5 Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

A History of the Future

Set in Southern China in the late 1800s and early 1900s as well as in a futuristic Serendipity in British Columbia between 2044 and 2062, Salt Fish Girl uses the dual time frame and multiple settings to demonstrate the connections between the past and the present, as well as the similarities between what has traditionally been divided into the East and the West. Instead of seeing a break between the myths, histories, and traditions of the past and the postindustrial, scientific, fragmented, and sanitized world of the postmodern, Lai stresses the parallels between them and shows the value of remembrance and unforgetfulness at the same time that she seeks to rework a past that effaces the histories of the dispossessed.2 In an article titled “Political Animals and the Body of History,” Lai points out the importance of not forgetting the past, as well as the need to rewrite it: “To claim a racialized space is empowering in that it demands acknowledgement of a history of racism to which the mainstream does not want to admit” (149).

In this politicized context, the theme of remembrance and forget-fulness becomes important in the novel. At one point, Nu Wa, the female protagonist of the early 1900s, is taken to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness, where she passes an indeterminate amount of time and ends up forgetting her native Cantonese dialect. This segment is a rather surreal and ironic echo of Christian’s journey in Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as the journey of immigrants who leave their homelands in search of a better life in the West. With a pale-faced foreign woman who smells of “expensive face powder and the kind of cologne that comes in crystal bottles” (Salt Fish Girl, 127), Nu Wa enters the City of Hope, “glinting pink and gold” on the island, through the east gate, marked “Progress” (125). The west gate is marked “Democracy.” The City of Hope, like America, however, offers opportunities and pleasure only to selected people, not to foreigners. Nu Wa finds much wealth and indulgence but also experiences the hardships that immigrants experience once her rich companion abandons her. She does not find the hope or salvation that Christian finds. Some of the work Nu Wa is forced to take on, under threat of deportation “back to China” (128), includes that of “a toilet scrubber and bedsheet changer” (129), as well as that of a tele-marketing salesperson who scams pensioners. Yet she is lulled by luxuries such as “shopping” and a “pedicure” (135, 137) from her companion when she becomes restless. Given the predominance of Asian and Asian American women in sweatshops and beauty salons, these two pleasures are rather ironic. Through this episode Lai critiques the unequal opportunities afforded by North America and the way its luxuries make us forget about the underside of the society—the hardships of immigrants, the poor, and criminals. At the same time, Lai also mocks the forgetfulness of immigrants, who, becoming caught up in the material life of their adopted country, too soon fail to remember the promises they have made to those they left behind, as Nu Wa forgot the promises she had made to the salt fish girl.

Remembering occurs in the futuristic narrative, too, but in that setting memories can be fatal. Miranda, the protagonist of the twenty-first century, finds that she is afflicted with the drowning/dreaming disease (108), a sickness that makes her see strange images from the past. It is this affliction that makes her interesting to the scientists and medical doctors who want to study and eradicate people like Miranda, who smell and have the dreaming disease, a form of disability in that society. Many of those afflicted cannot find comfort from their bad dreams except by drowning. For example, there was a “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” (85). For those in control of Serendipity, these visions of the past only disrupt the seemingly seamless and orderly present, and they must be suppressed. The people who dream of the past carry their histories with them, in the same way that they carry their stinking smell, no matter how much they try to clean themselves.

Lai’s insistence on the remembrance of atrocities past and on history counters what Fredric Jameson says of postmodernism. In his essay Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson argued that the main features of postmodernism include “a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary ‘theory’ and a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality [ . . . ]; a whole new type of emotional ground tone [. . .]; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology” (6). In particular, Jameson was critical of such postmodernist forms as architecture because “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production” (4). In contrast to this view of postmodernism, feminist postmodernist critics Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson have pointed out that for feminists, “the question of philosophy has always been subordinate to an interest in social criticism” (“Social Criticism without Philosophy,” 20). In addition, the feminist science fiction critic Jenny Wolmark argues that Jameson over-emphasized the “hegemonic capacities of postmodernism,” and the “negative capacities of science fiction” (Aliens and Others, 11, 10). Wolmark sees “the potential of science fiction to offer alternative and critical ways of imagining social and cultural reality,” and she argues that “new and contradictory social constituencies have emerged within postmodernity to challenge existing hierarchies and subjectivities” (10, 11). According to Wolmark, “The formation of new subject positions in terms of race, gender and class, and redefinitions of identity as provisional and plural are an important and oppositional response to the disappearance of the unitary subject, and yet their capacity to forge new ways of conceptualizing the link between history and subjectivity is consistently underestimated by Jameson” (11).

