Imagining the Otherwise in Eastern Mythology and Posthumanism: Queer Decolonial Subversions, Reversing the Fetish and Nonlinear Temporalities in the novel Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai

2025

Written by Faith Tan (faifyboo)

The Otherwise reminds me of a time I had in the villages of Malaysia, staring at the night sky filled with star —I am zoned out from life’s capitalistic mundanities of worrying, thinking, working, and doing. The sheer thought of being within the nuances of Otherwise worlds fills me with a feeling of hope I cannot describe. I

cannot help but simply dream of all the lives I might have lived if history had not already named my body before I learned to speak. The feeling, that hope and widening of the world, is how I understand the Otherwise: not as an abstract political theory, but as Lola Olufemi said in Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, a firm embrace of the unknowable, a well of infinity to fall together. To me, the Otherwise,

not only brings the world forward but also gives the world a heart. As an East Asian woman shaped by the long afterlives of colonial desire, displacement, and racialised femininity, I carry with me a lineage that has been both silenced and fetishised, archived and erased. Reading Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, I did not enter as an objective observer. I entered as someone whose ancestry has been touched by the very same forces that this novel renders. For me, Curating the Otherwise is a practice of return and reimagining—an attempt to claim meanings that were decided for me before I was born.

In this essay, I analyse the speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl, written by Larissa Lai. Lai is an American-born Canadian novelist and literary critic who is known for her novels that flow through the realms of the Otherwise. I will provide a deep analysis, focusing on how the novel worlds the Otherwise as a queer decolonial alternative to 1colonial-capitalist power. First, I explore the novel’s resistance to linear temporality

through sensory politics—an embodied, fugitive archive and a sensorial link that cannot be contained within Western frameworks. Second, I trace the text’s nonlinear queerness in which intimacy and kinship refuse reproductive futurism and instead cultivate survival through reincarnation. Third, I consider Evie and the cloned labourers as a speculative, decolonial recreation of life through technology, challenging biocapitalist ownership of racialised bodies. Finally, I discuss the novel’s reverse fetishisation and reimaginings of the patriarch in Asian feminine literature, transforming objectification into narrative agency and autonomy to desire, and political will.

This tale of an ageless female character interweaves two timelines. The first one is set alternately in nineteenth-century China, about a Chinese serpent goddess called Nu Wa, who creates humans from clay out of loneliness. As she grows jealous of the humans’ connections towards one another, she visits a big green fish under the deep waters and wishes to turn human. Her wish is granted, and she is reincarnated in the 1800s as a woman; however, she is cursed to live a life of poverty. During this lifetime, she falls in love with a mortal woman who sells dried fish goods, known as the Salt Fish Girl. Although their romance grows, Nu Wa is eventually manipulated by a woman into leaving the Salt Fish Girl in the hopes of escaping poverty. She ultimately murders that woman and commits suicide in despair, making herself a worm in a river and coiling her body around a durian bud beneath. The second timeline is set in a walled city in a futuristic Pacific Northwest called Serendipity. Miranda Ching was conceived when her mother devoured a durian, an illegal fruit in the city of Serendipity. She grows up emanating the scent of durian. The connection these two women have with the durian fruit indicates a reincarnated lineage between them. As Miranda grows up, she falls in love with Evie, one of the many cloned corporate labourers labelled as the “Sonias”. As the timelines collapse, history, mythology and sexual identity are interwoven.

