(Chinese Overseas - History, Literature, and Society) Jing Tsu, David Der-Wei Wang-Global Chinese Literature - Critical Essays-Brill Academic Pub (2010)

Global Chinese Literature
Chinese Overseas
History, Literature, and Society
Chief Editor
Wang Gungwu
Subject Editors
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, David Der-wei Wang, Wong Siu-lun
Editorial Board
Ien Ang, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Liu Hong, Frank Pieke,
Elizabeth Sinn, Jing Tsu
VOLUME 3
Global Chinese Literature
Critical Essays
Edited by
Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang
LEIDEN BOSTON
2010
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Global Chinese literature : critical essays / [edited] by Jing Tsu and David Der-wei
Wang.
p. cm. (Chinese overseas: history, literature, and society, ISSN 1876-3847 ; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18765-8 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-90-04-16905-0
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chinese literatureForeign countriesHistory and criticism.
2. Chinese diaspora in literature. 3. Chinese in literature. 4. ChinaIn literature.
I. Tsu, Jing. II. Wang, Dewei. III. Title. IV. Series.
PL3033.G56 2010
895.109dc22
2010015916
ISSN 1876-3847
ISBN 978 90 04 18765 8
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ..................................................................... vii

List of Contributors .................................................................... ix
1. Introduction: Global Chinese Literature ............................... 1

2. Minor Sinophone Literature: Diasporic Modernitys

Incomplete Journey ................................................................. 15
Kim Chew Ng
3. Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural

Production ............................................................................... 29
Shu-mei Shih
4. Global Vision and Locatedness: World Literature

in Chinese/by Chinese (Shijie huawen/huaren wenxue
) from a Chinese-Americanist Perspective ............... 49
Sau-ling C. Wong
5. (Re)mapping Sinophone Literature ....................................... 77

Tee Kim Tong
6. Sinophonics and the Nationalization of Chinese .................... 93

Jing Tsu
7. Alai and the Linguistic Politics of Internal

Diaspora .................................................................................. 115
Carlos Rojas
8. Thinking with Food, Writing off Center: Notes on Two

Hong Kong Authors ................................................................ 133
Rey Chow
9. In Search of a Genuine Chinese Sound: Jiang Wenye

and Modern Chinese Music ................................................... 157
David Der-wei Wang
vi contents
10. Reinventing Chinese Writing: Zhang Guixings Sinographic

Translations ........................................................................... 177
Andrea Bachner
11. Chinese Literature in the Global Canon: The Quest for

Recognition ........................................................................... 197
Julia Lovell
12. Commentary: On the Sainifeng as a Global

Literary Practice .................................................................... 219
Eric Hayot
Index ........................................................................................... 229

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for the present volume of essays arose from the dynamic and
polemical discussions that took place at a conference held at Harvard
University in December 2007, Globalizing Modern Chinese Literature:
Sinophone and Diasporic Writings. We give our heartfelt thanks to all
the participants and the following institutions for their generous support:
the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinology
U.S.A., the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and
the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University, and the Fairbank
Center and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
at Harvard University. The CCK Foundation and the Council on East
Asian Studies, in particular, offered further assistance that made this
publication possible. Our current editor at Brill, Mark Monfasani, and
former editor, Matt Kawecki, have been tireless in their enthusiasm. We
dedicate this volume to colleagues, writers, and critics in different corners
of the Sinophone world whose works provide the main inspiration for
putting forth this first volume of its kind.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Andrea Bachner, Ph.D. (Harvard University), is Assistant Professor of

Comparative Literature and Chinese Studies at Penn State University.
She is the author of essays on Chinese, Latin-American, and Euro-
pean contemporary literature and culture and is currently complet-
ing a manuscript on contemporary reflections on the Chinese writing
system, Mediality, Alterity, and the Sinograph.
Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity Col-

lege of Arts and Sciences, Duke University and the author of numer-
ous books on language, literature, film, and cultural theory. The Rey
Chow Reader, ed. Paul Bowman, is available from Columbia University
Press (2010).
Eric Hayot is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the

Asian Studies Program at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the
author of Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Michigan, 2004) and
The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford,
2009), as well as a co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota,
2008).
Julia Lovell is lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of

