Since consumers are masked by the enticing purposes of products, they can hardly realize the capitalist logic behind the products they desire. In a subversive act of the workers, the messages in the form of rhetorical questions radically rattle consumers’
concerns with the plights of factory workers and alienation of capitalism. As Evie states, the cyborg women are “not designed for wits or willpower” but she is different because she is “of an earlier model”; however, the corporation “couldn’t control for everything . . . Maybe the fish was the unstable factor” (158-59; emphasis mine). That is, the corporation is threatened by the monstrous entity with the fishy stink the
cyborgs give off, and thus cannot easily contain and is unable to counter the destabilizing force of biogenetic sources of cyborgs. As a result, the bodies in the conditioned technologized environment are adept at employing such materiality of its reality as fishy smell produced by biotechnology to claim the agency of historical,
social and gendered bodies.21 As Haraway argues, “[c]yborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (311). Lai’s characters in
Serendipity achieve bodily agency in alliance with biotechnology from which connections become reworked and renegotiable. In the face of global capitalism’s control, the characters both wield their potential of the body with the aid of biotechnology to withstand the corporate cooptation, and empower their bodies to thrive and multiply in the capitalist wave of globalization. The “uncontrollable”
nature plays an integral element in elusively subverting the corporate control and annexation.
While the corporation attempts to control female cyborgs, they have potentials to subvert the logic of capitalism with their bodies in the biotechnologically-engineered social machine under a relentless process of writing a new form of the body toward the future: “[W]e are the new children . . . of the earth’s revenge. Once we stepped out . . . of DNA both new and old, an imprint of what has gone before, but also a variation. By our difference we mark how ancient the alphabet of our bodies. By our strangeness we write our bodies into the future” (259). Their mixed origins can historically be traced back to the past, but paradoxically also related to the present, then, intriguingly projecting the future. The unstable, multiple identities, in this way, engender potentialities of bodies. Although Evie notes that the sordid origin of Sonias derives from the Chinese-Canadian woman interned in Rockies, the affectivity of queer women of color resonates with the ethnic histories of oppression occluded from the official history (160). The affective entanglement of history unravels the fact that the past cannot be contained in compartmentalized capsulate units unrelated to one
21 As Haraway claims, “[s]ituated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent” (592).
another in the operating mode of capitalism. The vague origins of Sonias make history the multiple components from various genetic materials inheritable to the next
generation or dispersion. With the erased archive of diasporic history and memory unfolding, the unrelenting quest of the Asian-Canadian root would produce what Evie calls “myth of origins” and a “perfect focus for revolt” (160). The recreated myth of Nu Wa empowers Nu Wa with the creativity of invention. As she articulates, “I made the strong ones into women and the weak ones into men” (5). The conventional gender binary22 is reversed in her vertiginous “latest invention” and “latest project”
(5). Moreover, Miranda reminds Evie that she is the maker of her maker: “I am your grandmother, I wanted to tell her. I am the maker of your maker. Both of us, such putrid origins, climbing out of the mud and muck into darkness. But I did not want to unmake what I had made, imperfect and wicked as it was” (253). Due to the stinking origins, they can unite with other escaped Sonias as a community and further trigger subtle disturbance of smell to rebel against the oppression and exploitation of
capitalism and heterosexuality. Unlike Dr. Flowers, who maltreats his products (252), Miranda claims that she would not do so while arousing the unruliness inside the spirit of Evie, who claims that she is “a patented new fucking life form” (158).
Vertiginously subverting the heterosexual reproduction, Miranda embodies the immaculate birth, despite her mother’s “good eight years past menopause” (15). That is, Miranda is an asexual product because her mother consumes a durian seed that is the incarnation of Nu Wa to conceive her. Nonetheless, Miranda’s father is remorseful about having given her mother to eat the durian fruit:
I should never have brought you that evil fruit. . . . Only barbarians eat
22 In the traditional setting, the Salt Fish Girl is taught by her mother as a “good girl” (50) and reflects that “I know some girls are betrothed at ages much more tender than mine, but still! I was only fifteen”
(50). Her mother intends to arrange a marriage for her to lead “respectable lives” (51). However, this kind of life is not a so-called “respectable” life, but ironically serves as a female bondage under the patriarchal society.
