Serpentine Sisters: Re-Visioning the Snake Woman Myth in Anglophone Chinese Women’s Speculative Fiction

Abstract

This essay examines how contemporary Anglophone Chinese women writers rewrite the imagery of Chinese snake women through speculative retellings that foreground sisterhood, queer desire, and diasporic identity. Drawing on queer diaspora studies and feminist criticism, I argue that Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake (2024) revise the figure of the Chinese snake woman to imagine forms of female intimacy and kinship that transcend heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks. In these works, sisterhood operates both as a familial bond and as an intimate, queer relation charged with affective, physical, and occasionally erotic intensity. The original White Snake legend—one of China’s Four Great Folktales—has long invited queer readings, especially through the complex relationship between White Snake and her companion Green Snake. In dialogue with the Chinese snake myth, Lai and Koe relocate the snake woman into speculative worlds shaped by queer desire, racial marginalization, and transnational migration. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai reimagines the reincarnations of the half-snake Chinese mother goddess Nu Wa across colonial South China and near-future bio-capitalist Canada, portraying a cross-temporal lesbian love between the protagonist and the titular Salt Fish Girl. In Sister Snake, Koe’s protagonists—serpent sisters Su and Emerald, separated between Singapore and New York—disrupt normative family scripts while forging a fragmented but enduring affective bond. Through the motif of the Chinese snake woman, these works construct imaginative spaces in which intimate sisterhood subverts patriarchal and national containment, advancing a queer vision of female togetherness.

1. Introduction

The snake woman is a potent and enduring figure in Chinese mythology, embodying transformation, transgression, and feminine power. From the half-human, half-serpent creator goddess Nu Wa—who molded humankind from yellow earth and repaired the sky after a cosmic catastrophe—to the Legend of the White Snake, this serpentine female image has persisted and evolved across Chinese literature and cultural memory. The earliest and fullest version of the White Snake story appears in Ming writer Feng Menglong’s “Madam White Is Kept Forever under the Thunder Peak Tower” (1624). Feng’s tale recounts how the serpent spirit Bai Suzhen (Madam White Snake) assumes human form to marry a mortal man, Xu Xian, but is ultimately punished for transgressing the boundaries between human and nonhuman and imprisoned beneath the Buddhist Thunder Peak Pagoda. In this version, her companion Xiaoqing (Little Green or Green Snake) is a minor handmaid, but later adaptations elevate Green Snake into a major figure in her own right—sometimes Bai’s loyal sister, sometimes her lover. The expansion of Green Snake’s role signals the legend’s growing preoccupation with feminine intimacy and desires. Cathy Yue Wang notes, “the addition of Little Green … successfully transforms an originally heterosexual tale into a story exploring female companionship and homosexual desire” (Wang 2023, p. 66), a transformation that can be traced to Qing theatrical traditions where Green Snake was staged as a male spirit who “willingly transforms into a female to act as White Snake’s maid” (Wang 2023, p. 66). As Liang Luo observes, the legend has since been continually mobilized to support “queer love, and transgender rights—in the Chinese-speaking worlds and beyond” (Luo 2021, p. 4). Queerness, therefore, is not a modern imposition but a latent impulse within this enduring cultural motif—a structure of intimacy that anticipates the fluid desires and erotic solidarities reimagined in contemporary rewritings.

Building on this long genealogy, Chinese women writers—from Li Bihua’s Green Snake (1986) to Yan Geling’s White Snake (1999) and beyond—have revived the myth’s latent energies of female desire and sisterly solidarity, mobilizing the snake woman as a recurring figure to negotiate questions of gender and sexuality. Extending the feminist and gender-focused adaptations in the Chinese cultural context, contemporary diasporic authors inherit this lineage and rework the figure across transnational and transhistorical terrains through themes of diasporic dislocation, racialized embodiment, and intercultural encounter. Focusing on two Anglophone works of speculative fiction by Chinese diasporic women authors—Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake (2024)—this essay traces how both reimagine the Chinese snake woman through a transpacific lens. By a transpacific lens, I refer to the entangled histories of colonialism, migration, and cultural exchange that connect China and Southeast Asia on the one hand, and North America on the other, foregrounding how the serpent’s afterlives unfold across Pacific worlds rather than within a single national frame. Featuring immortal heroines who traverse multiple epochs, Lai’s and Koe’s narratives follow serpentine figures whose cyclical lives enable migration across vast temporal and geographical landscapes. In Salt Fish Girl, the goddess Nu Wa reincarnates across the pre-Shang dynasty, colonial-era China, and a near-future bio-capitalist Canada, repeatedly falling in love with the titular Salt Fish Girl. In Sister Snake, the serpentine sisters Su and Emerald—echoing White Snake and Green Snake—move from Tang- and Song-dynasty China to colonial England and modern Singapore and New York. Juxtaposing Lai’s eco-mythic, matrilineal vision of queer regeneration with Koe’s urban, transnational portrait of fractured sisterhood, this analysis reveals how diasporic Chinese women’s speculative fiction reconfigures the mythic serpent to imagine both continuity and rupture in queer female kinship across temporal and spatial boundaries.

Bringing Lai’s and Koe’s works into dialogue highlights their shared cross-temporal and cross-spatial design, which reimagines the Chinese snake woman’s migration across transpacific routes and historical epochs. In both narratives, the immortal heroines’ mobility across oceans, empires, and diasporic worlds unsettles normative notions of home, nation, and belonging. Moving between mythic and modern realms—traversing the temporal and cultural boundaries of past and present, East and West—they find stability only in their bonds with one another. The intimacy between the snake sisters—whether maternal, erotic, or affective—becomes the single locus of continuity and belonging amid perpetual displacement. Reading Lai and Koe together reveals how transnational Chinese women’s speculative fiction extends the snake woman’s subversive potential—its queerness and defiance of heteronormative order—into a diasporic and cross-temporal context. Their narratives transform sisterhood into a queer structure of home and, more broadly, into a model of queer coalition: a form of kinship grounded in affinity rather than lineage, and in solidarities that reimagine belonging beyond patriarchal and national constraints.

The snake—evoking fluidity, curvature, and slithering movement—resonates with Sara Ahmed’s concept of queerness as “not following the straight line” (Ahmed 2006, p. 70), which broadens queerness beyond sexual orientation narrowly “directed toward the ‘same sex’” (Ahmed 2006, p. 70). Historically, before becoming a sexual term, “queer” described a spatial condition—a twisted, crooked orientation that deviates from the “straight line.” As Fabio Cleto explains, “‘Queer’ works by means of a spatial metaphor, twisting and bending straight principles of common sense, and the idea itself of normality, which emerges as a normative order” (Cleto 2002, p. 13). Queerness then encompasses a spatial logic characterized by fluid, non-linear, and multidirectional desire. The snake, by its very nature, never moves in a straight line; it glides through curves and detours—the snake, interestingly, is never straight. In this sense, it becomes an intuitive emblem of queerness, its sinuous motion mirroring the nonconforming paths of desire. Beyond this metaphorical association between serpentine motion and queer orientation, the female snake figure in Chinese cultural memory—especially in the White Snake legend—has long embodied queerness through her capacity for transformation, hybridity, and fluid desire that transgresses human and social boundaries.

