TRANSPACIFIC SPECULATIONS

The Pacific Ocean of the early twenty-first century is laden with speculation, mostly of two kinds: one that anticipates the economic potential of the “Asian century,” and another that projects its ecological devastation. The Asian Development Bank's prospectus Asia 2050: Realizing the Asian Century (published in 2011) prognosticates Asia's future economic dominance on the world stage as plausible but “by no means preordained.”Footnote ² A Trans-Pacific Partnership – characterized by one Nation reporter as “NAFTA on steroids” –attempts to shore up corporate interests and move global elites on both sides of the Pacific toward this financialized future. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) produces models for forecasting tsunami flooding, generating colorful projections of wave amplitude that get misleadingly redeployed online as supposed trajectories of radiation fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In the months and years following “3/11,” the NOAA image goes viral, metastasizing in the popular imaginary as a transpacific expanse, glowing green with radiation.

Despite their divergent utopian and dystopian trajectories, these twin transpacific futures of financial potential and ecological fallout are intimately conjoined – a conjuncture perhaps most aptly figured in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a stew of ever-disintegrating but never-degrading plastic particulates swirling in the North Pacific Gyre. A conglomeration of global capitalism's detritus, this slurry of microplastics instantiates rapid economic development's cultivation of disposability, pollution, trash, and practices that prioritize immediate profit over long-term sustainability. In many ways, the Garbage Patch is a physical manifestation of the abject future: an accumulation of flotsam and that has been jettisoned from the more sanitized and burnished visions of “new Asia”: gleaming, futuristic cityscapes built on the promises of a financialized global biotech industry as well as older and ongoing practices of exploitation of displaced migrant labor.Footnote ³

This paper takes interest in an alternative imagining of transpacific futurity “from below.” I turn to Larissa Lai's 2002 speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl as one example of such a narrative that extrapolates from the perspectives of the discarded elements of transpacific global capitalism. Living in a world shaped by predatory speculations that capitalize on the exploitation of biomatter, Salt Fish Girl calls attention to how disavowed histories of war trauma, labor exploitation, and ecological fallout inform a genetically modified future of corporate enclosures on the one hand and mutant assemblages on the other. Lai's queer, mutant-clone protagonists suffer from a “dreaming sickness” that renders all genetically modified organisms susceptible to reliving historical traumas, and it is precisely through this shared transgenic experience that they come together to sabotage the ideological and material systems of genetic engineering that would excise them as unpredictable aberrations from corporate subjection. Set both in pre-Shang Dynasty China and the Pacific Northwest of the near future, the novel structurally oscillates between past and future-present, eventually folding time (and subject) in on itself, disrupting expectations of linear progression. I read these literary moves through the queer analytics of “genetic drag” and “temporal drag,” as forms of anti-positivist speculations that unsettle the financialized future.Footnote ⁴ As an extended rumination on transgenic life and as a literary experiment in trans-temporal narrative, Salt Fish Girl imagines a post-genomic world that may very well have configured a Deleuzian “dividual” of econometric calculation and biometric accounting, but may also open onto unpredictable experiences of the sort that Dana Luciano and Mel Chen call “queer inhumanisms,” through which the normative category of the human gets called into question.Footnote ⁵ To write these bodies into the future, Lai must intervene in a neoliberal futurity that promises constantly upgradeable lives for some while dispossessing others of a stakehold in that temporal geography.

I focus my analysis around the central figures of Lai's novel – the transgenic fish and the Asian clone worker – against the backcloth of the racialized histories of genomics, the financialization of science, and transpacific labor. To fill in that backcloth, I provide an interlude wherein I put Salt Fish Girl in conversation with a different kind of speculative writing in the form of the National Human Genome Research Institute's (NHGRI's) 2011 Strategic Plan for the future of human genome research. Tracing the rhetorical shifts in genomics research from a focus on “mutation” to “regeneration,” I compare the 2011 Strategic Plan to the key 1989 special issue of Genomics, which attempts to historicize the origins of the Human Genome Project (HGP). I understand this rhetorical shift to underline how funding for the HGP capitalized on a conversion of atomic-age radiation trauma into the potential for gene therapy. By putting these speculative narratives into conversation, I approach genomic futurity as contested terrain, where Salt Fish Girl offers a revisitation of the “specters of the Pacific” that haunt the HGP's transpacific future.Footnote ⁶

