“The Kiss and the Cut”: Reassembling the Techno-Orientalist Clone through Multispecies Grief and Intimacy in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu

This article queries the revision of techno-Orientalist tropes in Larissa Lai’s 2018 novel The Tiger Flu, focusing primarily on how Lai repossesses the figure of the Asian female clone and imagines her as a formidable site of radical feminist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist knowledge in a time of planetary erosion and pandemic. I posit that Lai breaks the lineage of techno-Orientalist formations through the survivalist impulses of the Grist Sisters, a species of bioengineered clone factory workers, who move towards abolition from capitalism and compulsory heterosexuality by developing autonomous practices of reproduction, organ transplantation, and inter-generational storytelling. Through the Grist Sisters’ physical and symbolic acts of interdependent reliance and survival, Lai forges multispecies intimacies and embodiments as exertions of a radical politics of care that includes Asian American “women.” Further, Lai’s future world-building centers the multispecies grief of the Grist Sisters as a potent expression of feminist solidarity.