To counter the omission of those forgotten by history and, hence, create a new subject position for them in history, Lai says, “My strategy in recent years has been to make a project of constructing a consciously artificial history for myself and others like me—a history with identified women of Chinese descent living in the West as its center” (“Political Animals and the Body of History,” 149). She further explains, “I mean people who come from histories of travel and migration, people who are caught in various, often contradictory, positions with regards to the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, the body etc., people who are somehow marked as ‘other,’ as different, whether that is through race, or a way of moving through space, or a way of speaking” (“Future Asians,” 170). Lai inserts her Chinese Canadian protagonists into her postmodernist narrative, placing them into the historical consciousness of her Western readers at the same time. Unlike the early works of Asian American writers, who consciously wrote for a mainly white readership, Lai takes for granted the racial identity of her protagonist and does not go out of her way to describe her origins or to exoticize her and her cultural practices in the same way as earlier Asian American writers, such as Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan. For Lai does not spend time describing the different kinds of Chinese dishes prepared by Miranda’s family or their quaint customs.3 Instead, halfway through the first chapter featuring Miranda, her mother says of her, “It’s hard enough that she’s the only Asian child in her class, and surely she is aware of that” (Salt Fish Girl, 23). For the readers, this is the first indication that Miranda is Asian, that she is a member of a racial minority. But what is energizing about Lai’s account of Miranda’s activities is that in the world of Serendipity her racial identity is in many ways subsumed by other kinds of differences. There are so many other ways to be different—cloned of human and animal tissue, engendered from a durian seed—that to be Asian seems to be the least of one’s worries. In this exaggerated ethnoscape, to be a hybrid means more than taking on bicultural practices; instead hybridity is used at the physical genetic or biological level. In addition, exoticization through foods, what Asian American critics have called “food pornography” (Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, 61), does not occur because there is so little real food prepared in Serendipity. However, when Miranda and the clone Evie do buy something to eat from the street outside of the regulated zone, they have buns, “cha siew bow” or “gai bow” (Salt Fish Girl, 155). What is interesting is that Lai does not pause to explain that these are Chinese buns stuffed with meat and vegetables. She simply assumes that her readers know what they are, just as she assumes that women of Chinese descent have a right to live in the West.

Though Larissa Lai has shown her concern for issues such as the writing and rewriting of history, queer Asian subjectivity, race and power since her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (see Goellnicht, “Forays into Acts of Transformation”), she more directly confronts recent issues of globalization, genetic engineering, cloning, transnational labor, and diasporic subjectivity in her second novel, Salt Fish Girl. Here, in both settings of the novel, she presents scenes that remind her readers of the consequences of the expansion of multinational corporations, export industrialization, and the feminization of industrial work. The fact that this poorly paid exploitative labor is found both in the nineteenth-century Asian segment and in the twenty-first-century North American segment of the narrative is suggestive of the process of industrialization that occurred all over the globe in the last half of the twentieth century. As Aihwa Ong notes, “Modernization models of capitalist development predicted an increasing adoption of mass-assembly production and the gradual decline of cottage industries in the third world” (“The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity,” 61). However, there is now a new mix of mass production, subcontracting, and family-type firms worldwide. “Flexible labor regimes, based primarily on female and minority workers, are now common in the third world, as well as in poor regions of metropolitan countries” (61). Furthermore, Arif Dirlik notes that “the transnationalization of production calls into question earlier divisions of the world into first, second, and third worlds [. . .]. Parts of the earlier Third World are today on the pathways of transnational capital and belong in the ‘developed’ sector of the world economy. Likewise, parts of the First World marginalized in the new global economy are hardly distinguishable in way of life from what used to be viewed as the Third World” (“The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity,” 31). In her study of Asian American women and transnational labor, Laura Hyun Yi Kang similarly makes the connection between Asian women in sweatshops in Asia and Asian American women working in garment shops in the United States, noting that “the deployment of Asian immigrant female workers in U.S. garment and electronics manufacturing suggests that the offshoring of production processes in Asian countries should be read in terms of increasing interpenetration across geopolitical boundaries” (Compositional Subjects, 183).

