Conversation: Larissa Lai
By Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally published in Issue #9 “ECHO (替)”. Get it now on BLURB.
Canadian author and poet Larissa Lai was born in California, USA to Hong Kong Chinese scholars in 1967, and later moved to Newfoundland, Canada. She currently teaches critical theory and creative writing at the University of Calgary. Her three novels, steeped in fantasy and biotechnology, feature symbols and images that appear over and over again, each time in a different form. In her work, time is cyclical, with no real beginning or end. It simply flows, carrying the remnants of our bodies with it towards some new emotion.
Her 2002 novel Salt Fish Girl, for instance, features Miranda Ching, a young girl growing up in a mid-21st century dystopia. Sense and sensation come together as Miranda’s dreaming disease, which causes the stench of durians to leak from her pores, links her to the Chinese mythological creator Nü Wa. Memories of immigration and identity are inherited, confronted, and sold.
Now, in The Tiger Flu, which comes out this November, fish and roses tumble out of elevator doors as cannibalised flesh. Grist sisters, self-reproducing women, escape factory enslavement only for their granddaughters to return in search of a future. Tiger wine is synthesised using hair from a rug, resulting in an epidemic of putrefying disease and addiction. In a world whose rhythms are regulated not by the sun and the moon but by lumbering satellites, the best solution is up in the sky.
I spoke to Lai at length, back in September via Skype, about The Tiger Flu as well as queer diasporic Asian identity and the elements of storytelling. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jiaqi Kang: Starting off with something quite easy: how do you feel about the genre of speculative fiction as a platform for queer voices of color?
Larissa Lai: You think that’s an easy question.
JK: [laughs] I mean, I’m sure you get asked it a lot.
LL: [laughs] Fair enough, it’s a really good question. For me, the main thing that makes it so productive and useful is the metaphorical possibilities that it offers. It makes it possible to think through one’s stories, or one’s ways of being, in ways that’ll make sense to those who might not necessarily get it if it’s in a realist mode, because they think they can’t identify.
I’m also always really interested in the moments when the metaphor cracks open, when it breaks down: when the fox doesn’t stand in for the lesbian, for instance, and suddenly the fox becomes a fox again [in When Fox Is A Thousand (1995)]. It opens us to new possibilities for the world. And that
can be interesting and freeing, and also it gets us away from these over-determinations of identity that we find ourselves caught up in: queer people are supposed to be this way or lesbians are supposed to be like that.
I also think that speculative fiction is really great for the ways that it makes it possible for us to place ourselves at the center of the universe, instead of [making us] wade through the swathes of mainstream life and heteronormativity before we get to the place where we want to actually tell the story. So for instance, I’ve been reading J. Y. Yang’s The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Tides of Fortune, and they’ve set up this world where people don’t need to choose their genders until they’re ready to. It sets up a world with queer and trans folx at the center, and they don’t have to do any explaining to make that the case — they just do it.
It’s about the kinds of things that realism allows and doesn’t allow. Realism wants to know about things like your family, heterosexuality… but it doesn’t necessarily want to know about things like technology or biotechnology. As soon as you enter into those realms, suddenly you’re already in the realm
of the speculative.
There’s a whole crew of fabulous gals in the late 60s and early 70s: people like Monique Wittig, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Marge Piercy, who were trying to think about what feminists might want. How the world might be better if women ran it, or if women just separated from men. It was really interesting utopian thinking to try to find a way for us to be better. I was just really interested, because this stuff is really kooky, but in really fabulous ways that I think we’ve forgotten to think about.
JK: That’s actually quite interesting because I just finished reading Brave New World, and I was thinking about how the canon of science fiction tends to be really pessimistic, especially in the context of the classroom…it’s like, “Orwell was afraid of the new world order,” and how fear can make us imagine these sorts of worlds. What you do instead is, you have this idea that’s quite hopeful and then try to play out a situation and see how it is.
LL: Thank you so much. I’m so glad you saw that, because not everyone does. Some of the readers have read this as dystopian, because so much indeed is destroyed at the outset. But I really was trying to offer a possibility for the world in spite of all the horrible things, in spite of the patriarchy, in spite of environmental destruction, in spite of rabid capitalism, in spite of all those things. I can’t imagine those horrors away, but I can imagine their transformation into something else, maybe better, but definitely different.
JK: You often mention West Coast fiction, and use that as a way to categorise your work, along with terms like ‘Asian’ and ‘queer.’ What do you mean by West Coast fiction?
