Lai has twice been an instructor at Clarion Westscience fiction and fantasy writer's workshop in 2004 and 2007. She was also an instructor at the original Clarion workshop at UCSD in 2009.
She has published articles and criticism in journals such as West Coast Line, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, English Studies in Canada and Fuse Magazine, as well as several anthologies including Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography and Bringing It Home: Women Talk About Feminism in Their Lives. In 2014, she published a non-fiction work, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, with Wilfrid Laurier University Press), which discusses the movement's context of activism, Canada's ethnic minority history, and writers such as Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy.
An out lesbian,[6] she was one of the 1997 panelists at Write Out West, one of Canada's first-ever full-scale conferences of LGBT writers.[6]
Lai's work explores intersections of identity in relation to race, culture, gender, and sexuality.[8] In Lai's novels, she draws inspiration from Chinese mythology and culture with a particular focus upon historical and mythological female figures; these historical, cultural, and mythical connections are integrated within a feminist science fiction framework in the novel Salt Fish Girl.[9] Complex romantic and sexual relationships between Asian women are a recurring subject within Lai's work and serve as the main focal point for her novels.[8]
In an interview with Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, Lai discussed her book Slanting I, Imagining We within the context of being involved within the creative and literary fields of Toronto in the 1990s.[10] Lai said of her work during this time: "For me it was a time when questions of race, class, gender and sexuality were open to public debate in a broad and engaged ways. They still held their contentiousness, but productively so. Questions of history, movement, representation and justice were all available for interrogation. The work was not easy. The questions were personal and political and incredibly difficult to answer."[10] Lai cites discussions and interactions with other authors of color during this time as immensely influential and formative for her own work.
Critical reception
Lai's novels have generated much acclaim for their innovative narratives that help readers understand the modern diasporic experience. Her work has also generated a relatively large amount of scholarship and criticism, mostly Canadian, with the exception of a US monograph, The Influence of Daoism on Asian-Canadian Writers (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).[11]
Many scholars emphasize the contributions that Lai has made critiquing common understandings of race, gender, and national identity. Malissa Phung analyzes Lai as part of Chinese diaspora, and particularly studies how her works investigate concepts such as immigrant shame and what she calls "postmemory."[12] Stephanie Oliver suggests that Lai innovatively uses smell as an indicator of the "politics of representation, regimes of racialization, the power of the gaze, and the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that are key to processes of social marginalization" of the diasporic experience, rather than the more common visual and auditory frameworks.[13]
Sharlee Reimer suggests that Lai's work casts common Enlightenment ideas as racist and limiting, and uses her novels to suggest new ways of understanding, such as her use of cyborgs in Salt Fish Girl to criticize origin stories.[14] Nicholas Birns situates Lai's work as postcolonialtransfeminist, prominently featured in the Canadian canon but not as well known internationally, but nonetheless broadly relevant for offering "multiple, diasporic identities to counter the repressive rhetoric of monolithic globalization".[11]
Professors Wei Li and John M. Chen published a 466-page A Study of the Literary Influence of Socialist Theory in Major English-Speaking Countries (Chinese Social Sciences Press) in Beijing in 2018; this highest academic award-winning monograph across China features numerous comments on Lai as a critic, poet, and novelist from an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. The study is, in part, a continuation of Professor John M. Chen's The Influence of Daoism on Asian-Canadian Writers (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).[citation needed]
Professor John M. Chen's Chinese Canadian Literature and Criticism: A Multi-disciplinary and Cross-cultural Approach, Vol. 1, is forthcoming with Springer in 2022. It covers multiple aspects of the genesis and developments of Lai's poetics, politics, aesthetics, and ethics from the feminist, Daoist, post-colonial, Confucian, socialist, gender, Buddhist, and Marxist perspectives, while situating Lai and other Chinese Canadian writers and critics in the context of Chinese and Canadian literary and intellectual traditions since the dawn of Chinese civilization some 5000 years ago.[citation needed]
^Joo, Hee-Sung Serenity (2014). "Reproduction, Reincarnation, and Human Cloning: Literary and Racial Forms in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 55: 46–59. doi:10.1080/00111619.2011.625999. S2CID161574071.
^ abNicholas Birns (2008). "The Earth's Revenge: Nature, Transfeminism and Diaspora in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl". In Lee, Robert A (ed.). China fictions, English language : literary essays in diaspora, memory, story (Online ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN978-9042023512.
^Phung, Malissa (2012). "The Diasporic Inheritance of Postmemory and Immigrant Shame in the Novels of Larissa Lai". Postcolonial Text. 7.
^Oliver, Stephanie (Spring 2011). "Diffuse Connections: Smell and Diasporic Subjectivity in Larissa Lai's "Salt Fish Girl."". Canadian Literature (208).
^Reimer, Sharlee (2010). "Troubling Origins: Cyborg Politics in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl". Atlantis. 35 (1): 4.