SPECULATIVE FICTION AND FINANCIAL SPECULATION

Salt Fish Girl arose out of the confluence of several major events that the author encountered in the early stages of the project. From roughly 1995 to 2000, these highly news-mediated occasions, as Lai recounts, include:

Lai's list provides a curation of promiscuous movements of biomatter, any of which could plausibly masquerade as science fiction elements: cloned sheep, aliens mysteriously washing ashore, and a plant species genetically modified to colonize indigenous crops. Furthermore, this range of life forms constitutes a transpacific “undercommons” – a pooling of abjected biomatter caught up in and displaced by the currents of transpacific exchange. In the late 1990s, that transpacific exchange is marked in particular by a global narrativization of Asia's financial “crisis” of 1997–98 and subsequent “miraculous recovery,” which followed on the heels of Japan's speculative “frenzy” in the late 1980s and the Tokyo stock market crash of 1990.Footnote ⁸ In the case of Salt Fish Girl, speculative fiction understands financial speculation as its co-text.

Both financial speculation and speculative fiction participate in the cultural production of futurity – a term that highlights the construction of “the future” and denaturalizes its singularity, even while acknowledging its substantial effects on how we materialize the present. Financial forecasters produce extrapolative fiction when they functionally convert data into an interpretive arc. Econometrics extrapolates from data collected by the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index and Index of Consumer Expectations, for example, which reduce “sentiment” and “expectation” to numeric values in an attempt to measure and then advise for or against hedging uncertain futures. This data-fication is also a rendering of data into fiction, into statistical narrative, which Kathleen Woodward has characterized as “the preeminent expression of late capitalism.”Footnote ⁹ I argue not only that financial speculation produces a kind of speculative fiction, but also that despite its overtures to fact over fiction, financial speculation enters into dialectical relation with the literary production of futurity. In this vein, I join a wider, emerging interdisciplinary discussion about what could be called the cultural studies of finance.Footnote ¹⁰ Historians and cultural theorists of science have additionally called our attention to how scientific speculation, technological forecasting, and promissory futures transform “basic science” into an “entrepreneurial science,” wherein scientific inquiry follows an economy of deliverable outcomes and profitable goods rather than perhaps a less manufactured curiosity.Footnote ¹¹ In an entrepreneurial approach to science, narratives of futurity function as scripts in laboratory protocols, military strategies of preemption, and economic extrapolations alike, instrumentalizing the speculative mode by attaching it to funding mechanisms that call on scientists to anticipate and project the potential impact, benefit, and even profit their research might have in the future.

These resulting prospectuses constitute forms of speculative narration; however, as Colin Milburn suggests, “we have yet fully to take on the manifold ways these practices interrelate with the predominant mode of speculative narration in the modern era – namely, science fiction.”Footnote ¹² Milburn points out scientists' active disavowal of any substantive relationship that their work might have with the literary genre of science fiction (also called “speculative” or “extrapolative” fiction). Eschewed from the spatial construction of the pure and rational laboratory, science fiction seems nonetheless already part of the scientific process of imagining possibilities. If, however, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields remain oversaturated by white men, science fiction, with its possibly more successful recruitment of writers of color, queer thinkers, and women, might not only offer some explanation of historical exclusions and abuses of, say, imperial science, but also gesture toward how science itself might begin to imagine other kinds of possible future. I explore speculation not as the predictive calculations designed to turn a profit on the containment of risk, but rather as a modality of radical unfurling and mutation.

In its counterimagining of genetic recombination's potential, Salt Fish Girl in particular proffers a politics of mutation rather than regeneration. Whereas regeneration's aim is to restore a body to an original or normative state, mutation finds its expression in changing the materiality of a thing, likely in ways that alter conceptualizations of bodies, differentiation, origins, and copies. Lai construes a transgressive set of possibilities in mutation and its unpredictability in an era of rampant genetic modification (GM) marketed for its precision and control. Anchored by twin narrators located in different times – one in the past, one in the future – the novel slips between temporal streams, and just when the year 2044 holds up the regenerative potential of bioengineered futurity, Lai's slipstream techniques point the reader to the histories of biocolonialism and even older forms of empire that have given rise to this dubiously manufactured future.Footnote ¹³ In this way, Salt Fish Girl as speculative fiction ruminates on two forms of future-making: fabrication and fabulation, wherein the distinction and the tension seems to be their relations to actualization – either the realizing of potential or the opening of possibility.

