Cyberpunk proves the aff is exploitation

Throughout Salt Fish Girl, Lai is careful to reject the traditional cyberpunk use of the passive techno-Orientalized female body as she articulates the consequences of nonnormative reproduction for racially minoritized bodies. Writing in the late 1990s as the emerging issue of cloning fueled Western imaginations, Marlene Barr speculates that “the most dangerous issue is not duplication but, rather, the lack of mass production of certain humans: gays, Jews, people of color, women” (203). Going against Barr’s particular dystopian fear of the erasure of sexual and racial minorities, however, Lai imagines a world wherein the cloned bodies are only women of color. Lai explores the very scenario that Barr does not predict: what would happen if mass-produced clone are those of bodies already exploited by the global capitalist system? Lai’s critique of the Western marginalization (and exploitation) of the Asian body is strongly evident through Miranda’s apprehension and horror over cloning. On entering Dr. Flower’s experimental laboratory hideaway in the mountains, Miranda follows the escaped clone Evie and sees “the fridges where all the DNA was kept, the vials of fertilized and unfertilized eggs, the cold steel tables upon which the act of creation took place. All these tidy attempts to control the mud and muck of origin upset me” (268). Dr. Flower’s experiments with cloning translate literally into attempts at controlling paternity and maternity of the Asian body—a way to either contain or erase racialized otherness that is seen as threatening, or contaminating (just like the sleeping disease), to the white male body. In Lai’s dystopian scenario, it is a small leap to make from the exploitation of racialized women’s labor in the present world to the one of 2044 where women of color are mass produced solely for the exploitation of their labor. Evie believes that her cloned genes might have originated from a Chinese woman named Ai who married a Japanese man and was interned in the Rockies during World War II, but most likely, the clones—all named Sonia, as another measure to strip them of individuality and agency—are genetic composites pulled from the “Diverse Genome Project” which “focused on the peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction” (160). The bodies of the Sonia clones are treated as tools of production: Evie tells Miranda that she is one of “at least a hundred thousand” (158) clones bred and forced to work for Nextcorp, a corporation that produces Pallas shoes (157). The worker clones are controlled by an implanted mechanical device, their “Guardian Angel,” which “looks after us, monitors our body temperature, notes the presence of disease, helps rescuers find us if we get lost” (159). The Sonias are neither autonomous beings nor human— they are literally manufactured bodies, products, to be used and thrown away. Clones, just like real Eastern world factory workers, are ultimately deemed lesser beings as the whims of the marketplace determine their value. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai exposes the harsh reality of cyberpunk’s techno-Orientalized body—technology does not free it from suffering or erase the moral failings of those who seek to exploit it. Further deepening the perceived otherness of the Sonia clones is the indeterminacy of their origins. Miranda is shocked by Evie’s admission of her illegal nonhuman status (158), as she explains that her “genes are point zero three percent Cyprinuscarpio freshwater carp. I’m a patented new fucking life form” (158). Taken out of the realm of the human, Evie and the other Sonia clones are reduced to their patented genes—they become nothing more than tools for production. Addressing the clones’ indeterminate humanity, Robyn Morris argues, “The figure of Evie, and her human/fish genes, exists in a liminal state, neither fully human nor non-human. This ambiguity surrounding her identity is one way that Lai complicated conceptions of humanness as whole, centered, complete; ‘the real thing’” (92). Despite recognizing her own corporeal difference, Miranda’s discomfort with Evie reflects current anxieties surrounding cloning as a technology that challenges normative definitions of what constitutes a human being and brings into question who (or what) is ultimately responsible for human agency and creation. Lai emphasizes that the clone body, the techno-Orientalized body, is nevertheless an active one. Owning their right to reproduce, the escaped Sonias use genetically engineered durian fruits (the same fruit that brought Miranda into being) to bear children. Living and creating families outside of the factories, the clone Sonias reject subjection and control by those who deny them their humanity and insist on creating new lives, literally, for themselves. While Lai warns against the exploitive use of cloning and genetic modification, she also proposes that when taken up outside of dominant power structures, such technologies can be enabling for marginalized bodies by offering them novel modes of replication. “It is through Evie and the Sonias’ quest for independence that Lai rejects the narrativizing of women, and more particularly, women of Asian descent, as passive and silent under white, Western, patriarchal scrutiny” (Robyn Morris 89), effectively refiguring the central hackerhero of classic cyberpunk. While global capitalism seeks to turn Asian bodies into expendable workers for the pleasure and use of an insatiable Westernized market, Lai situates her Asian female characters as operating competently and creatively within society, within the real world, despite its exclusionary cultural constructions of their identity.