Emerging from the interplay between White Snake (Bai Suzhen) and Green Snake (Xiaoqing) is an undercurrent of female desire and defiance that transforms the legend’s moral and emotional core. Before Feng Menglong’s Ming-dynasty tale “Madam White Is Kept Forever under the Thunder Peak Tower” (1624)—the earliest complete vernacular version—the snake woman typically appeared as a solitary, predatory seductress. Earlier Tang tales such as Li Huang and Song huaben versions depict lone serpent spirits who destroy men without remorse. Feng’s version reoriented this figure by humanizing the serpent and introducing both a romantic relationship with the mortal Xu Xian and the companion figure of Green Snake, whose emergence shifted the story’s affective center. As Shang Wei observes, since her invention, Green Snake “loomed so large in importance as to eclipse nearly all the other characters” (Shang 2010, p. 319). From this point onward, the legend’s focus on sisterhood—and the latent currents of queer desire it carries—began to rival, and sometimes displace, the heteronormative morality of the tale.

The serpentine sisters have become especially prominent among contemporary Chinese women writers, who inherit and amplify the legend’s latent queer potential. As Cathy Yue Wang notes, the tactic of queering The Legend of the White Snake enables a critique of “socially and culturally defined attitudes toward gender and sexualities” and opens “new pathways for nonnormative female subjectivities” (Wang 2023, p. 75). In modern feminist rewritings, this articulation of queer desire transforms a heteronormative tale of interspecies romance into one of female solidarity and erotic autonomy. A pivotal turning point is Li Bihua’s Green Snake (1986), which follows the classical storyline while queering desire from within. Told through Green Snake’s first-person narration—“inspired by previous male narratives and at the same time tries to flout them” (Wang 2023, p. 69)—the novel subtly registers “Green Snake’s covert desire for her sister, White Snake” (Wang 2023, p. 72), destabilizing the heterosexual union with Xu Xian without imposing fixed sexual identities. As Alvin Ka Hin Wong observes, Li’s portrayal of Green Snake’s “fluctuating sexual subjectivities and unstable object choices” unsettles the patriarchal cosmology of Feng Menglong’s text and imagines instead “a world where desire has no orderly flow … and where a perverse utopia of subversion seems too powerful to be true” (Wong 2012, pp. 143–44). Later feminist retellings—such as Yan Geling’s White Snake (1999) and the online fantasy novels such as Fakeyang’s Mahoraga (2009) and Bai Yushi’s Story of the Golden Bowl (2013)—extend this queering impulse, exploring gender fluidity, metamorphosis, and same-sex love with increasing boldness. In Mahoraga, Green Snake shifts between female and male forms, fathering a child with White Snake; in Story of the Golden Bowl, she openly professes her love, and the two snakes embrace and kiss underwater.

Together, these feminist re-visions chart a genealogy of serpentine sisterhood in which queer desire not only persists but intensifies, offering a vital lineage for diasporic Chinese lesbian writers such as Larissa Lai and Amanda Lee Koe, who expand the snake woman’s subversive energies across transnational and transhistorical terrains. Building on this genealogy, my study further reconceptualizes queerness itself. As close readings of these texts reveal, from Chinese feminist adaptations to diasporic rewritings, the relationship between snake women characters sometimes resists resolution into a stable lesbian romance. It instead remains a fluid, affective bond between women—reflecting lived realities in which not every desire or attachment between women crystallizes into a fixed sexual identity. Through this literary analysis, I broaden the notion of queer intimacy beyond homonormative definitions that confine it to fixed gay or lesbian relationships. Drawing on Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012), I understand queerness as encompassing “the social and cultural formations of ‘improper affiliation’” and including “an array of subjectivities, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative” (Chen 2012, p. 104). In this sense, queerness names not only homosexual orientation but also alternative modes of attachment and kinship that resist normative familial and social orders. In the transnational retellings of the Chinese serpentine sisters I examine, this expanded notion of queerness manifests through forms of affinity that range from erotic and romantic desire to affective and sisterly bonds. Even when overt lesbian intimacy is absent—as in Koe’s Sister Snake, where the serpentine sisters’ relationship remains within familial bounds despite its ambiguous currents of desire—these attachments nonetheless unsettle patriarchal, heteronormative, and national frameworks. Rather than diminishing the vulnerability or urgency of gay and lesbian identities, this fluid conception of queerness acknowledges that, under hegemonic sociopolitical structures, queer desires often cannot manifest as stable relationships or self-declared identities. Yet their obscured or ambivalent forms still register as queer and enact resistance to heteronormative containment. In both Lai’s and Koe’s narratives, queerness operates as a politics of connection—a mode of affinity and solidarity grounded in shared displacement and affective bonds rather than in bloodline or national belonging.

2. Salt Fish Girl: Matriarchal Mythology and Cross-Temporal Unions

Known for a human body with a fish or serpentine tail, the Chinese mother goddess Nu Wa is often described as “the progenitrix of the human race” and as “marvelously fecund because of her ability to create things through transformation” (Dexter and Mair 2010, p. 67). In Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, the two heroines—Nu Wa, the Chinese mother goddess, and the eponymous Salt Fish Girl—reincarnate across time and space, from the pre-Shang dynasty and colonial-era South China to a near-future bio-capitalist Canada. This section examines Lai’s queer maternal origin stories alongside her portrayals of radical sisterhoods that disrupt patriarchal norms and national structures. By reimagining the half-snake, half-human Nu Wa, Lai reconstructs origin narratives in which women unite to reproduce women. Building on this radical reworking of matriarchal mythology, Lai portrays diverse forms of sisterhood—ranging from the intimate bond between the two snake-and-fish-tailed heroines to the collective solidarity embodied by the Sonias, a cloned female rebel group whose futuristic uprising echoes the “real-life all-female societies formed among silk factory workers in early twentieth-century Canton” (Sang 2003, p. 134). While Lai describes these silk-factory women—who resisted marriage norms and formed self-sufficient female households—as “my foremothers” (L. Lai 1996, p. 204), scholars such as Tze-lan Sang read these communities as part of early Chinese lesbian history.