THE GHOSTLY MATTER OF TRANSGENIC ORGANISMS

In Lai's speculative fiction, the future promised by advances in DNA recombination techniques is always already haunted by the past. Miranda Ching, one of the not-quite-human protagonists, is a “child afflicted by history.”Footnote ¹⁴ She, like many of the other genetically modified inhabitants of this mutant future, exhibits symptoms of the “dreaming sickness,” a mysterious malady speculated to be a “new breed of auto-immune diseases, related to genetic and other industrial modifications to our food supply,” wherein people become consumed with the experience of traumatic histories of war, famine, and violence. Miranda relates the story of one girl “who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought. She could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound; every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage.”Footnote ¹⁵ The dreaming sickness instantiates “memory as haunting,” the return of the repressed, and in this case the ghostly matter has been spliced into one's DNA – a condition that renders the host ghost, producing a primordial urge to drown rather than relive the disavowed experience of violence.Footnote ¹⁶ Also called the “drowning disease,” this condition becomes so unbearable that its sufferers can only find relief when submerged underwater.Footnote ¹⁷ The girl who smelled of cooking oil walked into the ocean and never returned. Miranda herself retreats to the bathtub. Traumatic experiences find their afterlives in transgenic forms, the constant undertow of such memories driving some to oblivion but others toward revolutionary pursuits.

These ghostly matters point to the ways in which the genomic dystopia of Miranda's world is a continuation of the necropolitical past.Footnote ¹⁸ Nextcorp, the multinational corporation who produces the clone laborers of the novel's near future, “bought out the Diverse Genome Project around the same time [Miranda] was born … It focused on the peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction,” so all the factory workers have brown eyes and black hair.Footnote ¹⁹ In Salt Fish Girl, the genetic engineering that produces clone workers of the future draws on the already racialized logics of the biobank. The dreaming sickness becomes Lai's vehicle for positioning the intertwined histories of war, labor, and the environment as the precondition for the age of genetic modification. In their discussion of dispossession and debt in the contemporary moment, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva articulate the “racial logic of global financial capitalism” and establish “how neoliberal architectures and discourses of dispossession act on earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation.”Footnote ²⁰ Lai's novel recalls such a disavowed history of genomics and clarifies how futuristic scientific enterprise builds on neocolonial practices, from bioprospecting to racialized internment.

Miranda's girlfriend Evie belongs to a series of clone workers called “the Sonias,” who not only share DNA with freshwater carp but also inherit some of their genetic material from a Chinese Canadian woman who chose to be interned with her Japanese Canadian husband during World War II.Footnote ²¹ This gesture of cross-ethnic solidarity, at a moment that might otherwise compel the assertion of difference, subtly but profoundly reintroduces the specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the history of genomics. The initial interest in developing what would become the HGP took hold among scientists studying rates of inherited genetic mutations in the 12,243 offspring of survivors of the nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By cultivating such elective affinities in the transgenic organism, Lai writes war, displacement, and trauma back into the cultural history of genomics.

SPECTERS OF THE PACIFIC: THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT'S TURN FROM MUTATION TO REGENERATION

The stakes of Salt Fish Girl's revisionist speculation on genomic futures become clearer upon investigating the Human Genome Project's often overlooked historical connection to the history of the atomic bomb.Footnote ²² Dr. Robert M. Cook-Deegan, former director of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy at Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and author of Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome, tells the history of the Human Genome Project as having its origins at the 1984 Alta Summit in the mountains of Utah. Cook-Deegan's report on the Alta Summit makes a point of clarifying that it “was not a meeting on mapping or sequencing the human genome. Through happenstance and historical accident, Alta links human genome projects to research on the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”Footnote ²³ In the two-page report, Cook-Deegan makes explicit mention of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven times, emphasizing in his narration how the Alta meeting signifies an important historical link between the Department of Energy's “traditional interest in detection of mutations” and the HGP's focus on sequencing the human genome. In the concluding sentence, Cook-Deegan asserts that the Alta Summit provides just “one of several historical links between genome projects and … the Manhattan project.”Footnote ²⁴ By 1986, though, just two years later, a report from the Santa Fe Workshop makes no explicit mention of the original Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies that led to the initial flurry of interest in improving DNA sequencing technologies.