In Salt Fish Girl, young Asian women and clones perform labor-intensive work that is harmful to their health. In the nineteenth-century segment, Nu Wa sees women working at making paper products—lanterns, stationery, and brightly dyed cutouts of opera masks, palace ladies, luscious flowers and exotic animals:

Younger women, their eyes still sharp, worked with tiny scissors under the low light, snipping away at the paper so that each figurine emerged in lacy detail beneath their hands. I did not linger long enough to notice their eyes growing dimmer, or notice the older women, nearly blind, wasting away in the dark corners of the factory mixing the colours and wheezing in reaction to the bright, powdery, dry chemical form of the dyes. (118)

Later she sees the salt fish girl wearing a tan-colored uniform with military-style pockets working in a factory. The conditions are similarly poor: “There she sat in the dim light, bleary-eyed and leaning over a scrambled mess of tin animal arms and legs, trying to nudge a spring into place with a pair of tweezers” (118). In order to earn a small living, the salt fish girl “spent all hours of daylight, and often many of darkness too, crouched under the dim lights of the factory, straining through a magnifying glass to attach tin torsos, wings, arms, beaks, legs, guns and bicycles to their springs and wind-ups with precise mechanical accuracy” (120). These descriptions of gendered labor are in keeping with the ethnographic accounts of women in factories in Taiwan and Malaysia, who also complain of being shut up all day and wasting the “spring” of their youth (see Ong, “The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity,” 80). Similar conditions of low wages, “hard physical labor, long hours, and an unhealthful shop environment” are reported in Chinatown garment factories in major U.S. cities (see Kang, Compositional Subjects, 181). The salt fish girl later becomes thin and “deathly pale,” with “bruises on her legs and shoulders that [suggest she has] not been entirely passive in the goings-on at the factory” (123). Refusing to work under such conditions and for so little return, Nu Wa picks the pockets of Western tourists and businessmen on busy streets instead. Both these occupations are precarious and dangerous, and Lai links the lack of viable career alternatives in an economically impoverished country not only to poor standards of living and ill health but also to crime and despair.

In the futuristic segment, Lai warns us against the misuse and overuse of science and genetic engineering, particularly in conjunction with capitalism.4 Tara Lee notes, “Late capitalism wants bodies that are controlled by the global market, and in the case of noncompliant bodies, it will not hesitate to suppress and reshape them into conformity. Science not only aids capitalism in regulating disruptive bodies, but it also provides the technology to enable the disassembly and the subsequent reassembly of these deviant bodies into a semblance of unity” (“Mutant Bodies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl,” 94). Miranda finds out that in her “brave new world” of Serendipity, there are powerful companies that make not only products, such as shoes, but also people. She learns from Evie, who herself has been cloned from human tissue and “point zero three percent freshwater carp” (Salt Fish Girl, 158), that a company called Pallas, a thinly disguised version of Nike, has been cloning people for a number of years in order to keep its labor costs low.5 These cloned people, all Asian or native in their features, form the ideal labor pool, because they are without family, without nation, and without history. They look identical to each other, and instead of names, they are given numbers, so that they are Sonia 116, Sonia 121, Sonia 148, and so forth.6 However, though they are clones, they are not without the inclination to rebel. In her study of Malay and South Korean women factory workers, Aihwa Ong found that they used “a range of resistance tactics that silently negotiated the contours of daily work relations” (“The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity,” 83) and that these women had organized themselves and “developed a whole repertoire of tactics and images expressing their struggles” (85). Andrew Ross has also outlined a number of efforts at stamping out sweatshops, organizing coalitions, and staging boycotts by labor movements that have made some impact on the fashion industry (see the introduction to No Sweat). Similarly, in Lai’s novel the Sonias, with a name provided to a particular kind of clone, have organized ways of resistance and made plans to build a “free society of their own kind from the ground up” (Salt Fish Girl, 256). One way they communicate their dissatisfaction is through the soles of the shoes they make: “The soles of the shoes functioned like rubber stamps” (237), with various messages, saying:

What does it mean to be human?

