Literature

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.

To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays that explore what poetic genres are and if they evolve. I then survey ways to understand how the history of satiric poems furnishes valuable perspectives on contemporary developments in ecopoetry, which is defined as poetry linking ecological and social crises. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. At the heart of the essay are readings of poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others. Their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work. Yet contemporary innovations paradoxically reaffirm the ancient legacy of satire’s importance.

My sinuous life as a humanist traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographical, and national borders has yielded palpable wonders, the most wonderful being the opportunity to live and connect many lives. I was made bilingual, bicultural, and cosmopolitan in colonial Hong Kong, a classicist at Pepperdine University, a Renaissance scholar at Berkeley, an intersectional Americanist at UCLA, and a polyglot comparatist by UCEAP. The many splendors of literary America unraveled by Bruins of disparate stripes have driven me to herald the variegated beauty of Chinese American heritage. I have gone from being an outsider, a suspect even, in both English and Asian American studies to being a humanist resource. It behooves me to usher in, among the Bruins, my mother tongue—the language of the Tang poets, gold miners, and the Transpacific railroad workers, and to stage Cantonese opera. “In my end is my beginning.”