In 2014, she published a non-fiction work, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, with Wilfrid Laurier University Press), which discusses the movement's context of activism, Canada's ethnic minority history, and writers such as Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy.
The audiobook, released in May 2020 by ECW Press, was produced by Bespeak Audio Editions for an international audience and narrated by Canadian actor Lisa Truong.
[9] Complex romantic and sexual relationships between Asian women are a recurring subject within Lai's work and serve as the main focal point for her novels.
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).
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.
"[12] 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.
[14] 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".
[11] 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.