those kinds of things. You know if it doesn’t have a Saturna sticker it isn’t safe. Everything has been affected by those modified pollens. If it grows wild in the Unregulated Zone you have no idea what kinds of mutations have occurred. (32)
In the rumination of Miranda’s father, he describes the durian fruit as evil with concerns about the safety of it, feeling dreadfully unnerved once the integrity of the body is tarnished due to the mutations caused by the modified pollens in the
Unregulated Zone. Despite the father’s quandary, it is significant to note that Miranda’s mother gets pregnant through the durian seed, where Nu Wa coils tightly and transforms herself; as a result, the birthing event mystically does not include any male intervention (208). Daring to resist the patriarchal order, Miranda is not petrified by Dr. Flowers’s intention to scare her: “[W]hat monstrosities might have come of those births. Those trees have been interbreeding and mutating for at least three generations since the original work. The fertility those durians provided was neither natural nor controllable” (256). She, however, makes her own body with the
recognition of durian smells and seeds to confront the appalling perception of Dr.
Flowers toward the impalpable nature of such female reproduction. And she recognizes Evie, who as a “traitor” defies the dictation of Dr. Flowers (257);
unanimously, they join the action in resisting Dr. Flowers. The unrestrained use of durians as a means of reproduction falls outside the naturalized epistemology of heterosexual reproduction that would deem non-heterosexual reproduction monstrous and abnormal. In fact, the history of the Sonias exhibits the use of durian trees for
“implanting human genes into fruit as fertility therapy for women who could not
conceive. And of course the pollen blew every which way and could not be contained”
(258). In this way, the human-plant hybrid serves as a panacea to the sterility of women while the contagion of pollen spreading ubiquitously cannot be held by any
method of control and thus unsettles the rationalized order.
The origin of Lai’s recreated myth becomes mobilized, creative act of
reproduction. The splitting and mutability of offspring set the garden of creation in an ongoing movement and commotion, leading to the renegotiation of bodies for
contesting any multicultural attempt at defining the elusiveness and subtlety of Asian- Canadian identity. The slippages and intricacies of creating meanings attest to the multiple worlds of productive potential which unearth the suppressed history and identity:23
When that thought crossed my mind, I imagined that something inside me turned and whispered, something long and coiled, a body that had not yet sprouted limbs, had not yet become definably human. I imagined I held a pomegranate seed in my mouth. I felt its presence, the small weight of it against my tongue. (236)
The serpentine subjectivity is ungraspable, despite the claim on “weight,” and topples the boundary which is seismically rendered fluid and fluctuating, inaugurating the cyborg potential of border-crossing.24 Thus, the subversive potential within the body itself exerts influence on the status quo that effaces the agency of bodies via
biotechnology and capitalism. In Lai’s assertion, she takes great advantage on negotiating an improper, impure body into a new life form of potentiality to question the legitimacy of patriarchy.25 Besides, the intercourse between Miranda and Evie
23 In a review by Madsen, Lai states that “I was trying to write to fill in gaps. I was trying somehow [to]
contact things that had been forgotten . . . Our histories are fraught with so many absences and
omissions . . . When I first started reading Chinese mythologies . . . the blank spaces between the words seemed to me to ooze history” (149).
24 Lai’s strategy of creating unstable subjectivity can be traced back to the writing of her debut novel Fox: “Politically, what I was interested in when I was writing Fox was exploring the multiplicity and instability of the notion of truth while also producing a subjectivity that doesn’t seem to have a stable site of articulation” (“Sites of Articulation” 25).
25 As Lai asserts, “I’m not just dealing with travel and dislocation as social practices, I’m dealing with the hybridity and impurity of the body itself. I was interested in undoing the patriarchal underpinnings of the founding myths of nation states” (“Future Asians” 174).
with their legs turn into tails arouses hope with the cyborg potential to overturn the patriarchal system of capitalism which is rendered destabilized by the queer desire.