In Salt Fish Girl, reproduction frequently occurs outside heteronormative frameworks. A slurp of water or a bite of fruit can surreptitiously impregnate women—whether barren or fertile—rendering conception an act of queer chance rather than patriarchal design. Through queer and radical imagination, Lai re-envisions forms of anti-normative procreation. She imagines reproduction as a cyclical, non-phallic process of becoming, decoupled from male participation or linear descent. The origin of the mother-goddess protagonist, Nu Wa, unfolds beyond heterosexual or divine hierarchy: she is born alone from a malodorous river at the world’s beginning. Lai writes, “In the beginning there was me, the river and a rotten-egg smell. I don’t know where the smell came from, dank and sulfurous, but there it was, the stink of beginnings and endings” (L. Lai 2002, p. 2). The stench of creation—unmistakably bodily, organic, and abject—signals a world-making act inseparable from impurity. Soon after, out of loneliness, Nu Wa comes ashore and creates humans from earth, then transforms into a human woman herself to explore the world of her creations. Wandering on earth, she climbs into a backyard cistern to quench her thirst. Yet, to her horror and disbelief, her body begins to shrink—“My body narrowed and shrank. Suddenly the cistern was an ocean, as big as the lake I had recently left” (L. Lai 2002, p. 48). Her dissolution, then, prefigures the queer process of creation: the next morning, a woman drinks from the cistern and conceives. This queering of creation turns fluidity into fertility, re-visioning childbirth as an act of metamorphosis rather than inheritance—a continual becoming rather than a continuity of bloodline.

Notably, Nu Wa’s first human incarnation takes place in late 19th to early 20th century South China, a period shaped by colonial encroachment in the aftermath of the Sino-British Opium Wars and rising internal unrest. Importantly, while China was never formally colonized during this era, it operated under what Shu-mei Shih defines as “semi-colonialism,” a condition that captures “the cultural and political condition in modern China to foreground the multiple, layered, intensified, as well as incomplete and fragmentary nature of China’s colonial structure” (Shih 2001, p. 34). Rather than establishing formal colonial administrations, foreign empires—most notably Britain and Japan—competed for economic dominance on Chinese soil. These imperial powers carved up coastal regions into zones of extraterritoriality, extracting wealth through “militarily protected capitalist ventures” and funneling it back to “Euro-American metropolitan centers” (Shih 2001, p. 7). This timeframe—from the late 1800s to early 1900s—also marks the onset of large-scale Chinese migration to North America, when early migrants, commonly known as lo wah kiu, left South China to work as laborers in the California and Fraser River gold rushes, the construction of the transcontinental railways in both the United States and Canada, and other service industries. In this way, Nu Wa’s first human incarnation not only anchors the narrative in a period of colonial trauma but also evokes the diasporic histories and ancestral legacies that inform Lai’s literary imagination.

In dialogue with real-world colonial and immigration history, the narrative oscillates between Nu Wa’s first lifetime in late nineteenth-century South China and her surreal rebirth in a futuristic West Coast setting. At the end of her initial life, she drowns in a river and mysteriously swims across the Pacific Ocean, arriving on North America’s west coast in 2044. This second incarnation takes an equally uncanny form: Nu Wa slips into a ripe durian growing by the shore. Lai vividly describes the scene: “It was a durian tree in full flower, and its yellow buds were already sending out that strange and marvelous odour that might be described as cat piss blended with unadulterated euphoria” (L. Lai 2002, p. 208). Unlike her earlier, involuntary fusion with cistern water, Nu Wa is drawn to the durian this time—experiencing a euphoric attraction—and deliberately chooses to inhabit it. A woman—long after menopause—later eats the fruit and gives birth to Miranda, Nu Wa’s second incarnation. Once again, reproduction is uncoupled from heterosexuality, emerging through nonhuman encounters that foreground queer desire and metamorphosis.

The durian thereafter emerges as a potent motif, embodying resistant sexuality, racial otherness, and queer modes of origin. While Salt Fish Girl exudes the odor of salted fish—a smell that “more likely suggests not a symbolic marker of rebellion but a sign of displacement” (Ma 2025, p. 606) Miranda—Nu Wa’s second incarnation—is marked by the unruly scent of durian. In the novel’s bio-capitalist future, durians are wild and illicit: they grow in the Unregulated Zone, a space of lush, maternal abundance that starkly contrasts with the sterile, corporation-controlled walled cities inhabited by the middle class. Lai describes the durian scent as “intriguing, yes, and familiar too, and also illicit” (L. Lai 2002, p. 13), capturing a sensual tension between attraction and repulsion.

Provocatively, the durian’s smell encodes the historical memory of early Chinese immigration and displacement. Lai writes that it is “the smell of something forbidden smuggled on board in a battered suitcase, and mingled with the smell of unwashed underwear” (L. Lai 2002, p. 13), evoking the sensory residue of early Chinese transpacific migration and the bodily confinement endured during oceanic crossings. During the Chinese Exclusion era, many early Chinese laborers “had to hide in underdeck crates for weeks during a difficult voyage” (Liu and Tian 2025, p. 3), a journey that unsettles the assumption of “the ocean as promising freedom, mobility, and non-territoriality” (Poppenhagen 2023, p. 10). The mingled odors of sweat, salt, and secrecy that haunt these crossings resurface in Lai’s durian imagery, transforming smell into a diasporic archive—one that preserves histories of suffering and survival through the senses.

The durian’s abject social position mirrors the layered exile of the fish heroines in Salt Fish Girl, whose displacements—racial, sexual, temporal, and geopolitical—situate them perpetually outside normative orders of belonging. As Paul Lai notes, the durian “has surfaced periodically in Western writing about travel, food, and science, often standing in as a figure of the exotic, the primitive, or the inexplicably alien” (P. Lai 2008, p. 177). Even in Southeast Asian and Chinese contexts where durians are prized, the fruit is frequently banned from public spaces such as hotels, subways, and airplanes—a contradiction that parallels Miranda’s exclusion from sanitized modern environments. At school, her classmates recoil from her malodor, leaving her isolated during lunch hour. Her father’s desperate attempts to “cure” her scent—even forcing her to drink “an infusion made by pouring hot water into a jar packed with live, angry bees” (L. Lai 2002, p. 59)—and her mother’s repeated efforts to cleanse her with “bubble baths” (L. Lai 2002, p. 43) literalize how nonnormative bodies are anxiously disciplined under modernity. The family’s obsession with purification reflects a broader social anxiety about contamination, where smell becomes a marker of racialized, classed, and gendered otherness. Miranda’s malodor, coded as both excessive and animalistic, registers the queer body’s incapacity—or refusal—to conform to sanitized ideals of whiteness, civility, and productivity.

