Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl

Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl resists the containment strategies of Canadian multiculturalism by using hybridity both thematically and as a textual strategy. Thematically, the characters’ hybridity in SFG, resulting from genetic cloning, immigration and cultural commodification, reveals the power structures of traditional China and a future North America, challenges the illusive stability of “home” and identity in both societies, and constructs a lesbian genealogy from the past to the future. Hybridity is also the text’s strategy of contextualizing and de-exoticizing its lesbian genealogy. The constructed lesbian genealogy is hybridized not only with the characters’ genetically mixed bodies and identities embodying multiple positions, but also through the text’s plural beginnings, endings, lines of development as well as multiple intertexts. Besides pluralizing the meanings of “home,” furthermore, the text hybridizes and contextualizes a variety of elements traditionally associated with the “Oriental”: the mythic goddess Nu Wa, New Kubla Khan, the opium den, ethnic foods (durian and salt fish) and exotic ornaments. Such a hybrid genealogy is thus contextualized because all the time-spaces the characters experience take on multiple social meanings pertaining to the exploitation and exoticization of Asian diaspora in the age of multinational capitalism. Salt Fish Girl’s strategies of hybridization, then, are the “post-colonial anti-exotic” strategies that “re-politicize” the “exotic” elements to evade the Orientalist gaze supported by both capitalism and Canada’s official multiculturalism, and to empower its characters in their multi-layered social networks. At the end, however, the text asks, with its two open endings, a difficult question of how differences can be recognized and what recognition means.