4 ideas
The creation goddess Nu Wa, who shaped humans from river clay, splits her serpent tail into legs to become mortal and enter the world she made. Her desire binds her to a cycle of reincarnations, and she resurfaces in a corporate future as Miranda, a girl who carries the goddess's memories and a persistent smell of durian.
That fraction lets the corporation classify them as patented products rather than persons, so it can own their labor, confine them to factories, and deny them rights. Genetic engineering becomes a legal technique for manufacturing a workforce that falls outside the category of the human.
In the novel's future, a 'dreaming disease' spreads through goods made in the corporate factories where the cloned women work. People who come into contact with those goods are flooded with memories that are not their own. The novel's mechanism is that the hidden history of workers' bodies travels inside the finished product and returns to afflict the consumers who thought the goods were clean of that history.
Characters are marked by odors they cannot wash off: the salt fish girl's brine and Miranda's durian stink. Smell works as a stigmatized trace of ethnic, gendered, and historical otherness that clings to the body even after other forms of assimilation. Reading odor this way shows how a community is sorted by what others find disgusting, and how that disgust carries the past into the present.