How old is history?

The shoemakers have no elves. (237)

Another imprint reveals the huge profits made by the shoe company:

Materials: 10 units

Labour: 3 units

Retail price: 169 units

Profit: 156 units

Do you care? (238)

It is the combination of exploitative labor practices with science that is particularly troubling in this dystopia.

In addition to the use of racialized and gendered labor by capitalistic corporations, another element of contemporary culture that Lai critiques is the excessive disciplining of female bodies. With some humor, Lai pokes fun at the way the ideal feminine body in our culture is purged of all associations with dirt, leaks, smells, and scatological functions, the qualities Julia Kristeva associates with the abject in Powers of Horror (chapter 1). For Kristeva, what causes abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). Miranda, like the cloned Evie and the Sonias, exists in this abject zone of the in-between. Miranda emanates an odor “akin to cat urine,” or “a stink of durian” (Salt Fish Girl, 69). She has some skin trouble, an “aggravated form of psoriasis” (69), that later causes her to shed scales, and has “two small fistulas, one above each ear” (69), which hold puss. She remembers things that went on before she was born, and “things that happened in other lifetimes” (70). Her very existence reminds the people in Serendipity of their origins, of their relation to the body, and of their mortality, and she becomes a threat to the false sense of serenity in that city. As Monica Chiu has argued in Filthy Fictions, there is a historical association of dirt and disease with the Chinese that “speaks more clearly to the nation’s own preoccupation with moral and medical self-hygiene than to that of the Chinese and other immigrants” (7). Chiu notes that “the subtle and overt references to Asian Americans as filthy that fill the pages of contemporary Asian American fiction offer counter-perspectives rejecting an Orientalism rooted in Yellow Peril rhetoric” (4). In Lai’s book it is not so much dirt but smell that is the sign of the pollution and pathology.

Miranda, like the cloned Sonias, is aberrant and abnormal and deemed monstrous. Of the monstrous, Rosi Braidotti says, “Contemporary ‘monstrous Others’ blur the dividing line between the organic and the in-organic, thus also rendering superfluous the political divide between technophobia and technophilia” (“Cyberteratologies,” 153). For Braidotti, “The monstrous expresses a deep anxiety about the bodily roots of subjectivity that foreground the material/maternal feminine as the site of monstrosity” (154). This figure becomes a “counterpart and counterpoint to the emphasis hegemonic postindustrial culture places upon the construction of clean, healthy, fit, white, decent, law-abiding, hetero-sexual, and forever young bodies” (154). In contrast to this clean, fit body that always needs to be disciplined by exercise, diets, deodorants, mouth fresheners, and sanitary products is Miranda’s body, stinking and leaking fluid. In both the nineteenth-century Asian segment and the futuristic North American segment of the novel, what is emphasized are the smells of women: the salt fish girl smells of the salty fish that she sells, and when she smelled it, Nu Wa says, “the stink of it made me want to live more than ever” (Salt Fish Girl, 56). In the futuristic segment, Miranda is similarly attracted to Evie because of her salt fish smell. When they make love, their bodies exude pungent, earthy odors: “When she kissed me it was like both eating and drinking at the same time. The stench that poured from our bodies was overwhelming—something between rotting garbage and heavenly stew. We rode the hiss and fizzle of salt fish and durian, minor notes of sour plum, fermented tofu, boiled dong quai—all those things buried and forgotten in the years of corporate homogenization. Steam rose from us like water splashed on a hot pan of garlic greens” (225). This focus on stench has offended some reviewers of the book,7 but in the context of Jameson’s critique of postmodernity for its lack of history and depthlessness, these images are important. For the smells are all linked to Miranda’s, and presumably Evie’s, Asian past, a tactile, material, and significant past that has been buried by “corporate homogenization” (Salt Fish Girl, 225). The foods evoked by the lovemaking are all slightly smelly delicacies that bring back forgotten memories and emphasize Miranda and Evie’s difference from the inhabitants of this “brave new world.” For them there is no need to mask the smells with air fresheners or bleach. The smells suggest sexual defiance, pleasure, and female strength.

