The Diasporic Inheritance of Postmemory and Immigrant Shame in the Novels of Larissa Lai
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I explore how diasporic subjectivity emerges in adopted and assimilated Chinese characters in Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl . Though Lai’s characters have never experienced a traumatic catastrophe or dispersion from the homeland, they still represent compelling figures for theorising diaspora. Drawing on Lily Cho and Marianne Hirsch, I argue that what makes this “postgeneration” diasporic is an ongoing process of discovering and mending an always tenuous relationship to the past: past histories and traumas of displacement and dispossession that they inherit, directly or indirectly, from previous generations, and past origins that they may repress due to the present-day experience of immigrant shame. Discussing how Lai’s characters inherit postmemory, I also suggest that the experience of queer pleasure associated with sharing and recuperating the olfactory and gustatory source of their immigrant shame is essential to the emergence of their diasporic consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".