HONG KONG is where Larissa Lai’s story originates. Her parents emigrated in the 1960s, and after a brief stop in the United Kingdom, arrived in La Jolla, California as philosophy graduate students, where Lai was born in 1967. Four years later, the Lai family moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her father worked as a philosophy professor and her mother as a sessional lecturer. In St. John’s, Lai was one of a few racialized students. “It was somewhat isolating,” she recalls. “Going through grade school was tough.”
At the time, Lai says she didn’t think much of her identity as an Asian Canadian person and how she might have been treated differently because of it, nor did her parents. “Nobody had language for these things in those days,” she explains.
It wasn’t until her second year of studying sociology at the University of British Columbia, in the mid1980s, that Lai developed an interest in Asian Canadian culture. Through the professor of a poetry class that she took, Lai was connected with Jim Wong-Chu, co-founder of The Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. “He’d host gatherings in his living room of Asian Canadian writers across generations,” Lai recalls.
There, she interacted with prominent arts figures like filmmaker Sid Chow Tan and Barry Wong from the community radio show Pender Guy. That experience led to a gig working on an exhibition of Asian Canadian contemporary media called Yellow Peril: Reconsidered in 1990. For the exhibition, Lai interviewed participating artists about their work exploring Asian Canadian heritage, identity, and community, which inspired her to start writing her own books. Her debut novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, came out in 1995 and won her an Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers' Award.
Publishing her first novel opened up doors for Lai. She was invited to sit on panels, give talks, and attend conferences about topics such as Asian Canadian feminism, speculative fiction, and ethics in writing. It was during this time that Lai experienced an informal type of mentorship from her peers in the community—other artists and Asian Canadian arts figures. From her mentors, she learned how to build and foster a community of Asian Canadian literature and culture.
“Those who were older than me and who were mentoring me in those years were very conscious of building something that was not guaranteed and for which there might not be any permanence,” Lai explains.
After pursuing a graduate degree at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, Lai completed a PhD in English at the University of Calgary before securing a position as an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of English in 2007. She then returned to the University of Calgary in 2014, where she taught until 2023 and was a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing.
It was in Calgary that one of Lai’s career highlights as an educator occurred. Inspired by her informal mentorship within the Asian Canadian community, she started The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing.
“We organized readings, symposia, and talks, and we put a podcast series together,” Lai explains. “I treated my teaching as apprenticing, in a way.”
During these years, Lai also published a number of creative works, such as the 2014 monograph Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s and her 2018 novel, The Tiger Flu.
Lai taught in Calgary for nearly a decade before she joined U of T’s University College in August 2023, as Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies. It’s Lai’s first time as a named chair—an honour that she recognizes.
“Richard Charles Lee was a really important Hong Kong Chinese businessman and philanthropist,” she explains. “Because my family is also Hong Kong Chinese, the name of the chair connects me back. So, it's really meaningful for me, and it's meaningful for my family as well.”
In her new role, Lai will have the opportunity to shape the future of a newer program at U of T and University College: the Asian Canadian Studies minor. “It’s quite skeletal at the moment,” she explains. “We want to create more sequenced courses so that there’s a trajectory that students can follow.”
Tisya Raina is a third-year undergraduate pursuing minors in Canadian studies and contemporary Asian studies. Raina has taken two of Lai’s classes: Asian Canadian Literature and Asian Cultures in Canada, where coursework includes the study of works from Phinder Dulai, Roy Miki, and Y-Dang Troeng, along with a screening of the documentary All Our Father's Relations and a field trip to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see an exhibition of artist Sarindar Dhaliwal’s works.
“As an Asian Canadian person myself, it’s meaningful to learn more about diasporic culture and how that’s developed throughout Canada,” says Raina, who is majoring in peace, conflict, and justice. “I appreciate how [Professor Lai’s] background is rooted in literature. She brought her real-life experience as a writer and transferred it into being an academic and a professor.”
Raina also commends Lai’s method of teaching, which prioritizes student interaction. “It's less about her lecturing us and more about us talking within small groups, which she calls cafés, and then doing a whole group discussion after getting our ideas together,” Raina explains. “It contributes to our personal understanding of the article while also … learning from other people's experiences.”
Lai also has plans to launch a new endeavour at University College: the “Interdisciplinary Space Asiancy,” a symposium that will gather scholars, activists, writers, and artists to discuss Asian Canadian culture and literature.
“I’m hoping that a podcast will emerge from it so that the conversation can become more public,” Lai explains. “You can get students involved at all levels. [They] can be interviewers, they can produce podcasts, they can edit them.”
It’s a way for Lai to carry on her ethos of informal teaching and mentorship that her elders and past community leaders shared with her.
“I'm really excited to pass along the ways of knowing that were given to me on to another generation,” says Lai. “There's a chance to bring knowledge into the university and make it something that can be passed on to future generations so that each generation doesn't have to reinvent the wheel.
Andrea Yu is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail and Toronto Life.