difficult to answer." Lai cites discussions and interactions with other authors of color during this time as immensely influential and formative for her own work. Critical reception Lai's novels have generated much acclaim for their innovative narratives that help readers understand the modern diasporic experience. Her work has also generated a relatively large amount of scholarship and criticism, mostly Canadian, with the exception of a US monograph, The Influence of Daoism on Asian-Canadian Writers (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). Many scholars emphasize the contributions that Lai has made critiquing common understandings of race, gender, and national identity. Malissa Phung analyzes Lai as part of Chinese diaspora, and particularly studies how her works investigate concepts such as immigrant shame and what she calls "postmemory." Stephanie Oliver suggests that Lai innovatively uses smell as an indicator of the "politics of representation, regimes of racialization, the power of the gaze, and the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that are key to processes of social marginalization" of the diasporic experience, rather than the more common visual and auditory frameworks. Sharlee Reimer suggests that Lai's work casts common Enlightenment ideas as racist and limiting, and uses her novels to suggest new ways of understanding, such as her use of cyborgs in Salt Fish Girl to criticize origin stories. Nicholas Birns situates Lai's work as postcolonial transfeminist, prominently featured in the Canadian canon but not as well known internationally, but nonetheless broadly relevant for offering "multiple, diasporic identities to counter the repressive rhetoric of monolithic globalization". Professors Wei Li and John M. Chen published a 466-page A Study of the Literary Influence of Socialist Theory in Major English-Speaking Countries (Chinese Social Sciences Press) in Beijing in 2018; this highest academic award-winning monograph across China features numerous comments on Lai as a critic, poet, and novelist from an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. The study is, in part, a continuation of Professor John M. Chen's The Influence of Daoism on Asian-Canadian Writers (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). Professor John M. Chen's Chinese Canadian Literature and Criticism: A Multi-disciplinary and Cross-cultural Approach, Vol. 1, is forthcoming with Springer in 2022. It covers multiple aspects of the genesis and developments of Lai's poetics, politics, aesthetics, and ethics from the feminist, Daoist, post-colonial, Confucian, socialist, gender, Buddhist, and Marxist perspectives, while situating Lai and other Chinese Canadian writers and critics in the context of Chinese and Canadian literary and intellectual traditions since the