Healing the Community

Also using strong smells and tastes in a playful manner, Chitra Divakaruni raises many of the same issues addressed by Salt Fish Girl in The Mistress of Spices, a novel similarly concerned with global migration, history, and female bodies. Set in Oakland, California, with flashbacks to an island somewhere in South Asia, Divakaruni’s novel is closer to fantasy and magic realism than it is to science fiction.8 It is not as symmetrically divided between two locations as Lai’s book; most of it is set in present-day California. However, the past and the mystical practices of the East are evoked through the first-person narrative of Tilottama (Tilo), the mistress of spices. Through special insights that enable her to see beyond the surface of things and into the hearts and minds of her customers, Tilo adds a textured layer of commentary to the otherwise everyday lives of diasporic Indians. With some of her customers she sees the history behind their frustration or anger; with others she acts as their confidante and finds out how their displacement has caused them trouble in their adopted country. Her remarks often provide readers with ways to understand the problems experienced by her customers not as the problems of an individual but as those of many, with roots in structural inequities in society or caused by institutional, legal, or political injustices. Like Lai, Divakaruni examines some of the evils caused by globalization, but she does so through the local. As Gita Rajan says, “By not attempting to effect huge changes through the usual tropes of history, politics, and fantasy as magic realism would, Divakaruni is able to work on a smaller scale and address the psychological needs of her disempowered cast of characters” (“Chitra Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices,” 217). The mistress of spices heals and helps her local community of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis from within the very insular and small space of her spice store, not by attempting to kill the heads of corporations or the directors of scientific laboratories.

Through a detailed look at the Oakland neighborhood around the Spice Bazaar, Divakaruni shows that the transnational movement of people across the globe has not always had positive effects. The setting, though in the so-called First World, is rather indistinguishable from what earlier was called Third World landscapes. The store is described by Tilo:

Perfect-fitted between the narrow barred door of Rosa’s Weekly Hotel, still blackened from a year-ago fire, and Lee Ying’s Sewing Machine and Vacuum Cleaner Repair, with the glass cracked between the R and the e. Grease-smudged window. Looped letters that say SPICE BAZAAR faded into a dried-mud brown. Inside walls veined with cobwebs where hang discolored pictures of the gods, their sad shadow eyes. (The Mistress of Spices, 4)

This description presents an image very unlike that in the film version (2006), in which the spice bazaar is set in a nice, upper-middle-class neighborhood. In the novel the residents of the neighborhood come from all over the globe, as the names of these establishments suggest, but their settlement and acceptance by their host community are unstable and inconsistent. Like the signs indicating the names of their businesses, which are cracked and smudged, their lives are in need of attention, repairs, and help. Globalization and global movements have improved the lives of many, but through this neighborhood that has seen better days we see that, in the words of Dirlik, quoted earlier, “parts of the First World marginalized in the new global economy are hardly distinguishable in way of life from what used to be viewed as the Third World” (“The Global in the Local,” 31).