Though the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) proclaims HGP “one of the great feats of exploration in history,”Footnote ²⁵ the official website of the HGP offers no account of the project's origins in the atomic era. Instead, its historical narrative highlights flashpoints of invention, genius, and breakthrough. It places the HGP in a genealogy of genomic research beginning with Alfred Sturtevant's first mapping of the Drosophilia fruit fly in 1911, followed by the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, on to Frederick Sanger's second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1980 for his development of sequencing techniques in the mid-1970s. Organized around the discrete accomplishments of individual, prize-winning scientists, the history locates the “intellectual roots” of the HGP in these people and events while diminishing the significance of a more nuanced history of science's relationship with military, atomic research and its fallout. The positivist arc to the NHGRI's official history of the HGP presents a series of scientific innovations as the building blocks of technological progress. Meanwhile, the sequential timeline downplays the HGP's messier connections to the geopolitical contexts to which this research was attached, including but not limited to what Cook-Deegan called the “happenstance” of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project – of nuclear holocaust.

The NHGRI's selective forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also signals the instrumentalization of Japanese survivors of the nuclear blasts and their descendants on behalf of genomic science, which at its inception sought to align its interests with a more profitable demographic than the survivors of nuclear warfare. When Jodi Kim writes about the US government prohibiting the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission from treating the Japanese subjects whom they were studying, she recognizes the ways in which wartime targets become objects of state knowledge. That targeting and objectifying, I would argue, are twin functions of the same practice of biopolitical subjection, the “reducing of others to data.”Footnote ²⁶ This realignment included a reorientation of scientific research toward the financial sector, in which speculations on the HGP's potential to predict and preempt disease and genetic “defects” would ultimately become the source of prolific financial speculation wherein venture capitalists could bet on scientific research and its conversion into private-sector enterprises like individualized genetic sequencing services such as those offered by 23andme.com.

To the extent that the HGP's official narrative attempts to fold the story of nuclear devastation into a narrative arc of the possibility of regenerative medicine, the renarrativization capitalizes on the proleptic logic that the United States used to rationalize the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to begin with. Donald Pease argues that “this fantasmatic representation of a nuclear holocaust in the future anterior” not only erodes the event's historical actuality but, in its projection, also inaugurates a national-security state now primed for all kinds of speculation on potential futures against which the nation can mobilize and militarize.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, the Human Genome Project presents itself as securitization against the onslaught of an uncertain mutagenic future, wherein investment in genetic engineering hedges against potential risk. My transposition of financial discourse (investing, hedging, forecasting) to the emergence of the HGP signals the next move of this essay to interject the emergence of genomics research into a confluence of financial and military securitization. As we will see, the Human Genome Project, in its attempt to informationalize biomatter and delink it from the feeling body, both subscribes to and is constituted by a strong turn toward quantification that helps convert biological life and sentiment into finance capitalism's terms of calculable, potential risk.

From the late 1970s through the late 1990s, “basic science” did not commercialize so much as it financialized, putting significantly more pressure on scientists to project the potential applications and utility of their research to sources of private funding with the purpose of fueling a derivatives market of betting on and hedging against the prospects of emerging techno-scientific research.Footnote ²⁸ In order to get funding, proposals necessarily include a speculative section, usually in the concluding paragraphs, wherein scientists imagine a future application of their research.Footnote ²⁹ As part of acquiring its federal funding, the NHGRI published a series of overlapping five-year plans outlining the priorities and goals of the HGP. Plotting the trajectories and articulating the potential future benefits of research, these documents constitute forms of speculative writing. Reading the 2011 Strategic Plan reveals a striking shift in rhetoric. The plan opens with “optimism about the potential contributions of genomics for improving human health.”Footnote ³⁰ Optimism recurs as a point of emphasis in the document. The Strategic Plan identifies the cell biological models that have led to a better understanding of Crohn's disease and cancer as “examples [to] justify the optimism about genomics' potential to accelerate the understanding of disease.”Footnote ³¹ The report's conclusion names the “audacious vision” of what sequencing the human genome could mean for the “ultimate control of many human diseases.”Footnote ³² The plan attributes this audacious vision to the origins of the HGP, but the origins the plan names (which include R. Dulbecco's 1986 article in Science, “A Turning Point in Cancer Research: Sequencing the Human Genome,” and the National Research Council's 1988 Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome) do not include the Alta Summit of 1984 and have already turned away from the study of radiation's effects on genetic mutation. It is an origin story born out of what Avery Gordon might call “repetition-as-displacement.”Footnote ³³ Indeed, “audacious vision” can only come about via the repression of genomic research's attachment to the Manhattan Project. Whereas the research on inherited genetic mutations garnered attention and funding from the Japanese government and the US Department of Energy (who worried about getting sued for the long-lasting and wide-reaching damage of radiation on anyone anywhere near either a bombing target or a testing site), the NHGRI's more audacious priorities for biomedical research claim to reach “well beyond what any one organization can realistically support, and will (once again) require the creative energies and expertise of genome scientists around the world and from all sectors, including academic, government, and commercial.”Footnote ³⁴ If research on radiation was seen as important primarily by people who perceived themselves to be immediately affected by the specific sites most commonly associated with the atomic age, then the HGP's new directions were bound by no such geographical locations. The plan's new terrain would be the limitless future and its securitization of healthy, wealthy individuals from risk (of disease, disaster, or accident).