Yet what society reads as illicit stench becomes, for Miranda, a sign of vitality and connection. When Evie—the reincarnation of Salt Fish Girl—“leaned over and kissed” her (L. Lai 2002, p. 161), the narrator confesses that “the fishiness of her drew me” and indulges in “the smell of salt fish” (L. Lai 2002, p. 161), a body odor that has haunted Salt Fish Girl across life cycles. The odor thus transforms into a medium of recognition and intimacy. Through these intertwined scenes of instinctive repulsion and erotic attraction, Lai reclaims smell—a sensory register long associated with racial and sexual inferiority—as the ground of queer relationality and affective intimacy. The body that stinks becomes the body that remembers, carrying traces of suppressed genealogies and alternative lineages. While recalling a painful history of otherness and exclusion, the durian ultimately becomes a vehicle for reimagining racialized and sexualized difference as reproductive continuity—an inheritance of survival that unsettles the regulatory logics of racial purity and reproductive normativity.

In the speculative future of Salt Fish Girl, the durian becomes not only a magical fruit but a bioengineered organism—capable of impregnating women and generating new life without male participation. Lai reveals that the durians were genetically modified by the Sonias, a collective of cloned Asian women—“Brown eyes and black hair, every single one” (L. Lai 2002, p. 160)—originally created by Dr. Flowers under corporate commission to provide cheap, compliant labor in the Pallas shoe factories. Evie, one of the Sonias, recounts their hybrid genealogy: their human DNA derives from “a Chinese woman who married a Japanese man and was interned in the Rockies during the Second World War” (L. Lai 2002, p. 160), while their biological code also contains traces of fish—“point zero three percent Cyprinus carpio, freshwater carp” (L. Lai 2002, p. 158). Evie remarks wryly, “Maybe the fish was the unstable factor” (L. Lai 2002, p. 158), echoing what Paul Lai identifies as the novel’s gesture toward “a fishiness, a questionableness, to any self-evident narratives of progress” (P. Lai 2008, p. 169). The “unstable factor” binds the Sonias to their mythic, fluid origin—the mother goddess born “from the stink of beginnings and endings” (L. Lai 2002, p. 2)—whose own existence continually drifts across forms, epochs, and species. Conceived as expendable products of capitalist experimentation, the Sonias subvert their design by transforming the genetic technology of control into a means of self-replication. The durian—cultivated and modified by the Sonias themselves—thus becomes a reproductive medium through which they reclaim biological agency and rewrite the terms of creation.

Through their inheritance of “fishiness,” the Sonias embody what Mel Y. Chen terms “improper affiliations” (Chen 2012, p. 104): relationalities that cross species, racial, and sexual boundaries. Their collective self-reproduction constitutes a queer mode of survival that redefines kinship not as lineage but as affinity. While the Sonias’ self-reproduction technically generates mother–daughter lineages, these lineages do not constitute vertical, generational hierarchy. Because each “daughter” is replicated from the same genetic template, she functions less as a biological descendant than as a lateral sibling. Reproduction therefore folds lineage into affinity, producing a horizontal kinship grounded in shared origin, shared embodiment, and shared resistance. As Ramzi Fawaz argues, “the female replicant offered a labile imaginative container for conceiving these same identities and political concepts as inherently multidimensional” (Fawaz 2022, p. 60), which helps clarify why Sonia’s replication can sustain expansive affinity rather than simply reproduce sameness. Whereas “lineage” marks biological descent, “affinity” names the expansive, inclusive, and non-hierarchical kinship through which the Sonias organize their collective survival. When a cluster of identical Sonia replicas, each holding a baby, first appears in the novel, the moment slyly reveals the truth: these identical women have all eaten the life-giving durians—fragrant, flourishing, and reeking—grown in the garden of their exilic home. The image of multiplied mothers with infants encapsulates Lai’s vision of queer, collective reproduction beyond patriarchal lineage. Notably, the Sonias embody a close-knit sisterhood rather than defined lovers; their household exemplifies a form of women’s bonding that transcends lesbian romance while sustaining deeply queer affinities.

As Miranda is led by Evie to the Sonias’ home, she too is offered a durian—this handover signifies an act of maternal inheritance. Evie’s gesture enacts yet another origin story—one where the transpacific mother goddess and her companion unite in procreating women’s futures, a world where women live, love, and reproduce together. When Miranda sees the durian tree outside the Sonias’ house, she is unmistakably drawn—indeed, enchanted—by this life-giving tree. Lai writes:

I felt the tree pulling at me, as though I were a small moon caught in the gravitational field of a heavy planet… She reached up with both hands, picked the fattest one, and held it towards me. I took it. It was heavy in my hands. Like a small corpse.

(L. Lai 2002, p. 221)

The simile “like a small corpse” crystallizes Lai’s vision of cyclical regeneration through loss. The durian, at once fragrant and deathly, embodies the persistence of historical trauma—the painful residue of colonial exploitation, migration, and gendered violence—while simultaneously gesturing toward renewal. As Lai writes in “The Sixth Sensory Organ,” “the key to liberation is to recall what we were, the parts of ourselves that we want to bring into the future… If women can recall their histories and retain their memories, then men’s histories and the systems of oppression they justify will no longer hold water” (L. Lai 1996, p. 217). In this light, the “corpse” that Miranda cradles is not an emblem of death but of remembrance—a vessel of buried memories that sustain female solidarity and collective resistance. The act of holding it embodies the transmission of history through the body: the dead weight of the past becomes the seed of future life. Predictably, the durian impregnates Miranda, culminating in the birth of a black-haired baby girl in a hot spring near the story’s end. Through this act, Lai closes the novel not with resolution but with recurrence—the rebirth of a queer lineage that announces continuity, resilience, and endless becoming.

Importantly, the self-empowered sisterhood of the Sonias in the speculative future overlays the narrative of the protagonist’s first lifetime, offering a creative reimagining of subaltern women’s histories. Engineered by Dr. Flowers under corporate commission for factory labor, the Sonias recall Salt Fish Girl’s earlier incarnation as a sweatshop worker and spotlight the persistent exploitation of Asian and other racialized women, who continue to form a disproportionately large segment of the global manufacturing workforce in industries such as textiles, electronics, and toys. Set against the fraught backdrop of Confucian patriarchy and colonial modernity, Nu Wa and Salt Fish Girl’s elopement in their first lifetime ends in tragedy: Salt Fish Girl’s subsequent employment in a toy factory—implicitly financed by white colonizers—leads to exhaustion, blindness, and despair. Lai vividly depicts the toll of feminized labor:

That night the Salt Fish Girl came back looking exhausted and disheveled. A Malaysian girl who worked at her factory had been stricken with hysteria [my emphasis], had gone to the toilet and begun screaming and tearing at her hair. She had been working at the factory for nearly three years and was half blind and bored out of her wits with the tedious repetitiveness of the work. Her hysteria [my emphasis] had provoked others until half the women in the factory were screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and once bright faces.