Although Tilo is not always able to help make everyone’s lives better, her account of the experiences of these diasporic Indians serves to illuminate some of the “local” consequences of globalization and modernization. Dirlik has argued that one positive effect of attention to the local is that “it rescues from invisibility those who were earlier viewed as castaways from history, whose social and cultural forms of existence appear in the narrative of modernization at best as irrelevancies, at worst as minor obstacles to be extinguished on the way to development” (“The Global in the Local,” 25). Through Tilo Divakaruni presents a number of vignettes of people who are “castaways from history” because, individually, they are too insignificant for postmodernism’s grand narratives of development. One of the most poignant stories is that of Mohan, the proprietor of Mohan Indian Foods, who is badly beaten up by two young American skinheads in “tight-fitting camouflage jackets” (The Mistress of Spices, 179). They taunt and insult him, saying, “Sonofabitch Indian, shoulda stayed in your own goddamn country” (180), then proceed to destroy his store, “kicking at the cart until it comes crashing down and the kababs and samosas that [his wife] Veena so carefully rolled and stuffed scatter everywhere in the dirt” (180). In self-defense, he hits one of them with a stone that he happens to reach. Later the men hire lawyers to claim that the Indian started it all. Disabled, unable to walk or work, he loses his store and finds out months later that the men have been acquitted of all charges. Depressed, feeling helpless with rage at the injustice, he becomes unstable and eventually “doesn’t speak another word” (182). Finally, neighbors “pool together ticket money to send him and Veena back home, for what else is left for them in this country” (182). Although globalization is supposed to create transnational subjects who are able to move back and forth between continents, the story of Mohan presents an ironic twist to global mobility. For Mohan the movement across the globe occurs because of desperate circumstances and with pain, not out of choice or for leisure. This incident turns him into a migrant laborer as opposed to a transmigrant worker.

Although focused mainly on South Asian characters, Divakaruni’s ethnoscape, that of multicultural Oakland, enables her to include the problems of other ethnic groups that are similarly disenfranchised by the dominant culture. One of the most fully developed stories in the novel is that of Raven, the half–Native American, half-white man who falls in love with Tilo. Lara Merlin suggests that through Raven “Divakaruni meditates upon the meaning of the word Indian—signifying both the Native American and the subcontinental—in order to remark upon the creative power of language and to broaden the concept of what it means to be an American” (“Review of ‘The Mistress of Spices,’” 207). The Raven subplot, which includes a flashback narrative about Raven’s upbringing and the story of his mother, illustrates the effects of what I have called “the politics of the visible” on native and minoritized subjects in North America.9 As I have argued in The Politics of the Visible, the gaze of the dominant culture and repetitive negative stereotypes exert a powerful influence on minority subjects that ultimately creates a debilitating psychic sense of otherness and abjection in racialized subjects (introduction). Raven’s native mother, who for years has passed as white, has internalized the sense of shame and inadequacy that one acquires after years of seeing oneself through the eyes of whites. She sees herself and her native culture as deficient, dirty, and backward. Raven had believed that he was white “for a long time, growing up” and recalls the way his mother “was always cleaning, with an angry kind of energy” (The Mistress of Spices, 163). He is shocked to discover one day that “her hair wasn’t naturally curly” (166), and he remembers how she always used to say she wished Raven’s hair “was more like Dad’s and not so coarse and coalblack” (165). At one crucial point in his life, she stops Raven from learning about and inheriting the “old ways” from his great-grandfather (213), because for her, native culture represents nothing more than drunks, fat women “eating chunks of fried dough,” and a life of squalor (220).

The disavowal of native culture, traditions, and heritage by Raven’s mother and many others of her generation of the 1950s through the 1970s in order to enter into middle-class capitalist mobility parallels the attitudes of the young South Asians who enter Tilo’s store today. For example, Jagjit struggles with his Punjabi parents and longs to be part of the gang of big American boys who wear “blue satin jackets [ . . . , ] black berets,” and “hundred-dollar Karl Kani boots” (126). They buy him “stuff, clothes shoes food watches Nintendo games stereos with speakers to make the walls shake” (127), and Jagjit believes that if he hangs around with them, one day they will give him, “cold and black-shining and heavy with power [. . .] pulsing electric as life, as death,” a “passport into the real America” (127). In this case, as in that of Raven’s mother, America is aligned with the fantasy of materialistic luxuries as well as the promise of psychic completion and identity, the “power” of being a real American. Indian immigrants wish for not only economic status and mobility but also sociocultural, political, and professional respect and mobility that seem elusive, granted only to white Americans. Similarly, in another instance, in one of Tilo’s insights she sees a little Indian girl who wishes for “a house, a big two-story house with flowers in front and no clothes hanging out of windows, and enough rooms so we don’t sleep two to a bed [ . . . with] lots and lots of Barbie dolls,” as well as for “American skin that American hair those blue blue American eyes so that no one will stare [ . . . ] except to say WOW” (66). This little girl, too, has learned to feel ashamed of the physical features and culture and practices of diasporic South Asians and longs to be white and rich.