As Melinda Cooper's compelling account of the embryonic futures market of the late 1990s reminds us, “whole sectors of the economy were held aloft on a wave of media-induced expectation.”Footnote ³⁵ Venture capitalists funded scientific research long before there was an actual product to be sold to the public. In a twelve-month period between July 1991 and July 1992, for example, forty-six initial public offerings in biotechnology companies were filed, raising $1.4 billion.Footnote ³⁶ Such speculations on regenerative medicine and precision-targeted designer drugs continue today, when investors extrapolate the endowed value of an experimental life form's “generative promise” based at least in part on how scientists narrate near-future projections of their research's impact.Footnote ³⁷ Nowhere has the conversion of basic discovery to application been more dramatically accelerated than in the field of genetics. Cooper notes that stem cell science in particular seeks to produce not just the potential organism, but “biological promise itself, in a state of nascent transformability.”Footnote ³⁸ Both stem cell science and the Human Genome Project constitute “markets and technologies specializing in biological promise [that] can in turn be understood as part of a larger trend toward the intensification of futures trading in both the US and world capital markets.”Footnote ³⁹ The Human Genome Project effectively brought together human genome sequencing with recombinant-DNA techniques to produce an endless suite of biogenetically engineered products geared for the biomedical health–pharmaceutical industry.

The Five-Year Plan's articulation of genomics research through the logics of speculative financing required not only the deployment of this narrative projection of futurity but also the translation of genetic material into statistical informatics. In its informatics-based approach to encoding, mapping, and “databasing” the genome, the HGP expresses its clear emphasis on studying (genetic) populations over and beyond a concern for individual bodies.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this way, the Human Genome Project's emphasis on mapping and sequencing the genome dovetailed perfectly with the logic of financial data-fication.

The promise of the genome's manipulability took deep root in its lexicality. As Judith Roof points out,

Roof suggestively puts Watson and Crick's 1953 articles on DNA in conversation with J. L. Austin's theorization of performative speech acts.Footnote ⁴² But if the performative utterance and deoxyribonucleic acid's alphabetical codes promised magical delivery of materiality, genomic sequencing was trained toward stability and normativity.

The rebranding of mutation as regeneration could only proceed with the collusion of a normative apparatus that could establish an ostensibly standard genome from which aberrations could be targeted and diseases identified. The 2011 plan makes this relationship explicit. By “extending from basic research to health applications,” the plan suggests that “the most effective way to improve human health is to understand normal biology (in this case, genome biology) as a basis for understanding disease biology.”Footnote ⁴³ Imagining the “healthy” body meant sequencing, reading, and editing the legible genome.

Heredity, as Michel Foucault laid out in his lecture on biopower at the Collège de France in 1976, conceptually gives rise to a “theory of degeneracy,” and sexuality, because it “represents the precise point where the disciplinary and the regulatory, the body and the population, are articulated,” becomes simultaneously disciplined and regulated.Footnote ⁴⁴ “The norm,” he continued, “is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Though Foucault delivered this lecture eight years before the Alta Summit, he already had some inkling that a genetic normativity would follow. In the very next paragraph, he cited atomic power as an example of “biopower that is in excess of sovereign right” and bioengineering (“when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster”) as an example of biopower “beyond all human sovereignty.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Foucault's theorizations of biopower emerge precisely from the particular historical moment when the HGP makes its transition from the atomic age to the age of genetic modification.

A key theorist of power, especially as it travels across the domain of sexuality, Foucault hints in this juxtaposition of atomic power and genomic power at the biopolitical implications of mutation and regeneration. What would it mean to queer the genome, and could doing so make for better, more nuanced science? To push the matter to broader implications, how might a theory of performativity help unsettle the consolidation of a genetic identity that one can ostensibly decipher, pinpoint the site of susceptibility, and repair?

