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07/20/2004 Entry: "Clarion West Reading by Larissa Lai"

Tonight at Kane Hall on the UW campus, Larissa Lai is reading as part of the Clarion West series. Start time is 7:30 pm, cost is four bucks. (Clarion West is a workshop for aspiring science fiction writers.) A short bio. Her most recent novel is Salt Fish Girl. Her personal website. Lai on Fox tales (Chinese supernatural stories): "But the most interesting thing for me were, of course, these traditional fox stories. Not all the texts are particularly compelling. There are many which are misogynist tales of wily supernatural fox women who lead innocent men to their doom and receive their just reward. But there are also those versions in which an unsavory young man leers at a beautiful woman who turns out to be a fox. The fox trounces him. There are other versions where the fox and the young man fall in love – star-crossed love, of course, because the human and the divine are not supposed to have such dealings with one another. So you see how the stories can take on a proto-feminist sort of bent, or display quite a savvy bit of class analysis! But more delightful than that is the fox herself, as this creature of darkness and death and also germination and sexuality. The fox has the power to travel both beneath the surface of the earth and above it. In order to work her mischief, she needs human form. She achieves this by entering a graveyard late at night, finding the corpse of some poor young girl who has died before here time and breathing life into it. In this form, her power over men (and perhaps women too?) is the power of seduction. I found these stories very rich and very visceral – and also very much of the moment, I suppose, as contemporary feminism struggles with questions of sexual representation."