“’vulture capital hovers over our dinner tables’: Larissa Lai, Rita Wong and Ecological Transcultural Alliances”

This article examines Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and concentrates on its political critique of economic greed, corporate power, dominating global capitalism and genetically modified food. The durian, in particular, one of the main agents in the novel’s plot, is here employed also to disrupt assumptions on heterosexual normativity and racial exceptionalism. Through the two main characters – Nu Wa, a snake-woman goddess who hybridizes Chinese myth with Genesis, The Little Mermaid, Frankenstein, and Blade Runner, and Miranda, whose body reeks of durian – we appreciate alternative trans-species modes of community, eventually challenging stabilized boundaries of ethnicity, race, and gender. These are the same ecological concerns that Rita Wong shares with Larissa Lai as illustrated in some poems collected in forage (2008) and here analyzed.