MUTANT ASSEMBLAGES AND QUEER DESIRE

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler uses drag as an example of gender performativity, clarifying in Bodies That Matter that her point was not to suggest that gender is performed and elective by choice, but that drag disrupts the settling of gender on either a presupposed interior or exterior.Footnote ⁴⁷ Therefore “genetic drag” – a term Sarah Franklin introduces in Dolly Mixtures, her queer genealogy of transgenic organisms – works to reveal the production of genetic normativity, which assumes a certain stasis, wholeness, and originality to the genome through analogies that configure DNA as the “blueprint” of life, consisting of “building blocks” of nucleic acids. Practices such as gene therapy replace “faulty,” mutated genes with “therapeutic” ones, even though they concurrently deploy DNA recombination technologies that might be characterized as artificial.Footnote ⁴⁸ Genetic drag upsets these natural–artificial, nature–culture binaries.

Larissa Lai explains that Salt Fish Girl began with an interrogation of the Enlightenment notion of the individual subject and an inquiry into alternative renderings of embodiment and sensation that span geographical and generational time–spaces.Footnote ⁴⁹ She writes, “Nu Wa is a hybrid goddess – half snake and half woman. So I'm not just dealing with travel and dislocation as social practices, I'm dealing with the hybridity and impurity of the body itself.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Lai's revision of the Nu Wa origin myth insists that we have always been transgenic, and we have always been queer. Salt Fish Girl is a “founding myth about dislocation” that unravels “the patriarchal underpinnings of the founding myths of nation states.”Footnote ⁵¹

What is genetic mutation if not the disowned, unruly relative of genetic modification? Salt Fish Girl examines the tensions between genetic engineering and genetic mutation by poking at the differences between the two. Lai connects the violence used to punish nonconformity to predatory forms of financial speculation, which capitalize on the future tense “should” (holding the future hostage to an obligation, or debt), rather than lingering in what “could” possibly come into being (holding the future open to a more radical uncertainty).Footnote ⁵²

As biomatter forged in the fires of biocapital, clones in Lai’s Salt Fish Girl are indeed, as the epigraph to this article suggests, the offspring of the subaltern. The techno-orientalized Asian clone in particular is a perfectly neoliberalized form of biomatter. Distant and forgotten kin to the irradiated bomb victim, it is all too undead … (Better to think of the Japanese as never having been alive than to remember the whole transpacific host of peoples – from residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll – as rendered disposable in service of the atomic war machine.)

Though Lai's novel precedes the behavioral-epigenetics studies of transgenerational genetic “memory” via DNA methylation, the dreaming sickness plays with the possibility of our recent ancestors leaving the residue of their experiences of stress or trauma on our genetic scaffolding that scientists at Emory University would publish evidence toward in 2013. Discovery magazine describes the process as traumatic experiences leaving “molecular scars adhering to our DNA … [l]ike silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes.”Footnote ⁵³

Lai's novel also performs a kind of “temporal drag” on genomic futurity. Elizabeth Freeman incites us to think about “‘drag’ as a productive obstacle to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense,” emphasizing undertow as a simultaneously disruptive and productive force in the creation of waves.Footnote ⁵⁴ While Freeman's arguments concern themselves primarily with feminist political movements, they also describe well how Salt Fish Girl evokes the necessary picking up of sediment from that which has been disavowed, the retrograde's formative relation to the progressive (“its forward movement is also a drag back”).Footnote ⁵⁵

In Salt Fish Girl, the future folds into the past – a generic convention of speculative fiction (time travel and quantum leaps) through which Lai fabulates a non-linear complexity of temporal dimensions, facilitated not through wormholes but through fantastical and queer forms of reproduction. At the end of the novel, Miranda “becomes” Nu Wa, insofar as she remembers – perhaps through her transgenic materials – that she has always been that mythological goddess of creation and figuration of entanglement.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nu Wa herself travels across time and space in movements that signal the ways in which speculative fiction can be used as a genre of migrant literature: abduction, alienation, and teleportation against the backdrop of indenture, displacement, deportation.