LL: There’s a long-standing and strong Asian presence on the West Coast of that place that some call North America and some call Turtle Island. We were connected to the people here before we were connected to the state. With respect to the state, there’s a long-standing anti-Asian history that includes exclusion acts internments, labor politics, lots of rioting, violence, anti-Asian
violence… but it also has a long-standing relationship with Indigenous peoples in these territories. And also there’s Black presences here.The first governor of British Columbia, for instance, James Douglas, was a mixed-race black man. Historically, there’s been slavery in these territories, but it unfolds differently from the slavery in the US context or in the Eastern territories. Mainstream publishing doesn’t have much of a sense of how different things are out here. Out here, there is a microculture of folks who very much know this stuff up and down the street, who are able to reading more complicated ways. That’s something special that’s grown out of these lands, these territories and the relationships between uninvited guests and original peoples.
JK: What is your process in conceptualising the heroines of your novels?
LL: The best characters come to me through voice. Voice is not something I can deliberately produce. It’s a process of playing with language and images and dreams, and other things I’ve been reading, and waiting for a voice to come. Sometimes it takes a really, really long time.
JK: Is that the main reason why The Tiger Flu took so long to write?
LL: Partly. I had been struggling to make a living. In the intervening years, I did a Ph.D, and then I got a job, and doing all of that and and teaching for the first time and dealing with vast numbers of students from all over the place — some of whom were really open-minded, some really racist — dealing with university administrations…I think it’s more that that took such a long
time. But Kirilow’s voice was slow coming. I don’t know if I would’ve heard her sooner if there hadn’t been so much cacaphony around me.
Voice is necessary. And once the voice comes, you can ask it questions. So there really is this funny engagement with the unconscious. There are means for tapping it. You gotta do the free writes, you gotta do the dream journal, you gotta do all that kind of stuff. Your job as a storyteller is to figure out what to do with the things the voice has told you.
“What’s at the center of canon is always power.”
JK: You mention in another interview that The Tiger Flu is born out of a desire for a Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey. Yet the result in your novel is a far from traditional narrative structure. Who is the hero — Kirilow, Kora, or both, or the Grist Village as a whole? Could you elaborate on how identity and gender influence a story’s construction?
LL: As a kid I loved Star Wars, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Dune. But the story of the singular hero going on a journey to meet the evil antagonist and win a battle against him, this is a patriarchal narrative and belongs to a patriarchal form of masculinity. One of the things that that narrative form
is predicated upon is: “The world is divided into good and evil.” And I don’t think that a feminist project can imagine the world in that kind of way, that idea of, “You’re with us or against us,” “The antagonist is fully evil and needs to be destroyed in order for me to become a grown-up and have my matured being.” Those hero stories are about killing the father in order to come into one’s manhood. There can’t be an equivalent story of killing the mother in order to come into one’s womanhood. You want a relationship with your mother. So then women’s narratives, or at least if it’s going to be feminist, it needs to be relational in the first instance, and not dialectical.
I would suggest that you’re right on all counts: that Kirilow is the hero, Kora is the hero, Grist Village is the hero, Chang is the hero, and Eng is also the hero. And maybe even the cut hand — the Salty’s cut hand — is another? So there are all these agented entities — Isabelle as well — moving through the novel. Originally Isabelle’s was a third narrative voice, but the novel became too unmanageable and so I took it out. I don’t know, maybe she’ll have her own story, her own novel at some point. There’s certain elements of the hero’s journey that remain intact. It still begins with stasis, there’s rising action, there’s a climax and so it is classical still, in that sense. But classical with a twist, because of all the characters running through it and because of the interactions among them. It’s not one man up against the world; it’s a group of people facing a crisis and resolving it collectively, while still having their differences.
With this particular project, I am really looking for legibility in the world as it is. Maybe that’s my realist gesture. I recognise that world as patriarchal and a certain narrative structure as one that most people are willing to read. The reason I write fiction is because we’re living in a historical moment now, where stories need to be accessible. I feel if there’s something I need to be doing right now out there, it’s telling women’s stories, and in particular telling stories about women in conflict. If I feel I have anything to teach, it would be how to think with and sit with contradiction, ambivalence, disagreement. And actually, the novel lends itself quite well to that.
JK: You also say that although you loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you hated it because it got rid of women at the get go. With a lot of work that is really highly praised, I felt I couldn’t appreciate because I found it to be overwhelmingly male. Is it reasonable to say, “This work shouldn’t be in the canon anymore,” or “The current canon needs to be destroyed because it’s so overwhelmingly white and male?”