(L. Lai 2002, p. 123)

The recurrent invocation of hysteria—a term etymologically rooted in the Greek hystera, meaning “uterus”—invites a feminist rereading: Lai, of course, does not employ it as a misogynistic label but reclaims it as an infectious and insurgent mode of collective resistance. As Margaret A. McLaren explains, “Hysteria, as primarily a female malady, was thought to be linked to women’s reproductive system; it was associated with a wandering womb” (McLaren 2012, p. 32). Historically deployed as a diagnosis to medicalize and discipline women’s bodies, hysteria functions in Salt Fish Girl as the collective language of revolt. The women’s screams, born of exhaustion and confinement, are not symptoms demanding cure or containment—just as Miranda’s durian stench is not a disease to be eradicated—but visceral eruptions that interrupt the mechanized rhythms of factory labor. Their hysterical cries transform the female body from an instrument of patriarchal and capitalist (re)production into a generative force of disruption. This uncontainable energy anticipates the Sonias’ later bioengineered reproduction: both moments dramatize the body’s refusal to remain docile under systems of industrial or genetic control. The women’s hysteria thus prefigures the Sonias’ act of reproductive insurrection, transforming what was once pathologized as disorder into a mode of creation. In this sense, the hysteria episode becomes an ancestral echo of the Sonias’ uprising—a proto-revolt inscribed in the body’s memory of resistance.

Lai’s depiction of the female-dominated toy factory underscores her critical awareness of the widespread feminized exploitation inherent in many forms of factory labor. In her essay “The Sixth Sensory Organ” (L. Lai 1996), Lai notes the feminization of industries such as silk production, observing that “it was believed that only the fingers of women were dexterous enough for the job of boiling and unravelling cocoons and twisting the fibres into thread” (p. 204). While Lai refers to the silk workers as “my foremothers” (p. 204), this is not a nostalgic or sentimental remembrance. Instead, she demonstrates a critical consciousness and a bold imagination that rewrite histories of sexual injustice. Lai’s creative re-vision thus resonates with Toni Morrison’s conception and fictional practice of “rememoration,” which Homi K. Bhabha describes as follows: “The act of ‘rememoration’ (her concept of the re-creation of popular memory) turns the present of narrative enunciation into the haunting memorial of what has been excluded, excised, evicted, and for that very reason becomes the unheimlich space for the negotiation of identity and history” (Bhabha 1994, p. 198). In this light, the Sonias’ communal home can be read as a ceremonial tribute to the homosocial households of female silk workers in Chinese history—while re-imbuing this memorial site with greater power and agency within the novel’s speculative framework.

The diasporic journey of the immortal-goddess Nu Wa, as the novel’s conclusion suggests, is thus endless and ever-moving. In this light, the concept of diaspora itself is queered and resistively reimagined. Rather than embodying a “backward-looking glance” toward a fixed homeland or an “endless desire to return to ‘lost origins’” (Gopinath 2005, p. 3), Nu Wa’s trans-temporal and trans-spatial journey disrupts traditional nationalist imaginaries of diaspora, which hinge on promises of return and originary rootedness. Instead, the snake goddess protagonist exemplifies the queer diasporic subject, described in the seminal anthology Queer Globalizations (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002) as an “unlocatable figure in globalization”—a mediator “between the nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global” (p. 2). Echoing Cindy Patton’s argument in Queer Diasporas (Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000) that “links are multidirectional” and that diaspora should be understood as “movement ever outward from the center” (p. 21), Nu Wa’s cyclical odyssey embodies precisely this dynamic. Spanning thousands of years, her journey dismantles the nostalgic hope of return, replacing it with a fluid and ever-evolving understanding of belonging. Amid perpetual motion and infinite reincarnation, home and hope emerge not through rootedness but through women’s alliances—forms of sisterhood that imagine kinship and belonging beyond patriarchal and national frameworks.

As Lai herself has remarked, her writing seeks to “open up a sort of imaginative geography that could be inhabited as opposed to articulated” (L. Lai 2004, p. 24). Salt Fish Girl realizes this vision through its immortal, ever-reincarnating heroine, whose journey transforms diaspora into a condition of continual renewal, where exile itself becomes the pulse of life. This imaginative geography—at once transpacific and transhistorical—replaces fixed notions of homeland with ongoing processes of bonding, affinity, and co-becoming. It resonates strikingly with Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake, whose immortal women likewise traverse epochs in their continual striving for belonging, seeking not a stable home but an expanded mode of being and living together that resists the constraints of heteronormative domesticity, nationalist imaginaries, and colonial inheritance.

3. Sister Snake: Ruptured and Rebonded Sisterhoods Across Time and Space

In Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake, the two serpentine sisters—Su and Emerald—begin the story estranged, living apart in Singapore and New York, respectively. The narrative alternates between their separate lives until their uneasy reunion, marked less by reconciliation than by tension. Su and Emerald embody opposing feminine archetypes: Su performs the Confucian ideal of a disciplined wife, while Emerald personifies unruly excess. Emerald dresses in skin-tight green minidresses, pursues sugar daddies through dating apps, and freely expresses desire across genders. Su, by contrast, clings to decorum—draped in immaculate Chanel neutrals, devoted to domestic order, and married to a senior government official. Koe’s characterization of the sisters deliberately echoes the long genealogy of White Snake adaptations, where Bai Suzhen, the White Snake, is the model of domestic virtue and Xiaoqing, the Green Snake, remains the emblem of unrestrained sensuality. As Cathy Yue Wang observes, White and Green Snake together represent bifurcated aspects of the primordial goddess Nu Wa—“the mythological archetype” who “embodies both the dangerous and glamorous aspects of female sexuality and fertility” (Wang 2020, p. 186). This symbolic split, Wang argues, registers the disempowerment of ancient matriarchal divinity and, by extension, of feminine creative power itself. Bai Huiyuan further emphasizes this duality, describing the two snake women as “mutually mirroring” (Bai 2024, p. 37, my translation) one another—two sides of the same Confucian gender order whose divergence turns on whether a woman accepts or refuses the symbolic structure of domesticity. Yet, as Bai notes, these contrasting feminine figures “contain each other” (Bai 2024, p. 37, my translation): their femininities coil around one another, rendering obedience and rebellion mutually entangled categories rather than stable opposites. In Sister Snake, Koe reanimates this duality within a modern transnational frame, translating the tension between the two snakes into a meditation on women’s divided subjectivities under patriarchal and colonial discipline. Although Green Snake is often foregrounded as the emblem of feminist rebellion, Su emerges in Koe’s retelling as the more feral and ethically volatile figure—an unstable compound of compliant wife and unruly serpent. Emerald’s outward unruliness coexists with tenderness and empathy toward humans, whereas Su’s polished civility conceals a violent core: she eats canaries raw and ultimately assaults Singapore’s parliament.

