I'm male but I hope you don't mind my offering a suggestion:
Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones. No relation to the awful Bill Murray film of the same title.
Within the first 10 pages we discover that protagonist Alice Mannegan, an interpreter based in Beijing, has a yen for sex with Chinese men. By the time we reach page 20, we've learned that Alice is in full flight from her father, a racist U.S. congressman, and about to start working for Adam Spencer, an American archeologist on the hunt for the missing bones of one of the century's biggest scientific finds: Peking man. Having set the stage, Mones steps back and lets her characters do the work as she proceeds to spin a tale that is part mystery, part love story, and part cultural exchange.
I read this book shortly after graduating college at the suggestion of my advisor, who knew of my interest in Peking Man and Teilhard de Chardin. It was, IMO, pretty good (and I'm very picky about the books I read).