London. She is author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: Chinas Quest for
a Nobel Prize in Literature (Hawaii University Press, 2006) and transla-
tor of numerous works of modern Chinese literature, including the
complete fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics, 2009).
Kim Chew Ng, Malaysia Chinese fiction writer and literary critic, is
Professor of Chinese Literature at National Chi Nan University in
Taiwan. Author of numerous award-winning fiction, his scholarly pub-
lications include literary anthologies and monographs such as MaHua
wenxue yu Zhongguo xing (Taibei: Yuanliu, 1998) and Wen yu hun yu ti: lun
xiandai Zhongguo xing (Taibei: Maitian, 2006).
Carlos Rojas is Assistant Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and

Womens Studies at Duke University. He is author of The Naked Gaze:
x list of contributors
Reflections of Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008)

and The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard University Press, 2010),
and co-editor of Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of
the Canon (Routledge, 2009) and Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History
(Duke University Press, 2007).
Shu-mei Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She

is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semico-
lonial China, 19171937 (2001), Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articula-
tions across the Pacific (2007), and the co-editor of Minor Transnationalism
(2005) and Creolization of Theory (2010). She also edited special issues
on Comparative Racialization (2008) for PMLA and on Taiwan for
Postcolonial Studies (2003).
Kim Tong Tee, Ph.D. (National Taiwan University), is Associate Pro-

fessor at National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He is
author of Nanyang lunshu: Mahua wenxue yu wenhua shuxing (Taibei: Mai-
tian, 2003) and Guanyu Mahua wenxue (Gaoxiong: CLA, NSYSU, 2009)
and co-editor of Chongxie Taiwan wenxue shi (Taibei: Maitian, 2006) and
Huidao Malaixiya: HuaMa xiaoshuo qishi nian (Selangor: Dajiang, 2008).
Jing Tsu, Ph.D. (Harvard University), is Associate Professor of Chinese

Literature at Yale University. She is author of Failure, Nationalism, and
Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 18951937 (Stanford
University Press, 2005) and Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard
University Press, 2010).
David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese

Literature at Harvard University. He is author, editor, and co-editor of
numerous publications in English and Chinese, including The Monster
That is History: Violence, History, and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China
(University of California Press, 2004); Writing Taiwan: A New Literary
History (Duke University Press, 2007).
Sau-ling C. Wong is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of

California, Berkeley. She has published extensively on Asian Ameri-
can literature, including Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to
Extravagance (1993) and (coedited) AsianAmerica.net: Ethnicity, Nationalism,
and Cyberspace (2003).
INTRODUCTION:
GLOBAL CHINESE LITERATURE
The idea of a global Chinese literature draws together three rec-

ognizably fraught terms. Each of them brings into view additional
related issues that the current volume addresses. But why global? Why
now? Indeed, the timing is anticipatory, as the geography of modern
Chinese literature has seldom been jointly reexamined from outside
its national boundaries. Yet, so-called overseas Chinese, to borrow
another imperfect designation that separates mainland China from the
rest of the Sinophone world according to bodies of water, have been
writing since well before the nationalistic period. The historical fact
of diaspora makes the present invocation of the global also somewhat
belated. We choose the title global Chinese literature for this volume
in full awareness of its various settings, temporalities, omissions, and
contradictions. Our aim is to make explicit the conceptual, disciplin-
ary, historical, linguistic, and geographical tensions that occasion the
emergence of Sinophone literature (huayu yuxi wenxue ).
In our view, the point of departure is best staged at the gathering of
consensus as well as dissensus among multiple disciplinary perspec-
tives, each born from a different academic context and its created
audience. Those who expect to rely on a readily made reference to
Anglophone, Francophone, or Lusophone studies will not find it here.
Each of those domains too carries its own historical imperative, and
they ought not be drawn together in the same way that postcolonial-
ism had previously rallied different experiences of oppression to its
platform. Similarly, for those accustomed to a nation-based historiog-
raphy of modern Chinese literature, our challenge here is to present
the disarticulation of its lineage and methodology. Instead of providing
an overview that inserts each of the ten essays into a single grid of
purpose, we thus begin with an outline of the larger trajectories that
have framed their differences.
To discuss Chinese literature in a global context, one first has to rec-
ognize the pitfalls. Historian Wang Gungwu cautions against the con-
ceptual trap of presupposing a single Chinese diaspora, an idea that
easily slides into the same register as other historically and politically
2 jing tsu and david der-wei wang
laden terms: huaqiao , huayi , haiwai huaren . Desig-