Two critics of globalization, Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, point out, “It is often said that globalization is leading to a global village. It would perhaps be more apt to say that globalization in its present form is leading to a pillage of the planet and its people” (Global Village or Global Pillage, 33). In the illustrations given by Divakaruni, both Jagjit and the unnamed Punjabi girl are displaced, brought to America by their parents’ desires for economic and social improvements. They learn to have desires that are influenced by American television, media, and consumer society, yet their abilities to fulfill those desires are limited. If wealth and power are tied in their minds to being white American, they have to dissociate themselves from their South Asian culture in order to find economic and psychoemotional fulfillment. One problem of globalization, then, is that it has succeeded to the extent that is has homogenized the desires of peoples across the globe without giving everyone equal access to the fulfillment of those desires.

Another important issue that Divakaruni raises in The Mistress of Spices is that of the ideology of female beauty and its relationship to age. Feminist critics from Simone de Beauvoir to Naomi Wolf have pointed out that there is a “beauty myth” that controls women: “strong men battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively successful,” notes Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 10). De Beauvoir observes that women are “called upon for youth and health” as well as beauty (The Second Sex, 157). Both feminists remark that beauty is antithetical to age. Wolf says, “Aging in women is ‘unbeautiful’ since women grow more powerful with time” (14), while de Beauvoir says, “The old woman, the homely woman, are not merely objects without allure—they arouse hatred mingled with fear. In them reappears the disquieting figure of the Mother, when once the charms of the Wife have vanished” (160). Divakaruni attempts to problematize these myths of beauty by having her protagonist appear as an old woman through most of the novel. Unfortunately, this element of the tale is not featured in the film version, in which beautiful young Aishwarya Rai plays Tilo. In the novel the mistress of spices, a young woman in the body of an old one, has been forbidden to look at herself in the mirror, a prohibition that is significant because it prevents her from spending time on her hair, dress, or makeup, thereby liberating her from many of the beauty rituals and vanities to which contemporary women succumb.

In the novel the attractiveness and beauty of women come from their internal strength and powers. For example, Tilo observes that the old woman on the island was “at once oldest and most beautiful of women with her silver wrinkles, though later I would see that she was not beautiful in the way men use the word. Her voice, which I would later learn in all its tones—anger and mockery and sadness—was sweet as the wind in the cinnamon trees behind her. A yearning to belong to her buffeted me like the waves I had fought all night” (The Mistress of Spices, 34–35). Here Tilo expresses more than respect for the old woman; she actually expresses a yearning for her. Later Tilo herself attracts the libidinous attention of Raven, though she is poorly clad and appears to be an old woman. She describes herself as “bent woman with skin the color of old sand” (4). What Raven sees is something beneath the exterior, a sign of her spiritual powers. He feels a desire for her companionship, her sympathy, and her wisdom. In many ways this feeling of being loved for oneself is the dream of every woman, but it is a dream that is at odds with the ideology of beauty. In the novel Divakaruni shows that contemporary women, even someone as determined as Tilo, still struggle daily with notions of femininity and beauty, as defined by Western-dominated media and visual culture. After a meeting with Raven, Tilo experiences a longing to see herself, to learn the “secret” of herself that a mirror can tell (151). She decides to risk it all by exchanging one night with Raven, in which her body appears young and beautiful, for a hundred years on the island or a single moment of conflagration (278).