This section examines the serpentine sisters’ repeatedly ruptured yet resilient bond across millennia, tracing how social and historical forces—patriarchy, colonialism, and heteronormativity—shape their cycles of separation and reunion. My focus on Su arises not from overlooking Emerald’s subversive vitality but from recognizing that Su’s internalized contradictions make her the more complex site of contestation. Mirroring Su and interrogating her through that mirror-like gaze, Emerald remains crucial: her responses to Su’s mimicry and self-erasure expose tensions that Su herself cannot articulate. Su’s internal conflicts—rape trauma, racial mimicry, and the longing for civility—constitute the most revealing site through which the novel exposes the entanglement of patriarchal and colonial power. Her shifting performances of assimilation expose what Rey Chow terms “coercive mimeticism” (Chow 2002, p. 107)—the pressure on the ethnic subject to imitate dominant cultural norms while simultaneously being degraded for doing so—and what Adrienne Rich identifies as “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 2003, p. 33), the institutional system that naturalizes women’s heterosexuality and secures men’s continued access to their bodies and labor. Read through these frameworks, Su embodies the convergence of racialized and gendered subjection within the colonized female body. Tracing her trajectory from assimilation to rebellion, Koe transforms the White Snake narrative from a romantic tragedy into a meditation on fractured kinship, compromised desires, and the fragile endurance of queer sisterhood across patriarchal and colonial structures of power.

Notably, the opening of Sister Snake resonates with that of Salt Fish Girl, where the snake goddess murmurs, “In the beginning there was me, the river and a rotten-egg smell” (L. Lai 2002, p. 2). In Koe’s novel, the story world begins with a similar gesture toward primordial embodiment: “Before they had legs, they had tails. This was way back when” (Koe 2024, p. 2). Both novels evoke humid, fertile beginnings that precede civilization’s order. Yet unlike Lai’s narrative—where Nu Wa emerges in solitude—Koe’s origin scene foregrounds intimacy from the start. The novel’s epilogue is titled “Before,” and its first chapter opens with the refrain:

Before they had legs, they had tails. This was way back when.

Before the buzzkill of data and doomscrolling. Before the inception of the steam engine and the stock exchange. This was more than a thousand years ago, under a majestic weeping willow whose hollowed trunk was home to an inseparable pair of snakes who had sworn to be sisters: one pure white, the other jewel green.

(Koe 2024, p. 1)

From the outset, Koe situates female kinship as anterior to history itself. The weeping willow—hollow yet sheltering—becomes a womb-like space of origin, symbolizing a world organized around care and mutuality rather than hierarchy or any reified order. The sisters’ bond thus appears not only natural but sacred, existing before, and ultimately beyond, the incursions of civilization. By locating their love “before the buzzkill of data and doomscrolling” (Koe 2024, p. 1), Koe playfully collapses mythic and modern temporalities, implying that technological modernity constitutes a belated fall from this primordial intimacy. Their relationship, in this sense, is not merely justified by antiquity but elevated to a prelapsarian ideal that continues to survive the modern world.

Significantly, in Koe’s retelling of the White Snake legend, she provides a painfully plausible explanation for the longstanding mystery of why White Snake—powerful and beautiful—chooses to enter human society and willingly marry a mortal man. Unlike Lai’s goddess protagonist, who leaves her home waters out of solitude and the absence of kin, White Snake is never alone—she is always accompanied by Green Snake. This enduring companionship complicates and problematizes her attraction to human men. In Koe’s version, Su’s turn toward human lovers and her integration into human society stem from her disillusionment with male snakes, particularly after a traumatic rape.

A thousand years earlier, during the Tang dynasty, Su—still a white snake and not yet able to take human form—was violently assaulted by a krait. In the aftermath, she “did her best to ruin her womb” (Koe 2024, p. 32), an act of self-destruction that marks her rejection of both reproduction and serpentine femininity. She might have “bled herself dry” had “a younger green snake not passed her way, and nudged her head hesitantly with its own” (Koe 2024, p. 32), a fragile gesture of sisterhood that rescues her from death. Yet even this bond cannot erase the shame inscribed on her body; the humiliation festers, intensifying her longing to transcend her serpentine form altogether. Throughout the novel, Su repeatedly tells herself, “This body itself is emptiness. Emptiness itself is this body” (Koe 2024, p. 2). The line borrows from the Heart Sutra, which teaches that “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form”1 What in Buddhist scripture signifies liberation through detachment is, in Su’s voice, transfigured into a mantra of denial. Rather than attaining enlightenment, she seeks to annihilate her embodied difference—her snake body—treating “emptiness” as the will to unfeel, unremember, and un-be.

When Su later observes humans from afar, she is captivated by their apparent order and refinement. She is intrigued by the scenes: “Hunched grannies selling steamed dumplings, masterful painters dousing ink over silk canvases, giddy lovers tossing lucky coins into the water” (Koe 2024, p. 33). Above all, she reveres the “scholar poets” who “carried themselves with logic and noblesse” (Koe 2024, p. 33). What she perceives as civility becomes a fantasy of a better elsewhere through which she seeks to overwrite the chaos of animality and the stigma of her violated body. Her yearning “to be human” is therefore less admiration than a displaced longing for safety and happiness—a wish to exchange the vulnerability of her serpentine form for the perceived harmony of the human world. Watching from the margins, she constructs humanity as an imagined refuge, not yet realizing that the very norms she idealizes will also exclude her. In this fantasy of a better elsewhere, Su’s desire implicitly parallels the early diasporic Chinese imagination that projected salvation onto distant lands across the sea—a longing shaped less by realistic knowledge of the new world than by the yearning to escape the unlivable conditions of war and poverty that afflicted China over the past century. Koe thus transforms Su’s vision of humanity into a myth of migration, revealing how the search for belonging begins as a dream of elsewhere but ends in the repetition of estrangement.

Interestingly, although Su is drawn to human civilization and dutifully performs the role of the ideal wife in her pursuit of successive human husbands for centuries, she never fully relinquishes her dangerous, feral nature. In fact, Su proves more lethal than Emerald: while Emerald may appear wilder, it is Su who embodies fatal danger. Koe vividly depicts a moment in 1868—returning to the colonial era, as Lai does—when the sisters attempt to live together again by marrying into the same English household. Su devises a plan: both sisters will wed English noblemen—brothers from the same family—who harbor a fetish for Asiatic concubines. “‘This is a golden opportunity,’ Su insists. ‘Two of us, in the same noble household’” (Koe 2024, p. 60).

Set against the late nineteenth century—after the First (1839–1842) and Second (1856–1860) Opium Wars, when Britain’s imperial dominance over China had been firmly established—this scheme becomes a paradoxical negotiation with power. Su seizes a form of social inclusion available to her and Emerald, yet that inclusion depends on submission to imperial and patriarchal hierarchies. Her longing for sisterly closeness is thus entangled with the sociopolitical forces of domination. What begins as an effort to preserve their bond is refracted through the heterosexual and racial hierarchies that compel women’s availability to men. This dynamic enacts Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality,” the ideological system through which, as Rich writes, “male power manifests itself … as enforcing heterosexuality upon women” (Rich 2003, p. 20). Within this structure, women are not “naturally” heterosexual but institutionally conditioned to desire and depend on men. Su’s scheme, therefore, transforms sisterhood into a form legible to patriarchal society—a distorted intimacy sustained through marriage and concubinage. Her desire to reunite with Emerald is obscured and compromised by the need to perform a femininity molded by imperial fetishization and male desire. Though Emerald is reluctant, she consents for the sake of staying beside Su, rendering their reunion both a tactic of survival and a tragedy of constraint.