nations of sojourners, Chinese descendents, and overseas Chi-
nese, respectively, were invented and privileged at different historical
junctures to subsume the diverse phenomenon of diaspora under the
dominant imaginary of the Chinese nation.1 For a long time the idea
of being Chinese furnished Chinese abroad with a clan-based solidar-
ity that reinforced the significance of their home against host localities.
They carefully deployed a strategy of identity, not without palpable
sentiments of nostalgia and homelessness, to weather local racial hos-
tilities in North America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.
From the perspective of the ancestral land, there was a pragmatic
purpose in continuing to draw Chinese identities toward the center.
At several points in the twentieth century, overseas resources were
solicited to fund revolutions and civil war at home, as during the Rev-
olution of 1911 and again during the War of Resistance against the
Japanese, including the ensuing Communist-Nationalist split.2 That
diasporic Chinese communities were viewed as reservoirs of extrana-
tional capital reflected two realities. On one hand, their increasing
material autonomy outside of China demonstrated a separation from
the continental motherland. On the other hand, still invested in the
idea of China as the proper ancestral origin of their cultural iden-
tity, they lent their patriotic support from afar. The tension between
these two allegiances grew in the latter half of the twentieth century
as Chinese abroad came to recognize the need to establish roots in
their host countries, each undergoing its own nationalization and ver-
tical integration in the wake of widespread postwar decolonization and
independence movements across East and Southeast Asia. For exam-
ple, debates over the distinctiveness of Malaysian Chinese literature
in 194748 marked an important turning point that led to its current,
distinct profile both inside and outside of Malaysia.3
1
Wang Gungwu, A Single Chinese Diaspora? in Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life
and Work of Wang Gungwu, ed. Gregor Benton and Hong Liu (London and New York:
Routledge, 2004), 15758.
2
See Yen, Ching-huang, The Overseas Chinese and the 1911 Revolution, with Special
Reference to Singapore and Malaya (Kuala Lumpur and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976).
3
This debate was decisive in declaring an independent identity of Malaysian Chi-
nese literature, even though momentum had been gathering in previous discussions
from 1927 to 1930 (Southern Ocean color) and 1934 (Local writers).
introduction: global chinese literature 3
Admittedly, associations with nationalism render diaspora a prob-