Thereby, the post-apocalyptic imagining does not lead to catastrophe, but potentiality.
As Lai writes, “Evie’s beauty lies in her ability to survive, adapt and reproduce in forms that mutate the present. She both doubles the past and diverges from it, in order to open to an embodied, knowing hopeful future” (“Future Asians” 175). Indeed, Salt
Fish Girl concludes with a reconfigured body of a new generation in anticipation of a
possible future. Nonetheless, the ominous tone presages the recurrence of history with blunders, betrayals and massacres of escaped workers by the dominant center. As Miranda ruminates, “[e]verything will be all right, I thought, until next time” (269;emphasis mine). Despite the spiral of despair, such peripheral forces as the
dreaming/drowning disease and its concomitant smells and conjured histories have already exerted unsettling influence on the dominant center that has been crumbling.
Within the disintegrating empire, the birth of the black-haired baby girl gives the text new hope. “[W]ithout any need for insemination” (258), the intercourse scenario exhibits cyborg revolutions with this creative ending offering “other ways of
imagining both epistemologies and ontologies of the present that might give way to a more hopeful future than the one offered to us by neo-liberalism, high capital or
‘empire’” (Lai, “Community Action” 117). In other words, Lai imagines other kinds of alternatives to displace and challenge the hegemony of capitalism and
heterosexuality. Although the change in present is limited, the revolutionary power is latent. As Haraway proclaims, “location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure. . . . feminist embodiment resists fixation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning” (“Situated Knowledges” 590).
Corresponding to Haraway’s politics of location, Lai’s main characters demonstrate cyborg potentials. Miranda and Evie are not content with the status quo, and thus
strive to challenge the seeming normalcy of heterosexuality and patriarchal capitalism.
To them, the significance of memories provides a space to reevaluate the present in hope of a potential future where they can enjoy temporary emancipation, despite the persistence of oppressive and hegemonic present. As Miranda ambivalently narrates,
“[t]he intensity of my recent ordeal made the real world seem suddenly very strange and very banal at the same time” (213).
The alternative narrative of lesbian eroticism26 has its limits, since the reproductive agency of queer women is still implicated in the gender opposition.
Despite the existing gender binary, the cyborg politics of transformation has proved promising in Salt Fish Girl. In furthering the subversion of sexuality in the novel, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity has made a breakthrough. As she claims,
[t]o universalize the point of view of women is simultaneously to destroy the category of women and to establish the possibility of a new humanism.
Destruction is thus always restoration―that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology. (119)
According to Butler, the naturalized categories of men and women should be nullified.
The generalization of women’s stance means the annihilation of rigid binaries that would be transformed into a new paradigm of ontology as a whole. In Salt Fish Girl, although the gender dichotomy does not dissolve itself, the cyborg community has struggled enormously to problematize and destabilize the matrix of patriarchy and capitalism. Furthermore, despite the fact that the escaped cyborgs are assassinated, Miranda and Evie are capable of exercising agency via biotechnology as a way of
26 Lai intends to replace the lesbian with “women identified women of Chinese descent” to evade the racist categorization (“Political Animals and the Body of History” 149).
empowerment to make resistance against the patriarchal hegemony and global capitalist flows.
The cyborg embodiment corresponds to Butler’s statement: “[T]he source of personal and political agency comes not from within the individual, but in and through the complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever-shifting” (127). As a political network, the cyborgs communicate with one another to form a community where identity is perpetually in a process of various positionalities. Also, reluctantly being defined by the official strategy of assimilation of the racialized, Miranda oftentimes projects backward glances to her previous bodily form as Nu Wa, further reexamining her identity. As Butler argues, [t]his new form of being is not
a transcendence of the binary. Instead, it is an internal subversion in which the binary is both presupposed and proliferated to the point where it no longer makes sense. . . . an experience beyond the categories of identity, an erotic struggle to create new categories from the ruins of the old, new ways of being a body within the cultural field, and whole new languages of description. (127; italics original)
Based on Butler’s view, it is significant to note that the dichotomy is the site for political contestations in which subversion effects its very power. The binary is nothing more than the cultural effect of gender performativity, an appearance pertaining to the label of categorization. Thus, the signifying system loses its
meanings. In Salt Fish Girl, the portrayal of the post-apocalyptic city does not simply mean the destruction of the global capitalist society, but also the imaginary creation inaugurating the threshold of a new world and ontology. As the birthing scene suggests, the birth of the black-haired baby girl by Miranda and Evie instills a new hope toward the possibility of the future. The intermingled connection between
Miranda and Evie proves the creative bodily capability of producing the flows of desires mixing such forces as flesh and myth. In the process of intercourse, they transform legs into tails as fishy forms reaffirming the queer connection with Nu Wa.
