Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Currency Of Visibility And The Paratext Of “Evelyn Lau”, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

The apparently deracinated nature of Evelyn Lau’s work has rendered her an ambivalent figure in Asian Canadian and Asian American literary studies. Lau’s characters, often racially unmarked, are instead scarred by their longing for human connection, and they drift in and out of generic spaces or cloistered back rooms that are untethered to the specificity of the world outside. Her stories of prostitution, sadomasochism, obsession, and unrequited love do not lend themselves easily to the interpretive frameworks that have characterized Asian American and Asian Canadian literary studies.