lematic concept. In addition to fixing the point of comparison on
China, real or imagined, the invocation of nationalism tends to lose
sight of the continual transformations of diaspora itself, now less a
departure from an origin than simply different itinerant movements
between places. Secondary and tertiary diasporas make it less mean-
ingful to assume a fixed geographical place for overseas Chinese. Con-
temporary writers such as Hong Ying and Yang Lian move easily
between London and mainland China, while Malaysian Chinese writ-
ers have negotiated a second homestay in Taiwan since the 1970s. Ge
Liang, residing in Hong Kong, traverses multiple nations in his literary
imaginary. Gao Xingjian, the most recognized writer according to the
2000 Nobel Prize committee, was naturalized as a French citizen in
1998. To be sure, nationality does not determine the geographical
parameters of Sinophone writing. Geographical location, moreover, is
no more fixed than the place of origin. To use what Edward Soja once
said about the study of urban geography, the space of diaspora may
be more instructively thought of as a malleable space created by new
social relations rather than as a geometric, inert container that does
not come under the influence of such relations.4 Thus looking differ-
ently at Sinophone writing as an interaction between the production
of literatures and moving agents, one might subject the narrative of
customary disciplinary divides and national literary histories to similar
shifts. More important than the coinage of new terms is the creation of
new dialogues among the fields of area studies, Asian American stud-
ies, and ethnic studies. Although each has largely focused on its own
stakes in examining the notion of Chinese diaspora, they have long
been implicated in one anothers histories. The study of modern Chi-
nese literature, to begin with the most nationally dominant example,
has habitually consecrated this disciplinary distinction.
For the most of the twentieth century, the study of modern Chinese
literature as a national tradition carried on primarily two conversa-
tions: with modernity and with its own post-1949 factious internal
landscape. The former began to take shape under the general rubric
of Westernization in the nineteenth century. After the Opium War,
4
Edward Soja, The Socio-Spatial Dialectic, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 70, no. 2 (1980): 209. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991).
the political and social elite attempted a series of military and insti-
tutional reforms in one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese
history. Plagued by internal ethnic and peasant uprisings, famine, and
poverty, as well as external invasion and the imposition of unequal
treaties by foreign powers such as the French and the British, China
was a significantly diminished empire. Attempts at technological and
military Self-Strengthening (beginning in 1861) and, later, a Hundred
Days Reform (1898) had limited success. The watershed event of the
Sino-Japanese War of 189495, which ended in Chinas total defeat,
further alerted intellectuals and reformers to the countrys dwindling
status in the more immediate region of East Asia. This gave them the
impetus to reinvent China as a national entity.
In response, revolution was the creed of the day. Its momentum
achieved an extraordinary new vision for history, dismissing any less-
than-radical stance as conservative cultural essentialism. The same felt
purpose of national survival engendered the self-conscious formation
of modern Chinese literature. The imprint left by the traumatic neces-
sity of such a transformative evaluation was not to be easily erased.
The ensuing decades witnessed arduous and impassioned endeavors
to define literature in light of the political reality on the one hand,
and aesthetic experimentation on the other. Realism was a dominant
but not exclusive literary ideology, and it was this mode that came to
preoccupy the creative focus of Sinophone writings such as Malaysian
Chinese literature. The shared urgency of anti-Japanese colonization
and occupation during the 1930s and 1940s produced certain solidari-
ties that would once again split and follow different paths after the war.
Meanwhile, the call of the May Fourth movement was heard far
and wide, stirring Chinese communities in Taiwan, Southeast Asia,
and elsewhere to share in its collective purpose. This early national
solidarity across wide distances, however, gradually receded into the
background, as the economic and colonial reality of the various host
environments imposed itself as the more permanent setting. Malaysia,
Indonesia, and Singapore have had various colonial histories (Dutch,
British, Japanese), while Taiwan has been similarly subjected to the
Dutch, Japanese, French, and mainland Nationalists. Chinese com-
munities outside of the mainland, often minority groups by definition,
were compelled to mobilize themselves socially in the places where
they were settled. The goals of the May Fourth cultural renewal, fur-
thermore, did not always prove as useful elsewhere. Its central tenet of
establishing the vernacularas opposed to the long-venerated classical
or literary Chineseas the language of modern literature, for instance,

met with varying degrees of success. Overseas Chinese generally more
strongly identified with their home regional idiolects, which marked a
cultural and ethnic distinction. It was unclear what was meant by ver-
nacular or everyday speech when Fukienese, Hakka, and Teochiu
seemed more reasonable candidates than the Beijing-based written ver-
nacular. For the Chinese writers in the Southern Oceancurrent-
day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singaporethe language of the Beijing
capital was a language of prestige. Their access to learning and writing
in the Chinese language was not to be taken for granted. To compli-
cate matters, the varying national language policies in the countries
where they resided did not always guarantee continual learning of
minor languages such as Mandarin. National language, moreover,
has a completely different connotation in the Japanese colonial context
of Taiwan, where Japanese, not Chinese, was the official language.
Writers commitment to writing in the Chinese language, therefore,
was a pregnant gesture of great artistic and cultural significance, draw-
ing from a cultural capital that fortified their sense of distinction in a
foreign setting. This was already evident during the 1930s debates on
developing a literary language based on the language of the masses,
a discussion that was well under way on the mainland, led by intel-
lectuals like Qu Qiubai. The writers in the Southern Ocean had an
additional challenge: how to take into account local ethnic inflections
in a mass language that was originally intended to address class
rather than ethnic differences in the predominantly Han society of
mainland China.5
Different versions of the same question about the social and cultural
disjuncture between diasporic settlements and mainland China will be
posed time and time again. Whether conceived in terms of citizenship,
literary aesthetics, cultural identity, or language and dialects, evolv-
ing relations to China as a historical heritage as well as a departure
point for new narratives of migration are still under discussion among
historians, anthropologists, and literary critics. As China continues
5
See Fang Xiu , ed., Ma Hua xin wenxue daxi [Compendium
of Malaysian Chinese New Literature], 10 vols. Xingzhou: Xingzhou shijie shuju, 19720,
1:33264. For a brief introduction to Malaysian Chinese literature in English, see
his Notes on the History of Malaysian Chinese New Literature, 19201942, trans. Angus W.
McDonald and ed. Kazuo Enoki (Tokyo: Center for East Asian Cultural Studies,
1977).
to reestablish itself as a world power in the twenty-first century, the