Strikingly, Su remains a deeply contradictory figure, ultimately turning against the very household she has willingly joined. In a feral act of rebellion, she devours the English nobles’ cherished canaries—delicate creatures kept in gilded cages, “prized for singing with their tiny beaks closed, issuing a soft, sweet song that blended into the background, unlike more strident songbirds” (Koe 2024, p. 61). A handmaid witnesses the scene, and she cries out, “She ripped it to shreds with her teeth!” (Koe 2024, p. 63). Yet in a cruel irony, the maid cannot tell Su and Emerald apart—“one of the oriental ladies” (Koe 2024, p. 62), she says hesitatingly—allowing Su’s transgression to be displaced onto her sister. The sensual violence of the act is not merely destructive but corporeally liberating—almost exuberant—as Su briefly reclaims the animal vitality she has long suppressed. The canaries, prized for their beauty and fragility, mirror the sisters’ own captivity—gilded, decorative, and voiceless within the colonial household. Su’s violent destruction of the birds thus becomes a fierce refusal of the ornamental role imposed upon her. Yet the rebellion is fleeting and misrecognized: Emerald bears the punishment while Su resumes her mask of propriety. The narrative notes that she remained calm and pretended as if nothing had happened, her composure instantly restoring the illusion of civility. Her rebellion, however instinctive, remains contained within the very structures of race and decorum that define her existence. What seems like a moment of transgression becomes another rehearsal of captivity. Each act of defiance is brief, convulsive, and painful, folding back into the logic of assimilation that governs her life.

Su’s oscillation between assimilation and rebellion encapsulates the ambivalent desires for belonging and resistance that often shape the experiences of diasporic, gendered subjects. As Rey Chow explains, the colonized subject’s compulsion to mimic arises from “a permanent inferiority complex” shaped by “the imperative, created by Western imperialism and colonialism of the past few hundred years, of the white man as the original” (Chow 2002, p. 104). This logic mirrors Su’s position within Koe’s mythic world: as a snake aspiring to humanity, she reproduces the same hierarchy that defines her as less than human. Her yearning to inhabit the “original” form—the human—echoes the racialized subject’s coerced desire to approximate the dominant ideal. However, within this structure, “she is always a bad copy, yet even as she continues to be debased, she has no choice but to continue to mimic” (Chow 2002, p. 104). Su’s performance of civility in the English household exemplifies this paradox: the more flawlessly she imitates refinement, the more her otherness is reified. In the 1800s London setting, while both sisters are confined within an English man’s harem, Koe captures a moment of linguistic repression: Emerald asks Su in Mandarin, “‘Are you even happy here, Jie?’” (Koe 2024, p. 62), but Su refuses to respond, as she “didn’t like her to speak Mandarin, here in London” (Koe 2024, p. 62)—a silence that functions as self-censorship and self-erasure, as if even her native tongue must be shed to sustain the illusion of respectability. Her meticulous adherence to English decorum, which might appear as composure or self-mastery, is in fact another form of submission: a psychic discipline that polices the self from within. When Emerald later protests, “Assimilate all you want, but don’t pass your self-loathing onto me” (Koe 2024, p. 97), she exposes the violence that coercive mimicry inflicts not only on the colonized subject but also on bonds of intimacy. Emerald’s challenge here also activates a gendered critique, echoing Bai’s observation that “Green Snake’s gaze inevitably turns toward a gendered self-interrogation of the White Snake figure—toward a modern woman’s reflection on the Confucian norms that have long governed female conduct” (Bai 2024, p. 37; my translation). The sisters’ estrangement thus dramatizes how a racialized woman, compelled to emulate dominant ideals, must perform both gendered inferiority and racial docility at the cost of the intimacies that cannot be legitimized within the world she seeks to enter.

The perpetual sense of inadequacy—of never measuring up to the dominant ideal—drives coerced mimicry and obstructs the possibility of genuine self-formation or alternative, nonnormative bonds. The same logic of captivity that governs racial mimicry also structures sexual subjugation: the colonized subject’s compulsion to imitate the “original” finds its corollary in the demand that women orient their desires toward men. Compulsory heterosexuality, as Rich observes, not only suppresses lesbian existence but distorts all female experience by ensuring that women’s relationships remain subordinated to male access and control. Koe dramatizes this dynamic through Su’s serial marriages to mortal men, each of which secures her social legibility at the cost of her bond with Emerald. What passes as stability or choice is in fact submission to a heteronormative order in which female intimacy can exist only through male mediation. Su’s desperate attempts to assimilate—through language, civility, and marriage—repeatedly rupture her connection with Emerald. Each marriage becomes a ritual of submission, a reenactment of captivity disguised as belonging. These performances are less expressions of desire than capitulations to the intertwined demands of colonial and patriarchal power.

Crucially, at the story’s end, Su unleashes a feral assault on the Singapore Parliament, attacking Paul—her husband and a senior government official—and thus symbolically turning against the patriarchal and state apparatus that once promised her assimilation. Her fury erupts when she learns that, during her coma, Paul authorized an abortion after being told the fetus she carried was likely serpentine. As the doctor remarks, “Birth defect… I don’t see any limbs, but there’s a lot of vertebrae” (Koe 2024, p. 116), confirming what Su has long repressed: that no matter how flawlessly she performs humanity, her difference is inscribed in her very body. Seen within the novel’s cross-temporal arc—from Tang-dynasty Hangzhou to colonial London to modern Singapore—this climactic outburst ends her centuries-long masquerade. Koe stages the eruption in cinematic detail: “A sibilant snarl echoes around the hall: Ssssssssss… The wind gathers with a swishing susurration, like a thousand leaves crackling in a storm” (Koe 2024, p. 209). Chaos ensues as Su’s serpentine form overtakes the chamber, shattering the very architecture of state power. When she confronts Paul, “Su’s eyes are white coals, ablaze in the dark. Her skin so pale and glassy it lights her up with a faint, unearthly glow… Where her nose should have been are two narrow slits” (Koe 2024, p. 214). The juxtaposition between this ghastly vision and Paul’s recollection of her tenderness—“What would you like for dinner, my dear?” (Koe 2024, p. 213)—renders the scene grotesquely intimate, exposing the gap between the feminine ideal imagined by male fantasy and the suppressed vitality it conceals. In her serpentine form, Su hisses, “Because I made it by myself? Without you” (Koe 2024, p. 214), suggesting that she conceived the child independently of her mortal husband. Echoing Lai’s speculative vision of female reproduction without men, the line asserts a self-generative, nonpatriarchal possibility of creation—a radical alternative Su had imagined nurturing with Emerald, her sister and truest kin, by returning together to the forest. Yet this utopian vision of sister-centered kinship, where female intimacy and creation might flourish beyond domination, is once again violently foreclosed by male intervention. The fetus’s death shatters Su’s fragile hope of reconciling her nonhuman identity with human society, revealing that assimilation demands not only the suppression of difference but also the sacrifice of kinship, fertility, and futurity itself.