Saying “[i]n the beginning, there was just me,” the mythic goddess Nu Wa opens the prelude of Salt Fish Girl with the chaotic world: “[T]here was no order, nothing had a clear relationship to anything else. The land was not the land, the sea not the sea, the air not the air, the sky not the sky” (1). The disorderly worldview resonates with Butler’s perspective in “an otherwise unified ontology” (119) where there is no hierarchy on the basis of patriarchy and heterosexuality. When Miranda explicates her conception, she insinuates its nature as the “third gender” (15). The alternative
ontology of gender dismantles the gender binary. Actually, the order in the city with the claim on heterosexuality and patriarchy operates through the exclusion of others such as the homosexual and the racialized to maintain its normal function, but the maintained order is the artificial illusion behind which exists oppression and exploitation. In Butler’s point of view, the binary is no longer valid and the real subversion happens within the logic of the binary in an attempt to reconfigure a new way of the ontology without being stuck in the appearance of any side of the
opposition.
To sum up, in an attempt to biotechnologically control the factory women, the corporation dehumanizes them into assembly numbers and compartmentalized units;
therefore, they are rendered intellectually and emotionally numb and thus hardly escape the systematic control of capitalism. However, the escaped Sonias
subversively reverse the entrapped situation, uniting with one another to build a community in resisting the global capitalist webs. Haraway’s trope of cyborg sheds light on the political activities of cyborgs in understanding the internal logic of
capitalist exploitation and oppression and its entangled inequalities. More specifically,
despite the fact that the cyborgs undeniably reside in the endless exploitation of capitalism, they raise critical awareness of the capitalist intrigue, employing their products as a medium to convey politically subversive messages; also, they get empowered with the use of biotechnology to give birth to their queer offspring without any male intervention. The heterosexual and patriarchal norm can be further problematized from the lens of Butler’s theorization of the subversion of identity. In her view, gender is simply the repetitive effect of performativity; following this vein, the formation of identity founded on the ontology of gender dichotomy is in the politically naturalized process of cultural effect. Although the lesbian eroticism in the radical opposition to patriarchal capitalist hierarchy has manifested its limits, Butler’s new paradigm of ontology envisions the queer desire for cosmopolitan imaginings with the cadence of change in resisting the power and allure of global capitalism. As Haraway aptly avers, “[c]yborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance”
(“The Cyborg Manifesto” 316).
Conclusion
In the contemporary world, the ostentatious celebration of multiculturalism tolerates racial differences and welcomes immigrants who harbor the dream of democracy and affluence. Nevertheless, after the decline of the nation-state and the rise of global corporations, the politics of multiculturalism is the strategy of global capitalism to contain and assimilate the racial others. To assimilate prosperously as citizens, they are likely to deny their ethnic history and make themselves acceptable by the dominant. In hope of eking out a living, they work for the corporations and conform to the rules. All in all, the immigrants are ensconced in the illusion of possibility the ethos of multiculturalism have promised them, and thus they may find it hard to see the seamy side of capitalism clearly and entrap themselves in the risky enjoyment of consumer culture. Therefore, the frenzy celebration of multiculturalism not merely has the immigrants blind to the logic of global capitalism, but engenders more racial and gender conflicts and hierarchies with the disillusionment of the immigrant dream.
In the spiral of transgenerational traumas, the embodied connection to the origin
In the spiral of transgenerational traumas, the embodied connection to the origin