The story of Tilo echoes that of the Arthurian legend of Gawain and the Loathly Lady, a tale that is told by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath but that also existed in different versions in the Middle Ages. In the last two hundred years, it has been retold and exists mainly as a children’s story (see Susan Reed, “Re-telling of ‘Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,’” and Thomas Bulfinch, “Sir Gawain”). Both Tilo and the Loathly Lady are beautiful young women who have become ugly and old because of magic spells or charms. They both encounter a young man with whom they have a relationship in which the lack of youth and beauty becomes an obstacle to romantic love. The Loathly Lady story is a female version of the tale of the Frog Prince, in which an ugly hag is transformed into a beautiful woman only after a young man has been able to conquer his aversion to her; in the Loathly Lady’s case, the transformation occurs after the man has relinquished his “sovereignty” or need for control. In Divakaruni’s novel the lady has become loathly by choice in order to gain the power to help others. Yet she, too, desires to be beautiful once she meets someone she wishes to please. In “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky talks about the various ways women discipline their bodies—through diets, exercise, bodily gestures, facial creams, makeup, and so on. She says, “the disciplinary practices I have described are part of the process by which the ideal body of femininity—and hence the feminine body-subject—is constructed; in doing this, they produce a ‘practiced and subjected’ body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed” (71). Women have been taught to believe that without self-discipline, exercise, and cosmetics their bodies are not good enough. This ideology of the inferior female body even affects Tilo. At one point, she disobeys the injunctions of the First Mother and goes to a department store. She is tempted to buy frivolous things, like

a mirror. A color TV so I may see into the heart of America, into the heart, I hope, of my lonely American. A makeup-kit with everything in it. Perfume of rose and lavender. Shoes, several pairs, in different colors, the last ones red as burnished chilies, high heels like chisels. Clothes and more clothes—dresses pantsuits sweaters, the intricate, wispy mysteries of American feminine underwear. And last of all a bed robe of white lace like raindrops caught in a spider’s web. (The Mistress of Spices, 138)

However, she stops herself from completing these purchases. This temptation scene reveals the pervasive power of consumer advertising, American media, and fashion, demonstrating how they affect even those who are determined to live outside of these systems.

Although the female protagonists in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl are othered because of their peculiarities of origin and their partly inhuman attributes, in The Mistress of Spices the protagonist struggles with otherness that comes from age and from culturally defined notions of beauty and ugliness. The ending of the novel offers a compromise for the vexed question of female beauty. Tilo does not become youthful and beautiful, but neither is she old and ugly. Instead she is given a body that is not “in youth’s first roseglow, but not one in age’s last unflowering either” (325).

What is crucial about the resolution of Divakaruni’s novel is that it refuses to fully succumb to the romance of the exotic or take refuge in the mythic goodness of native or Indian originary culture. Raven tells Tilo that he has always had a dream or vision of an earthly paradise: “high in the mountains’ pine and eucalyptus, damp odor of redwood, bark and cone, a stream so cool and fresh to the mouth you feel you’ve never tasted water before” (211). He proposes to take Tilo there, to “nature undiluted, in beauty and harshness both” (212), to live “alongside the bear lifting his mouth to the rowanberry, the antelope standing tall, listening for sounds. The mountain lion springing upon its fleeing prey” (212). Such an Edenic life, however, is not feasible in a post-lapsarian multicultural America. Instead of ending her novel with the couple in some mountain idyll, Divakaruni presents a more up-to-date and down-to-earth vision of happiness. Happiness, according to the novel’s conclusion, is only to be found in the service of others, in helping others. Tilo finds herself unable to go with Raven to seek his paradise. The novel does not end with the romantic union of the heterosexual couple, as the film version does. Instead Tilo feels compelled to go back to Oakland to help those who have been devastated by an earthquake that might have been brought on by her disobedience. Tilo concludes, “There is no earthly paradise. Except what we can make back there, in the soot in the rubble in the crisped-away flesh. In the guns and needles, the white drug-dust, the young men and women lying down to dreams of wealth and power and waking in cells. Yes, in the hate in the fear” (336). For Divakaruni as well as for Larissa Lai in Salt Fish Girl, endowing a protagonist with the ability to transcend geo-graphical boundaries does not mean that she is able to neglect or magically remove the problems of the here and the everyday. Their heroines are shown to struggle daily with the challenges of technology, globalization, and cultural differences. What fantasy does, however, is allow us to see these problems in a more acute and provocative way, presenting us with different possibilities for understanding and resolving these large issues.