Negotiating Asian Canadian Identity: Memory and Otherness in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl

• Main Authors: Meng-ChunHuang, 黃孟純
• Other Authors: Shuli Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/99389251252774245837

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系 === 102 === Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl features mixed genres and alternate narrative style, with allusions to the Chinese mythological folktale, Nu Wa’s Creation of Mankind, and the Western fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. The “hybridized” writing style is strategically employed to reflect the hybridity of the Asian Canadian identity. This thesis intends to investigate how the Asian Canadian identity is negotiated in the process of creating a fake memory and in the encounter of the other. The first chapter explores how the narrator I embodies the multifarious voices in the distinct memory narratives in the process of doing the remembering in order to deconstruct fixed and essentialist representations of the Asian Canadian identity. The second chapter further explores otherness, embodied by the smells, and how the smells function to distinguish between one and the other and between the other and other others. The thesis concludes with the reflection on the limits of the thesis and with a response to Julia Kristeva’s claim on love for strangers.