Radical Sensory Politics: Resistance to Linear Temporalities

The smell of durian—a sensorial link that interweaves the two timelines—invokes the Other through its representation of racialised difference, reincarnated identity and its reclamation of what colonial modernity deems impure and disgusting. Western colonial discourse constructed the non-European world as “a realm of powerful odours,” with non-white subjects described as “foul”. (Classen, 1994) The olfactory hierarchy—where the West is defined through deodorised cleanliness and the colonised through aromatic excess—defines what Miranda, a woman born in a hyper-capitalist city, is going through. Miranda is born from forbidden fruit, illegal in the Unregulated zone, outside of Serendipity. Her durian odour marks her as racially impure or Other, a body that cannot be assimilated into the sanitised, sight-filled society. Lai transforms this stigmatised trait into radical politics of embodiment. Her family, acknowledging its significance and rarity, shelters her away, allowing her to embody it—a representation of a world away from extraction and colonial influence. Because of this, Miranda can recollect memories of her past lifetime, and this becomes a major key in uncovering her lineage and discovering the significance and value of her life. The novel reclaims it as a source of memory, lineage and anti-assimilation power, saving Miranda’s identity as a whole.

Radical Sensory Politics: Feminised Version of the Biblical Adam and Eve Story

In the Bible, Eve falls into temptation and leads Adam to follow along—the apple, fresh, crisp and clean, is the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve and, as commonly cited in Western counterparts, the beginning of sin. Lai references this biblical imagery: Miranda is a reincarnation of Nu Wa and is conceived through her mother’s consumption of durian, making Miranda’s birth one of impurity: pungent and sensual, a similar reference to the result of sin. In the Bible, Eve gave in to temptation, leading to Adam’s demise. Eve’s doing is a telling by the West that Eve’s experience is said to have incited a woman’s reputation for leading men to their destruction, therefore justifying women’s subjugation (Reimer, 2010). Lai reimagines and feminises this patriarchal narrative: it was the mother’s desire for the fruit—untempted—that led her husband to get it for her. This makes Miranda tied to the serpent, Nu Wa and Jesus from the Bible. This feminisation of the novel’s story from the Bible exposes the deeply embedded patriarchal ideologies that are set way back in time, when humans developed enlightenment to create world structures.

Radical Sensory Politics: Olfaction as Epistemological Framework

Within Western epistemologies, the sense of sight has long been privileged as the dominant sense—a colonial modality tied to objectivity, distance, classification, and surveillance (Classen, 1993; Mirzoeff, 2011). This ocular regime produces knowledge by stabilising the viewed object, rendering it knowable, governable and easily categorisable. Sight creates distance—separating what is now known as the “East” and the “West”. Lai subverts this calculated hierarchy and uses scent—the pungent, unruly smell of durian, beloved by people mostly from the East—as an alternative sensory logic. Unlike the use of sight, smell operates through intimacy and proximity; it permeates boundaries, resists containment, and invokes embodied memory. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s analysis in Ghostly Matters (1997), olfaction here functions as a form of haunting: a sensorial trace that lingers across temporal and spatial registers, refusing assimilation into linear Western historical narratives. By linking the two “Orientalised” bodies through a scent historically coded as excessive or abject, Lai destabilises the visual-colonial modes and offers a relational, affective epistemology instead.

Queer Naturality and Intersectionality in Mythological and Postcolonial

Subversions

Moving towards the centre of Salt Fish Girl reveals a nonlinear queer love narrative that unsettles the humanist, heteronormative logics structuring both mythology and late-capitalist futurity. Nu Wa, a significant figure in Chinese mythology, is reimagined by Lai as a queer goddess whose desire for a mortal woman destabilises the patriarchal order embedded in Eastern mythological traditions. While Miranda’s love for Evie—a “Sonia” who is a genetically engineered clone—acts as a subversive refusal of capitalistic biopolitics that treats labouring bodies as commodities in Serendipity, a city that renders them replaceable. This aligns with José Esteban Muñoz’s theorisation of queerness as a mode of futurity—an opening toward worlds that exceed the limitations of the here and now (Muñoz, 2009). Queerness in the novel is also not merely confined to human relationships but extends beyond realism into a nonhuman continuum: serpents, clones, and goddesses participate in a fluid ontology that dissolves binary distinctions between nature and technology. The portrayal of intersectionality within the nonhuman in the novel is crucial, as it highlights that intersectionality is essential when analysing queer media, as it highlights how gender, sexuality, race and postcolonial histories co-constitute modes of desire and relationality (Fischer, 2016). By embedding queer desire within mythological, ecological, and postcolonial frameworks, Lai refuses to justify or exceptionalise its existence. This results in a naturalisation of queer relationality that diverts from mainstream Western narratives, which often only focus on the centreing of queerness. Instead of adhering to the scopes of the West, Lai chooses to situate queer desire as an everyday condition of being and a critical vector for imagining alternative futures of kinship, ecology and labour.

