it’s like, actually, I’m part of this as well. I’m not coming from it from a top-down perspective. I’m navigating these waters together with you.
I was struck by that. People might have an idea of who’s running the project, like someone who speaks very well, someone who doesn’t stammer or say, “I guess…” It felt vulnerable, and also relatable to me, because as a journalist, I’m always asking questions like that, imperfectly.
I’m glad that came through. With photography and journalism and ethnography, the history of it has always been this idea of “neutral.” I’m not neutral. I’m just asking these questions, bumbling through them, or asking them because I’m interested. This is all shaped by my interests and biases and I guess I just wanted to make that obvious rather than hide it.
I guess I hope it’s a more active sense of collaboration.
You have photos, you have audio, and there’s the written text. Can you talk about the different kinds of intimacy involved with each of those? Does one feel more intimate than the other?
The most intimate moments are the conversations I have with people. What you’re seeing is only a fraction. Like, these conversations are hours long. They’re two hours long, across maybe two days, three days, across the years. You don’t see any of that. The moments that are the most intimate are not necessarily seen. Or just like the negotiations that happen, where I redact things and people ask for things to be changed.
Tell me about the decision to only include a minute or two of hours and hours of conversation.
First and foremost it’s the attention span we have these days. People are in the TikTok/Instagram era.
The second part of it is, well, not everything has to be seen or heard. There’s so much value in things that are not seen or heard. Some things are meant for that moment in time. Even the interviews that don’t make it to publication, for whatever reason, mostly because the other person doesn’t want it public, that is valuable in itself, I think.
It’s not a failure because they didn’t want it to be public.
No. Maybe I think about it like, could I have communicated better about the ways the work would have been used? I’m not sure. But in having spent the time with that person, I don’t think that’s a failure at all.
When I was working as a journalist at a daily paper, there was a lot of pressure to make every interview count, to turn it into a story. If a source pulled out of a story, it was really stressful. You couldn’t just say, well, but that time we spent together was meaningful.
It’s the difference between a personally driven project and working for a corporation, a business. The project is quite selfish, like, it’s just having an excuse to talk to people about these things. I love talking about sex and desire.
What draws your interest to sexual intimacy?
I think about my relationship to sex and my sexuality and desirability in a racial context. Maybe I’m just inclined to talking about these things. The histories and legacies of things like Miss Saigon, Madame Butterfly, you know, the ways that empire and imperialism has controlled sexuality in the colonies, and that informs now.
I’m reading this great book [The Hypersexuality of Race by Celine Parreñas Shimizu] that talks about the formation of race and sexuality, how it’s so intertwined. I think a lot about how my experience is really racialized and gendered. Like literally, this morning at 10 a.m., this man was like, “Oh yeah, you’re just what I’m looking for! Asian!" I’m like bro, could you not wait until…
Noon?
Yeah, midday, for a gross cat call?
When I started the project, the Atlanta shootings had just happened. I think about the ways it’s quite violent, that the idea of an Asian woman essentially compelled this person to murder sex workers, the insidiousness of this undercurrent of violence, and it’s literally manifested.
And then you think about the Filipino transwomen who have been murdered. There was a woman named Mhelody Bruno in Australia who was murdered, and another case where an American serviceman murdered a woman [Jennifer Laude]. This is the racial and sexual perspective on a microlevel but thinking how they relate to bigger structural things and histories and how they inform each other. When someone’s on a dating app being like, I’ve never been with an Asian woman. That’s coming from this whole lineage and history, right?
But yeah, I also just think it’s fun to talk about sex. I just started dating someone who has a foot fetish and I was like ooooh, whaaaa! So exciting. I’ve been telling everyone about it.