Whenever narratives of progress, development, and improvement seduce them, Lai's characters suffer the consequences. Nu Wa, who escapes the grind of factory work in nineteenth-century Canton, gets duped by the alluring Edwina into traveling to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness, which abbreviates suggestively to “IMF.” Taken in by the promises of “Progress” and “Democracy” inscribed on the gates to the IMF, Nu Wa begins working as a telemarketer, selling big chances to win lotteries in China, using her Chinese accent to lend credibility to the “insider information” she dispenses. Though the IMF promises opportunity (Edwina checks Nu Wa into a gilded hotel, which turns out to be a glorified prison), Nu Wa becomes embroiled in the indentured logics of predatory speculation and its empty promises. The financial scheme of Lai's fictional IMF strikingly resembles that of the Asian Development Bank's strategy of pooling financial instruments such as equity investments and securities into a fund, which provides “opportunities for people to lift themselves out of poverty.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Once she herself gets blamed for fleecing pensioners of their retirement funds, Nu Wa is left jobless, destitute, and painfully aware of the precariousness of her situation.

Miranda's father Stewart works as a tax collector, and though “[t]he bank promised adventure,”Footnote ⁵⁸ in the form of a first-person shooter game where the protagonist “protects” destitute subjects by shooting down birds that burst into streams of digits, Stewart's job seems masochistic at best. The heroic-savior narrative is a sham. In fact, the tax collector is extracting money, which he hands over to the Receivers General. Depicted once as policemen bludgeoning the collector, or another time as a “gang of spindly tall children with mutilated faces” holding his head down in a cesspool while penetrating all his orifices with their long fingers, the Receivers General dole out punishment under the auspices of fantastic play. The tax collector subjects himself to assault as part of his job, accepting the violence as part of the promise of adventure the bank has extended him. Stewart works for the bank to secure a life in the suburban, corporate GM enclave Serendipity, but the novel makes clear that the luster and sheen of this engineered life, which has taken the suburban ideal of manicured lawns and made them perpetually green, is undergirded with a form of violence.

In Lai's Serendipity, the securitized city owned by the Saturna corporation, genetic recombination has given rise to apples genetically modified to feed a family of four, not to mention a clone labor force manufactured to clean buildings and work in factories. There, the Ching family feel that they really should mow the lawn, trim the hedges, and somehow expunge the stink of durian fruit from Miranda's pores.Footnote ⁵⁹ When Miranda visits her friend Ian Chestnut's house, she encounters the intensity of a genetically modified, augmented reality that a wealthy family can afford. On the table, there is “a bowl containing unnaturally large pink blossoms.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Ian's mom offers Miranda “a glass of brilliant blue liquid to drink. Her teeth gleamed white. Her eyes were both prosthetic and had a terrible piercing intelligence to them.”Footnote ⁶¹ Ian's dad's “arm muscles ripple unnaturally.”Footnote ⁶² While corporate enclosures like Serendipity promise perfect produce and pristine environs built on the controlled subjugation of these bioengineered organisms, the novel takes more interest in the possibilities of genetic mutation that belie the closed-system fantasy precision of laboratory life. The true uncertainty embodied by these forms of life is not to be contained by the security promised by the suburban bubble; instead, unpatented seeds germinate and escaped workers slip beyond the purview of the corporate enclosure into the Unregulated Zone.

Despite an apparent acceleration of regulatory mechanisms, the GM future of Salt Fish Girl is nonetheless teeming with unbridled, queer life – queer in that transgenic and mutant life forms travel beyond normative conceptualizations of speciation, temporality, and communicability to form promiscuous bonds with one another. Clones produced by and for the factory assembly line find a way to reproduce themselves offshore, or rather on the banks of a magically fecund river whose reproductive power prolifically spawns mutation in the Unregulated Zone. The mutagenic conditions of the Unreglated Zone facilitate Miranda's very conception. Though her mother Aimee Ling is “a good eight years past menopause,” her desire for a genetically rogue durian fruit growing in the Unregulated Zone compels her to reach beyond the seemingly safe and sterile enclave of Serendipity to satisfy her craving.Footnote ⁶³ “She wanted it so badly, she would have taken the risk, but my father said that wild things weren't safe. She knew that. She wanted it anyway.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This strange fruit – infused with the mythical powers of generation of the serpentine goddess of creation, who has coiled herself around its seed – fertilizes Miranda's mother's egg with Nu Wa's genetic essence. Conceived in a moment when her mother craved wild durian, Miranda embodies her mother's momentary rebellion against the privatization of food. “I should never have brought you that evil fruit,” Stewart tells Aimee,

Here, the discards from the lab experiment gone wrong, through fish genetics, through queer desire, hold wild assembly.