LL: The problem with canon and canonicity is an imagining of a culture with something at the center. And what’s at the center of canon is always power. Canon itself can only happen under patriarchy and it can only put men at the center. I don’t know if that’s too pessimistic. But the world I want to live in is a world where we hang out and we tell our stories, and nobody’s story is more important than anybody else’s. They might be different. There might be moments where stories do rise up as more important because of some injustice. Like right now, here in Canada, especially in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, all these indigenous stories are coming to the fore. And in some ways they are more important because they’ve been so profoundly repressed, and if we don’t foreground them, then there’s a danger that people, bodies, ways of knowing will just be disappeared. So then we need to say, “These stories are more important.” We need to place them at the center. But that’s a kind of historical pragmatics. It’s different from the setting up of a canon that says, “This is what’s at the center of a culture because it’s the best.”
JK: I really agree with that. But then can you even build a second framework It’s quite pessimistic to say that but then you also can’t build a new one because everyone’s already learned the problematic ideas. You can’t wipe memory.
LL: You know, your friend right now is Foucault. He says, “Yeah, the history’s there, it’s hegemonic, it sucks. But there are alternate histories.” He calls it genealogy. There are other knowledges, there are other ways of knowing, but they’ve been repressed. One can reach back into the historical record and look. That’s part of what I do, with my fiction: this stuff doesn’t come from nowhere, it just comes from other traditions and the mixing of those traditions as well, and the things that erupt surprisingly from that mixing. It offers a bit of agency. In trying to find those things, you will invariably see something that can then be deployed into another kind of future. And that’s the work, and that’s where the hope is. So it’s not hopeless. But that is the fight.
JK: Yes — even though you can’t eradicate Orientalism as an idea, ever, you can find alternative ways and you can also go back and revisit these hegemonic ideas and reconsider, problematise them, and think about how they’ve shaped our history.
LL: There are knowledges that are China-based, that are not Orientalist. There’s a Daoist tradition, or there’s a Buddhist tradition. There’s women’s poetry in China that’s not Orientalist. Just women who were there, in Xi’an or whatever, writing poetry. They weren’t thinking, “Here I am, as an Oriental, in 1342, right?” So you can return in that kind of way. You can shove hegemonic stuff aside altogether, but invariably it comes back. But by centralising this other way of being, you get a completely different set of stories.
JK: Moving on to the themes within your work… Why do you use mythology? What can we learn from it? Is mythology history?
LL: I think of history, in its social function, as linear and monological. History wants to look to the past in order to teach us lessons so that we don’t reproduce them. Mythology, I think, is circular and polyvocal. And then I think of mythology also as stories that return to us when you least expect them. So then my job as a storyteller is to work out which myth it is that we’re living. And maybe we’re living more than one at the same time.
They’re tricky. What might’ve appeared as a positive in one iteration might return as a negative in another iteration. Your job as a storyteller is to be able to see that. But myth doesn’t teach lessons in that moral way. What it can do is it can show us how to pay attention. “Is that typhoon or that monsoon the neglected mother returning?” It might give us clues as to what we can do to survive her wrath. Or if a broken lamppost, for instance, appears in a story: is it a sign to pay attention to the darkness? Will it nurture me, or obliterate me, or both?
Myth can show us the directions in which stories are moving and the directions that we might be moving. But it can’t show us what’s good or bad, and it can’t show us what’s reward or punishment. I think history tries to make decisions about those things. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with history as history, is that it thinks it knows a lot more than it actually does.
JK: You often bring up the idea of the female body and its lack of autonomy in a patriarchal world, especially with the clones and the biotech, and a lot of scientists creating women. Could you talk more about the idea of the body and autonomy in your work?
LL: That’s a really great question. The body is really important to me, especially women’s bodies. They’ve been debased, in so many cultures through so many centuries, and yet they carry so much wisdom. And I don’t think the wisdom has been lost, but I think that the ways we have of accessing it have been closed off. And story is one of the avenues that has not been, so it’s important to engage with stories for that reason.
I very much experience the mind as seated in the body, and that experience to me is gendered. The head is part of the body, but when we’re reading and writing we don’t always think of it that way. As soon as I start thinking about bodies and women’s bodies in particular, away from the heteropatriarchy, other ways of thinking about the body present themselves. In this novel, I’m thinking about the consequences of the body/mind split; the way that it emerges in Western culture through the Judeo-Christian inheritance, the Enlightenment, the rise of technology, and hyper-capitalism. All the trouble with patriarchy, climate change, is a consequence of that split, of insufficient value placed on bodies, especially women’s bodies. Our bodies are seldom treated as sites of wisdom. I feel that we’re living now in a moment where our bodies have been pushed, through scientific innovation and the harnessing of the body’s productive capabilities, to the absolute edge of their capacity to function. We’ve pushed the Earth, which is only an extension of our bodies, to the absolute limit of its capacity to sustain capitalist consumption. So many things have been pushed to the edge, and so then what’s of particular interest to me are those moments when something breaks and you get mutation.
