Background
Lai was born on September 13, 1967 in La Jolla, California, United States. She is the daughter of Tyrone, a university professor, and Yuen-Ting (Tsui) Lai, an independent scholar.
(When Fox is a Thousand is a lyrical, magical novel, rich ...)
When Fox is a Thousand is a lyrical, magical novel, rich with poetry and folklore and elements of the fairytale. Larissa Lai interweaves three narrative voices and their attendant cultures: an elusive fox growing toward wisdom and her 1000 birthday, the ninth-century Taoist poet/nun Yu Hsuan-Chi (a real person executed in China for murder), and the oddly named Artemis, a young Asian-American woman living in contemporary Vancouver. With beautiful and enchanting prose, and a sure narrative hand, Lai combines Chinese mythology, the sexual politics of medieval China, and modern-day Vancouver to masterfully revise the myth of the Fox (a figure who can inhibit women’s bodies in order to cause mischief). Her potent imagination and considerable verbal skill result in a tale that continues to haunt long after the story is told. First published to wide acclaim in 1995 and out of print since 2001, this new edition of When Fox is a Thousand, published by Arsenal Pulp Press for the first time, features a new foreword by the author. Praise for When Fox is a Thousand: “A sure-footed writer and teller of tales, Lai takes the reader on a magnificent journey through layers of time, myth, and imagery.”—Susan Crean “A particularly acute pleasure.”—The Advocate Larissa Lai was born in La Jolla, California and lives in Calgary where she is completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Calgary. She was awarded an Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers Award in 1995. She is also the author of the novel Salt Fish Girl (2002). When Fox is a Thousand is a lyrical, magical novel, rich with poetry and folklore and elements of the fairytale. Larissa Lai interweaves three narrative voices and their attendant cultures: an elusive fox growing toward wisdom and her 1000 birthday, the ninth-century Taoist poet/nun Yu Hsuan-Chi (a real person executed in China for murder), and the oddly named Artemis, a young Asian-American woman living in contemporary Vancouver. With beautiful and enchanting prose, and a sure narrative hand, Lai combines Chinese mythology, the sexual politics of medieval China, and modern-day Vancouver to masterfully revise the myth of the Fox (a figure who can inhibit women’s bodies in order to cause mischief). Her potent imagination and considerable verbal skill result in a tale that continues to haunt long after the story is told. First published to wide acclaim in 1995 and out of print since 2001, this new edition of When Fox is a Thousand, published by Arsenal Pulp Press for the first time, features a new foreword by the author. Praise for When Fox is a Thousand: “A sure-footed writer and teller of tales, Lai takes the reader on a magnificent journey through layers of time, myth, and imagery.”—Susan Crean “A particularly acute pleasure.”—The Advocate Larissa Lai was born in La Jolla, California and lives in Calgary where she is completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Calgary. She was awarded an Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers Award in 1995. She is also the author of the novel Salt Fish Girl (2002).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1551521687/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(Salt Fish Girl is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless fema...)
Salt Fish Girl is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless female character who shifts shape and form through time and place. Told in the beguiling voice of a narrator who is fish, snake, girl, and woman - all of whom must struggle against adversity for survival - the novel is set alternately in nineteenth-century China and in a futuristic Pacific Northwest. At turns whimsical and wry, Salt Fish Girl intertwines the story of Nu Wa, the shape-shifter, and that of Miranda, a troubled young girl living in the walled city of Serendipity circa 2044. Miranda is haunted by traces of her mother’s glamourous cabaret career, the strange smell of durian fruit that lingers about her, and odd tokens reminiscient of Nu Wa. Could Miranda be infected by the Dreaming Disease that makes the past leak into the present? Framed by a playful sense of magical realism, Salt Fish Girl reveals a futuristic Pacific Northwest where corporations govern cities, factory workers are cybernetically engineered, middle-class labour is a video game, and those who haven’t sold out to commerce and other ills must fight the evil powers intent on controlling everything. Rich with ancient Chinese mythology and cultural lore, this remarkable novel is about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against oppression.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887623824/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in ...)
The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment―from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state―continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Larissa Lai takes up the term “Asian Canadian” as a term of emergence, in the sense that it is constantly produced differently, and always in relation to other terms―often “whiteness” but also Indigeneity, queerness, feminism, African Canadian, and Asian American. In the 1980s and 1990s, “Asian Canadian” erupted in conjunction with the post-structural recognition of the instability of the subject. But paradoxically it also came into being through activist work, and so depended on an imagined stability that never fully materialized. Slanting I, Imagining We interrogates this fraught tension and the relational nature of the term through a range of texts and events, including the Gold Mountain Blues scandal, the conference Writing Thru Race, and the self-writings of Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/177112041X/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixte...)
In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixteen years—a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by the male-dominated Salt Water City, goes to war against disease, technology, and powerful men that threaten them with extinction. Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover Peristrophe is a “starfish,” a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to Salt Water City, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a group of powerful men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body. Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative, The Tiger Flu is at once a female hero’s saga, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale—a striking metaphor for our complicated times.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1551527316/?tag=2022091-20
2018
(A thief, a wayward detective, and an automaton with a sou...)
A thief, a wayward detective, and an automaton with a soul. What could possibly go wrong? Arhyen is the self-declared finest thief in London. The mission was simple. Steal a journal from Fairfax Breckinridge, one of the greatest alchemists of the time. Arhyen hadn’t expected to find Fairfax himself, with a dagger in his back. Nor had he expected his automaton daughter, Liliana. Suddenly entrenched in a mystery too great for him to fully comprehend, he must rely on the help of a wayward detective, and an automaton who claims she has a soul, to piece together the clues laid before them. Will Arhyen uncover the true source of Liliana’s soul in time, or will London plunge into a dark age of nefarious technology, where only the scientific will survive? This novel is classified as Gaslamp Fantasy, with elements of magic within alchemy and science, based in Victorian England.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MG26KNA/?tag=2022091-20
(Witch, Warlock, Whatever… My name’s Devon Jinx, and, yes,...)