Improvisational life forms and experimental practices form ad hoc community networks and resistance movements that coalesce spontaneously and ephemerally, on the fly, on the run, cobbled together from recycled and repurposed materials. The Unregulated Zone is also home to all sorts of other mutant forms of commerce and life. Pirate television, backyard farming, and reconstructed bicycles offer alternative models of communing for workers fleeing the corporate compounds, once “the stock market crisis and the further devaluation of the dollar” compel Saturna to start cutting pensions and firing workers.Footnote ⁶⁶ The clones who escape the Pallas shoe factory start making sneakers with revolutionary messages etched into their soles, sold on the black market to foment pedestrian speech acts in the mud. The artistic shoe impressions traverse unregulated space and indicate the hidden currents; the sudden, unexpected connections; unseen networks; and spontaneous associations that constitute the lived urban space beyond the frame of the blueprint and the planned city of Serendipity, or its Disney counterpart of Celebration, Florida. Insofar as they do the often anonymous work of disruption, these anarchic footprints instantiate Salt Fish Girl's guerrilla tactics against the imagination of a neater, more compliant futurity. They participate in a “creative sabotage of the future.”Footnote ⁶⁷

This is a story of clones, fish, and mutants who enact an “improvisation of kinship” to intercede in the collusion of corporate greed and scientific ambition.Footnote ⁶⁸ What brokers these alliances across species might be described best as queer desire. Queer theorizations of kinship, collectivity, and affinity-based politics become quite helpful in formulating the particularly queer ways that Salt Fish Girl reconceives transpacific futurity.

POSTSCRIPT: TRANSPACIFIC ECOLOGIES

The Pacific Ocean is occupied. An assemblage of mutagenic and discarded life forms helps us formulate transpacific futurity from below, by thinking speculatively from the perspective of the irradiated fish, the never-disintegrating bead of microplastic, the Asian migrant worker, the embryonic stem cell, the disappearing coral reefs. This heterogeneous, unmannerly crowd of indeterminate actors is bound together by a vague but potent sense of disenfranchisement. They have been cast as disposable service workers in global capitalism's transpacific speculations. By bringing together labor histories of Asian migration to, from, and between the Americas with projections of Asian biotech futures, I mean to tether twenty-first-century extrapolations about transpacific futurities in the era of global finance capitalism to earlier histories of US imperialisms across the Pacific. Thinking transpacific futurity from the extrapolation point of nuclear fallout demands a perspectival shift that disrupts the promissory optimism surrounding how genetically modified organisms as well as other forms of biocapital exchange will deliver the so-called Asian Century. In my reading of Salt Fish Girl and the NHGRI's Strategic Plan, “fallout” emerges as abjected futurity, tugging at the sails of a more triumphant narrative of techno-scientific progress.

After a six-month investigation in Thailand, The Guardian put together a report on “The Supermarket Slave Chain,” tracing the packages of frozen shrimp sold in the vast majority of supermarkets in the US and Europe to Burmese migrants coerced into indentured servitude on Thai shrimping boats, where their invisible, free labor makes them feel “worthless.” “The fish has more value than we do,” one worker says. “We are less than human.” He, like the Salt Fish Girl, who finds work in a factory assembling tin animal wind-up toys, expresses textbook alienation. He and the fish constitute the flotsam, the detritus, the imperial debris circulating in the Pacific Ocean, ground together into fishmeal to feed global capitalism. They are precisely the ones the Trans-Pacific Partnership renders disposable, even as it calls into being an Asian futurity.

Larissa Lai imagines transpacific futurity differently. Salt Fish Girl traces the biopolitical currents of the transpacific, bringing Asian/American labor histories into conversation with circulations of other forms of biocapital, including Monsanto seeds, embryonic stem cells, and irradiated fish. These human and inhuman assemblages point to an alternative apprehension of Asian futurity from the perspective of transpacific life. The novel's multiple forms of drag – genetic, temporal, and literary (though I did not go into the last of these here) – produce a number of interventions into the construction of speculative futurity.Footnote ⁷⁰Salt Fish Girl's interspecies “animacies,” including but not limited to the genetic drag of Miranda's dreaming sickness and the clonal genealogies of Evie and the Sonias, also facilitate a temporal drag that folds back into the story of GM futures the transpacific historiographies of wars in Asia and the collusion between military, industry, technology, capitalism, and scientific research. If the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the atomic afterlives of the Bikini Atoll constitute the specters of the Pacific that haunt the era of genetic modification, then Lai's invocation of them through the transgenic bodies of Miranda Ching and Salt Fish Girl – through the spliced DNA of saltwater carp and Asian migrant – suggests the queerness of a transpacific ecology.