Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography

7 Troubling the Mosaic: Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and Representations of Social Differences

153 S hani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand (1995) both play with readerly expectations of ethnic literature, “moving beyond the politics of identity, beyond what Françoise Lionnet has termed ‘autoethnography,’ or ethnographic autobiography,” and yet these texts have been received critically and commercially in very different ways.1 Like many other recent texts by ethnic writers, these two novels complicate the connections between individual and cultural identities and ask us to reconsider what is at stake politically in critical engagements with representations of ethnicity. As much as I hope to suggest readings that examine representations of gender and ethnicity in Mootoo’s best-known work and Lai’s first novel, I also want to provide readings of their readings, as a way to “get at” the work these novels perform in the field of Canadian literature. That is, I want to place text and context in dialectical relation to each other to show how, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s vocabulary, cultural production in Canada is not autonomous from the field of power, but is instead shaped by local and global economic interests as well as the powerful sway of literary taste-makers and dominant academic discourses.2 I want to focus on the contradiction between feminist small-press production and the postcolonial, in the case of Cereus Blooms at Night, or multicultural, in the case of When Fox Is a Thousand, politics of consumption to trouble the position of ethnic Canadian fiction within the larger literary field and reflect upon the dominant critical practices that shape how ethnicity is both written and read within Canadian contexts .3 Reinserting questions of gender back into discussions of these novels reminds us that these are literary texts that trouble multiple kinds of social [chapter seven] Troubling the Mosaic Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and Representations of Social Differences Christine Kim identities by using a variety of strategies. In an attempt to move away from ethnographic readings of ethnic literature, I want to first consider some of the different factors that encourage reducing ethnic literature to anthropological fieldwork and think about what happens when texts such as Lai’s refuse to make such readings possible. My discussion will begin by examining Cereus Blooms at Night as a novel that is typically packaged as postcolonial , a move that foregrounds exclusion as it includes it within national culture. The positive response by the mainstream to Mootoo’s novel as a postcolonial text implies that part of its symbolic currency stems from its appeal to institutionalized discourses. The ease with which Cereus Blooms at Night was embraced by literary institutions suggests an effort to normalize and contain difference within specific frames. After examining aspects of the postcolonial reading of Mootoo’s novel that has rendered it so popular within academia, I will argue that Lai’s text has not achieved the same levels of critical and commercial success, in part because it critiques dominant representations of Asian Canadians within the nation and troubles discourses of Canadian multiculturalism. The difference between Mootoo’s and Lai’s texts speaks directly to issues of circulation and institutional success that shape the reading of ethnic literature and its position within broader discourses of the nation, and it encourages us to find new strategies for reading this body of writing. Prior to writing Out on Main Street, Mootoo’s first collection of short stories published in 1993 (she released Cereus Blooms at Night three years later, and then The Predicament of Or, a collection of poetry, in 2001), Mootoo was an established visual artist and experimental video producer. Press Gang, a small feminist publisher based in Vancouver, solicited written texts from Mootoo after seeing her visual art, because the press was interested in the way that her visual work explored intersections between cultural, gendered, and sexual identities.4 The subsequent release of Out on Main Street and Cereus Blooms at Night by Press Gang not only helped Mootoo enter the literary field, but also positioned her within a literary network of politicized women writers with strong connections to activism.5 The publication of Lai’s novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, also by Press Gang a year earlier, situates her within this same political milieu. Framing Mootoo and Lai as Press Gang writers draws attention to the feminist and lesbian dimensions of their work and encourages reading their texts alongside...