At the story’s end, the narrative returns to the snowbound grotto near West Lake, where the two snakes first emerged. There, Emerald shelters the grief-stricken Su—“Come on, Jie,” she whispers, “Time to go home” (Koe 2024, p. 220). Their reunion, quiet yet momentous, restores the elemental rhythm of their bond: the green snake once again guarding the white, as she did a thousand years earlier. As Emerald meditates through the long winter, her reflection expands into an avowal that transcends epochs and empires: “I love you in metric. I love you in imperial… Love you in any and every form, be it corporeal or even immaterial, love you in every direction of space and time” (Koe 2024, p. 221). What begins as sisterly care becomes a declaration of cosmic endurance—a love that persists “through the Copernican revolution, the rise of communism, the fall of capitalism, the final hour of the Anthropocene” (Koe 2024, p. 221). This love between snake women lies outside the cycles of heteronormativity, colonialism, and the shifting sociopolitical orders of human history. It envisions a kinship untethered from the institutions that have sought to contain them—a cross-temporal bond that survives the temporalities of empire, nation, and human life itself. Alongside this cosmic endurance, Emerald’s final gesture also embodies what Bai describes as Green Snake’s gaze toward White Snake: “not especially sharp, but suffused with a ‘sympathetic understanding’—a scattered, multi-angled way of seeing that is itself marked by an uncanny instability” (Bai 2024, p. 38; my translation). In this last sheltering embrace, Emerald does not judge Su’s failures or mimicry; she simply holds her, offering a gaze that is at once tender, sympathetic, and unwavering across time. Sister Snake closes with the recognition of what endures beneath transformation, as Emerald declares, “A snake can shed its skin a hundred times, but it will always remain a snake. To be sisters with you in one lifetime is not enough” (Koe 2024, p. 221). The line crystallizes the novel’s vision of persistence through change—a love that transcends form and mortality, surviving every rupture as the only home that remains.

In sum, Koe’s Sister Snake traces a serpentine sisterhood repeatedly fractured by colonial, patriarchal, and heteronormative pressures, yet resiliently reconstituted across centuries and geographies. While Su’s oscillation between assimilation and rebellion exposes the psychic toll of coercive mimicry and compulsory heterosexuality, the sisters’ continual reunions affirm the persistent force of queer sisterly kinship. Their bond—repeatedly ruptured by male intervention and racialized sexual politics—nonetheless endures as a fragile but radical form of solidarity. This tenacious, ever-renewing connection resists the fragmenting forces of heteropatriarchy, envisioning alternative kinship sustained through shared history, pain, and desire. Read alongside Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Koe’s conclusion extends the same mythic and affective lineage between sexualized and racialized women: both reimagine the snake woman’s crossings—from mythic China to diasporic modernities—as journeys through which sisterhood becomes the only durable home. Across oceans and centuries, their serpentine heroines embody a queer mode of belonging grounded not in lineage or nation but in shared endurance—a love that outlasts erasure and persists through perpetual transformation.

4. Conclusions

Across Lai’s and Koe’s reimaginings, the Chinese snake woman emerges as a figure that entwines sexuality, race, and species difference. In the Chinese cultural imagination, serpent women have long signified not only erotic transgression but also ethnic alterity. As Haiyan Lee notes, in premodern Chinese thought, “animal-kind is equated with alien-kind,” marking a space beyond civilization that both threatens and renews it (Lee 2014, p. 72). This logic is rooted in the Hua–Yi distinction—the traditional dichotomy between the Han (Hua) and the non-Han “barbarians” (Yi)—which defines humanity and civility in opposition to animality and foreignness. Translated into modern racial discourse, this civilizational hierarchy reappears within a Western framework that equates the human with whiteness and renders racialized others less than human. In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North America, Chinese immigrants were commonly likened to vermin: an 1870s advertisement by the E.S. Wells Trade Company for a product called Rough on Rats described the Chinese as “rats (or of the same stuff as rats)” (Chen 2012, p. 110). As Mel Y. Chen observes, queer bodies are often intertwined with ethnic and other socially marginalized bodies: queer embodiment includes “those located in class and race disprivilege who might otherwise be defined, or self-define, as ‘heterosexual’” (Chen 2012, p. 134), figures rendered out of place within dominant orders. Read within this long genealogy, Lai’s and Koe’s serpent women reclaim animalized otherness as a site of resistance, transforming what was once a mark of exclusion into a language of queer kinship and survival.

Through a comparative reading of Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake, this essay illuminates how contemporary Chinese diasporic women writers reimagine the snake woman figure as a complex symbol of queerness, ethnic otherness, and feminist resistance. Both authors rework the mythic serpent across transpacific and transhistorical frames to explore how female intimacy and solidarity endure under systems of racial, patriarchal, and colonial constraint. The serpentine heroines’ ruptured yet enduring bonds demonstrate how intimate alliances among women persist across time, space, and cultural displacement, delineating alternative forms of kinship beyond familial and national structures. Moreover, by entwining queer sexuality with racialized and colonial histories, these novels expose the intersectional struggles faced by diasporic and gendered subjects navigating multiple forms of captivity and resistance. Whether through Lai’s speculative reimaginings of maternal origin stories or Koe’s contemporary reworkings of the White Snake mythos, the snake woman emerges not only as a figure of danger and desire but also as a resilient emblem of queer affinity and political solidarity. In drawing attention to these mythic retellings, this study contributes to broader conversations in queer diasporic speculative fiction, feminist myth-making, and transpacific literary genealogies. Framing mythic revision as a transpacific approach, it demonstrates how Asian American literary studies can be enriched by diasporic speculative narratives that rework Chinese serpent-woman figures—and broader cultural scripts—to interrogate race, empire, and belonging across colonial, migratory, and transnational geographies. Ultimately, this study calls for both an expansion of Asian American literary boundaries and a broader understanding of queerness—one that encompasses not only non-normative sexualities but also enduring bonds of care, fluid (dis)identifications, and solidarities forged in resistance to patriarchal, colonial, and heteronational forces. Through their serpentine heroines, Lai and Koe reimagine radical female solidarities that defy and reshape conventional boundaries of identity, kinship, and national home.