Witch, Warlock, Whatever… My name’s Devon Jinx, and, yes, I’m half warlock, half witch. But I couldn't care less about which kind of magic is better. All I want to do is keep my head down and get on with my new job as an investigator at the Hunted Witch Agency. A recent, shall we say, mistake, has put me in place to inherit the leadership of the warlocks. Which means only one thing. I have a choice to make: Leave behind my life of witchery to become a warlock, or lose my warlock magic forever. Complicating my choice is the fact that someone is trying to destroy the warlock coven. If I don't stop them, the warlocks will be annihilated. The task seems impossible until Gerard Freshwater, a distractingly handsome witch, explodes into my life. He's determined to make me see that being a witch isn't just the best option, but the only option.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0777RHXY3/?tag=2022091-20
critic editor educator producer writer
Lai was born on September 13, 1967 in La Jolla, California, United States. She is the daughter of Tyrone, a university professor, and Yuen-Ting (Tsui) Lai, an independent scholar.
Lai studied at the University of British Columbia and earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from it in 1990. She earned her Master of Arts degree from the University of East Anglia, and her Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Calgary in 2006.
During 1989 Lai held several posts: an apprentice in Eric Cumine and Associates (architects and engineers) and a host and producer of the series Air Aware in CITR-Radio. Next year Lai was an assistant curator in the organization named On Edge Productions. In 1991 she was a coordinator in SAW Video Cooperative. In 1992 Larissa Lai worked as a television and video associate in media arts department in Banff Centre for the Arts. Also during this year she was a production manager for the film My Sweet Peony. From 1994 to 1995 Larissa was an editor in Western Front Society. The next two years she held the position of a gallery animateur in Vancouver Art Gallery.
From 1997 to 1998 she was the Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary, and she was a writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in 2006. Lai has twice been an instructor at Clarion West science fiction and fantasy writer's workshop (in 2004 and 2007). She was also an instructor at the original Clarion workshop at UCSD in 2009.
Larissa was an editor of poetry for the journal Canadian Literature from 2007 to 2010. Now Lai is an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of British Columbia.
(In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixte...)
2018(Salt Fish Girl is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless fema...)
2012(When Fox is a Thousand is a lyrical, magical novel, rich ...)
2004(The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in ...)
2014(Witch, Warlock, Whatever… My name’s Devon Jinx, and, yes,...)
(Poetry about the search for self amidst the shrill din of...)
2010(A thief, a wayward detective, and an automaton with a sou...)
Quotations:
“As an English-speaking, assimilated woman, very much touched by histories of colonialism and migration, my relationship with my own history is highly mediated. The only way in which I can access my own history, beyond the stories told by family members, is through English texts. These texts, however, are heavily inscribed with the West’s expectations and understandings of ‘the Orient.’ It may be, in fact, that these expectations are all that those works convey. That is, perhaps, an overly cynical take on the situation, but not without a grain of truth."
“At the time in which I started seriously writing fiction, around 1992, questions of authenticity and appropriation were at the top of the list in cultural debates taking place in Vancouver, at least in certain circles. It was a time when a new generation of antiracist activists and artists were beginning to clarify for themselves and others the way in which systemic racism has suppressed us and our work in Canada. It was incredibly empowering to be a part of those discussions. I began to think about questions of power and history in ways I had not before."
“One of the things that interested me about those discussions was the way many of us often assumed a kind of utopic place of origin which we, or our ancestors, inhabited some time in the distant past before the advent of European colonialism. I think we knew that there had never been any such thing, that we all come out of particular troubled histories of our own, just as the Europeans did when they crossed the Atlantic to come to the Americas. The desire for that utopia was overwhelming, precisely because it pinpointed what we felt was lacking in this society. That was how I first started thinking about When Fox Is a Thousand.
I didn’t want to pass judgment on the imagination of that utopia. I wanted to flesh it out, to create a little, literary, utopic world where my weary brothers and sisters could retire when they were exhausted from more confrontational types of work."
“I also wanted to engage the question of myth. It is something which I feel has been largely abandoned by the Chinese society I know, in favor of more pragmatic types of knowledge. I am thinking particularly of Hong Kong, which is where my roots are."
“Realizing how biased all these various so-called historical records were was actually very freeing for me. I thought that if all the truths I can find are already ideologically determined, what harm is there in producing another one, true to my own quirky sense of the world. I also believe that, while exact histories can get lost or buried under false or biased renderings, our histories run very much in our blood, and that we can remember their emotional content, if not precisely what transpired during events long past."
“By the time of my grandparents generation, her role has once again been simplified. My mother tells me that, when she was growing up in Hong Kong, people would use the word ‘fox’ the way we in the West use the word ‘slut.’ The fox crops up again in popular Hong Kong cinema, but again it is not in a flattering way. I wanted to reclaim her and take her to late twentieth-century Vancouver and see what she would do. I gave her just a tinge of a feminist consciousness and set her free.”
A Chinese-Canadian, Lai has been cited as an example of "the growing elasticity of Canadian fiction and Canadian identity".
As an out lesbian, Lai was one of the panelists at Write Out West, one of Canada's first-ever full-scale conferences of LGBT writers, in 1997.