| Growing up near Hamilton, Ontario, the kids labelled"ethnic" during my early childhood all had Italian backgrounds. For us seven-year olds eating lunch in the school gymnasium, the meaning of "Italian" could really be reduced to one thing: stinky meat sandwiches.
Of course, mortadella or capicollo didn’t really "stink" any more than peanut butter or meatloaf. But even then, in the intimate theatre of our nostrils, the curtain was going up on a whole drama of race, otherness and identity. (I think since then an educational kid’s book has been witten about those "stinky" sandwiches.)
All of this came back to me while I read Salt Fish Girl, Larissa Lai’s second novel. By making Miranda, one of her two protagonists, smell like durian fruit (i.e. a lot like cat pee), Lai boldly places odour at the heart of her novel. Oh God, you may already be saying, a story about a girl who stinks? Your nose is wrinkling, isn’t it? Which shows the power and primal connotations of smell: involuntary repulsion (and attraction), the messiness of decay (and birth).
There’s so much more going on in the novel that I tended to forget about the smell. To start with, the novel is split between a mythical past in China and the near future in the gated community of Serendipity on the Pacific coast of North America. Miranda lives in Serendipity, where her dad telecommutes to work every day in a video game-like digital environment called Real World, using a full-body interface called a Business Suit.
Meanwhile, back in Old China, a shape-shifting female creation figure called NuWa molds people from the malodourous river mud. These two stories, distant in time and space, intertwine as both women live out rather romantic love stories and come up against shocking power and violence.
Redolent of Jeannette Winterson for its earthy fairy-tale quality, and of William Gibson for its vision of a near-future dystopia based on the present, Salt Fish Girl contends with something neither of those authors touch on: the great 20th century story of immigration, with its shifting identities and links to a world left behind. It does this indirectly by offering characters who seem to be transformations of one another across time.
In an interview at the University of Calgary, where Lai is now pursuing a PhD in English, I asked her about this aspect of the book. Its complex relation to the past and future is nothing new to many immigrant families, she points out, because "on the one hand you have this relation to the past which is mythic, so you’re constantly trying to imagine it as this romantic thing that you’ve sorrowfully left behind or as this terrible violent thing that you’ve escaped from. And on the other hand you’ve left that place because of the future. You want to go to a better future and you’re constantly mortgaging the present to that future. I think a lot of people are coming from those fragmented backgrounds and into these fragmented futures that are actually really really difficult to wrap your head around."
Like immigrant families caught between two times, the novel itself never touches on "the present," even though it builds upon things we see around us.
"I think this book is an attempt to make a cohesive imagining of something that can’t possibly be cohesive, and try to sort of pull it into a string even though it’s completely not linear," Lai says.
Maybe the story is shaped more like a net than a line, but it does manage to catch references both topical and historical. How many stories touching on ancient China are also likely to appeal to readers of No Logo?
Salt Fish Girl is also about the need to create or discover one’s own identity, rather than simply inheriting it – even though heredity makes a difference. The novel even goes beyond the creation of "identity" to address new technological myths of creating (and controlling) life itself through the chilly, remote methods of science.
Which brings us back to the stink. All negative connotations aside, that stink is part of the novel’s appealingly hopeful quality. And as Lai says, "I think there’s something very romantic about this book. This is a really utopian book in a lot of ways, I guess."
And it really is hopeful to think that imperfection and impurity can win out over control and perfection: it’s a topic Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith have taken on. What they, and Lai, take comfort from is the way life can continue to, as Miranda puts it, "grow out of the most fetid-smelling places." |