The Grist sisters and the tiger flu are figures of mutation that erupt unexpectedly as a consequence of humankind’s endless tampering with the flow of life. That’s exactly the thing I’m interested in investigating — those moments when the body breaks because, in a sense, too much mind has been pushed on it. When the body can’t bear what the mind pushes on it, it releases
another kind of wisdom. The release may seem wrathful, but the appearance of wrath is only a mirror image of the violence that the rational mind has pushed on the body.
JK: I think that’s so interesting. Right now as a young woman in the 21st century… I find it quite hard. A way that I’ve survived is by considering my mind as being apart from my body, because of how much focus there is in the heteropatriarchy on my body. I’ve actually often thought, “It would be so great if women just uploaded ourselves to the cloud.”
LL: The upload to the cloud in The Tiger Flu is an ascent, an upload to that place of pure mind. You leave your body behind. And then everybody’s up there on the mainframe satellite, at the mercy of whoever wants to press the button down below.
Chang is a figure of mind mutated so much that it has left the body behind. The Grist sisters are figures of the body returned to earth — clone women in a garden of plants that have been tampered with but still unfold something of their ‘plant nature’. The garden is something that makes it possible for them to continue, in spite of all of the violence that’s been enacted upon them. They’re still women but they’re not human anymore. And yet they get a little something that reconnects them to the body, that reconnects them to the
earth. And my utopia lies in a return to the body in whatever mutated form that develops from earlier tamperings, but still connected to earth. I’m sure that thirty years from now some young whippersnapper’s gonna come along and go, “Isn’t that hilarious that Larissa Lai thought that in 2018? Oh my God, so stupid.” [laughs] But for me that’s still where the hope and possibility lies, with the body and not with the mind.
JK: I love the idea. I think that’s what makes it so utopian. Having this future where you become this sort of extra-human thing that no longer has to worry about its body anymore…
LL: There’s no male gaze anymore.
JK: Exactly! And the tiger flu has killed all the men so that’s even better.
LL: [laughs] There’s a difference between this novel and lesbian separatist utopias of the 70s: I actually still do make room for men in this novel, and there’s still sympathy towards them, maybe because I’m a sucker or something. Uploaded to this mainframe satellite that’s now in this wide orbit around the Earth, so you only get to come back once every thousand years. But they don’t cease to exist because that would be fascist. [laughs]
JK: Why do dream sequences feature so prominently in your work?
LL: I actually really struggle with this question. The dreams are just there because they’re there, because the moment arrives in the narrative and it says, “It’s time for a dream now.” Linearly speaking, dreams move the world forward. As I’m working the classical narrative, it’s a way of avoiding that old science-fiction technique of the infodump. But I don’t know, I like to think that the dream is an intervention for something that I don’t control; it’s space in a narrative for the author to abdicate her agency and make space for another knowledge.
JK: When I saw you mention durian in The Tiger Flu I was like, “Oh my God! Durians!” So is there a possibility that this book and Salt Fish Girl might be in the same universe?
LL: The easy answer is: I began The Tiger Flu very shortly after I finished Salt Fish Girl and I realised I wasn’t finished with the clone figure. Salt Fish Girl ends with Miranda and Evie running off together and the clone women remain these utopian figures, but we don’t really get much of their actual story. Just because you put a bunch of women in a community it doesn’t mean everything will be okay — quite the contrary. We treat one another terribly. I want to explore where the flaws come from. Maybe they come from the patriarchy, maybe they’re inherent in our nature, I have no idea.
“My job as a storyteller is to work out which myth it is that we’re living.”
JK: Regardless of whose hands your works end up in, when you initially begin a story, what audience do you envision yourself writing for? In other words, who is a book like The Tiger Flu written for?
LL: I always write for my people. There’s not so many of us out there. So if there are a bunch of weird, geeky, queerish, Asian diasporic women out there, I’m so happy that it’s in their hands. But I also want it to be legible to all people who read. Because our world is falling apart and I wanna make a contribution and I want everyone around me to survive. There is a sense in which the novel I’ve written is for everybody, but it’s not in a naïve universalist kind of way. It recognises there are these profound differences among us, but I really wish for and believe in the ongoingness of human kindness.
JK: You’re a creative writing professor at the University of Calgary. What have you learned from teaching and reading your students’ works?
LL: In everybody’s practice, interesting problems always arise and attach to whatever the project is: the premise of the narrative, or the problem being addressed in the poem. It’s always easier to look at other people’s work and see the problems, and I also learn it for myself anew. I learn by teaching them, and teaching them how to respond. I learn how to take critique and respond to it. Teaching’s great. It’s ’cause it’s so social. It’s about making community at the end of the day.
Original interview by Jiaqi Kang. Illustration by Elisabeth Siegel. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.
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