Evie: Decolonising Science and Capitalism

The cloning of the “Sonias” in Salt Fish Girl represents how capitalism at its extreme can extend colonial logics of extraction, rendering feminised bodies into hyper-efficient labour commodities. SynBio Corporation’s productions of Evie and her cloned counterparts—genetically engineered and branded for commercial desirability—embody a biocapitalist regime in which life itself becomes meaningless and disposable. Despite this, Lai’s portrayal of Miranda’s love for Evie disrupts the presumed fungibility of cloned labourers and restores individuality, agency, and relational depth to bodies deemed as biologically expendable. In addition, Lai refuses to allow her portrayal of biotechnology to remain solely a tool of domination and extraction. In Nalo Hopkinson’s assertion in her introduction to So Long Been Dreaming (2004), she states that postcolonial speculative fiction “reclaims the tools of science and the technologies of imagining the future” from their colonial inheritance. Evie’s emergence as a figure of desire and self determination despite oppression demonstrates how technoscientific systems, while an instrument of

corporate control, can simultaneously facilitate alternative futures and enact decolonial recreation. Rather than producing colonial hierarchies, Lai positions posthuman bodies as the very agents capable of imagining and enacting worlds beyond capitalism’s limits.

Reversing the Fetish and Patriarch: Agency and Free Will

Orientalist discourse renders the “Orient” as an object of mystery, eroticism and passivity (Burney, 2012)—a symbol of Asian femininity being an aesthetic object rather than a speaking subject. Salt Fish Girl overturns this logic by granting these “fetishised” women narrative depth, agency, self-expression, and the autonomy to desire whoever, away from the colonial perception of rendering them conventionally decipherable and consumable. Lai foregrounds their contradictions and vulnerabilities—a reclamation of power that humanises these women. It is clearly shown in Salt Fish Girl that there is also an act of political gesture, where the dominant discourse of the created worshipping the (male) creator is reversed; it is the creator who is envious of the created (Reimer, 2010). This reversal destabilises the patriarchal and colonial hierarchies at its conceptual core. Nu Wa’s subsequent reincarnations further unsettle this exalted patriarchal god figure, blurring the binary between origin and followers that is deeply embedded historically in Orientalist narratives. By providing autonomy to the “fetish” and reversing the patriarch, Lai transforms the figure always prone to objectification into a medium for world-building, resistance, and alternative futurities challenging the epistemic violence of Orientalism and asserting a postcolonial imaginary in which marginalised bodies reshape the terms of creation, desire and becoming.

Conclusion

Coming out of Salt Fish Girl feels empowering—the novel does more than offer a speculative dream world; it asks me to face parts of myself shaped by colonial desire, silence and fetishisation. In Lai’s storytelling, the Other is not something to be defined or corrected, but someone to listen to—to let be without labels, categories and assumptions. That shift echoes through me: a reminder of how often history has named my body before I could speak for it. Through Nu Wa’s rebirths, Evie’s rebellion and Miranda’s longing, I began to see the Otherwise not as a utopia but as a practice for me to unlearn systems that shaped me. Lai showed me that resisting colonial structures does not have to be grand—it can happen quietly, through alternative modes of desire, cracked-open mythologies and bodies that simply refuse to conform. The knowing that other futures persist outside scripts we inherit fills me with hope. The Otherwise gives those possibilities a pulse—a learning to give the world a heart again, teaching me to imagine beyond my given origins and reclaim the futures I was always meant to inhabit.

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