centripetal pull of its economic presence creates a renewed cultural
gravitation. That global Chinese literature can be under discussion at
all bespeaks a renewed concern with the perpetuation of nation-based
narrative as the only worthy narrative. Indeed, it is against that pull
that many of the contributors in this volume stake their claims. Sino-
phone, depending on the definition, excludes or includes mainland
China as a focus of analysis. In the case of exclusion, the priority of
analysis lies with developing a critical network of minority discourses.
Inclusion entails a reworking of the lineage of modern Chinese lit-
erature as a solely mainland phenomenon. Both approaches seek to
dismantle the hegemonic focus of a national Chinese literature and
perhaps of a national literature at all.
At the same time, even though the tale of nation founding has occu-
pied a central place in the study of modern Chinese literature, its
apparent homogeny and hegemony is rather undeserved. Critics and
enthusiasts alike often take this point for granted. The founding of
modern Chinese literature was not exclusively legislated by national-
ism. If anything, it absorbed the momentum of literary activities from
the preceding decades of the late Qing period. Its prized language,
the vernacular, drew from sources even further back. While modern
Chinese literature was undergoing its early formation under the aegis
of nationalism, the idea of the nation was already being extended and
traversed. Leading intellectuals and reformers found their inspirations
for modern China outside of China, studying mostly in places like
Japan, France, Britain, Germany, and America. Each location pro-
voked a sense of foreignness and discrimination, compounded by a
lack of language access. Being a foreigner rather than a national citi-
zen heightened the nationalistic sentiment. Displacement worked as a
negative, against which nationalism acquired its positive value. Partici-
pating in forging a literary nexus that is now recognized as student
immigrant literature (liuxuesheng wenxue ) writers from Lu
Xun to Guo Moruo, Lin Yutang to Nieh Hualing, left their important
imprints on the literary histories of Japan and Asian America.
America was the meeting place between East Asia and Asian
America. The formers displacement constituted the latters founding
condition. Interestingly, the field of area studies and the writing of
Asian American literature emerged for related reasons. The former
was a product of the Cold War, developed as a pocket of specialized
geographical knowledge of particular areas of strategic concern.6 The

latter was made possible by the civil rights movement, along with the
attempted social redress of racial inequalities in the United States. If
John Okadas No-No Boy can be taken as a benchmark for Asian Amer-
ican literature (1957) and C. T. Hsias History of Modern Chinese Fic-
tion (1961) as the inaugural study of modern Chinese literature in the
English language, their proximity is timely. The former was about the
Japanese internment during World War II, and the latter introduced
for the first time writers outside mainland Chinas literary canon. Both
took a step outside the mainstream interpretation of national belong-
ing and displacement. They shared in a recognized problem of cul-
tural and racial differences within a migratory matrix, each accorded
a place inside and outside the borders of China and America. Maxine
Hong Kingstons seminal exploration of the specificity of gender and
Chinese patriarchy in The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, just five
years before the publication of another hallmark in the history of femi-
nist immigrant writing, Nieh Hualings Mulberry and Peach.7
Understandably, for Asian American literature to engage in a dia-
logue with area studies or modern Chinese literature, caution is needed.
Although they have overlapping critical interests, especially as shaped
by the past three decades of literary criticism in the United States,
their intersection does not imply shared critical goals. Each has devel-
oped its own set of concerns, putting different emphases on issues of
ethnicity, immigration, race, nationalism, gender, and postcolonialism,
so a correspondence in their present concerns does not necessarily lead
to a common experience in the world. The very circumstances that
make possible such analogies are a peculiar manifestation of the cur-
rent historical moment. The parallel drawn between Asian American
literature and modern Chinese literature is, therefore, also vulnerable
to a conflation of critical differences: either a return to Sinocentrism
or a leveling of specificities under the general theorization of diaspora,
ethnicity, the Sinophone, or even global Chinese literature. Out of a
similar concern, Stuart Hall underscores the contingency of discursive
6
See Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian, Learning Places: The Afterlives of
Area Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); Tani Barlow, Formations of
Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
7
See Sau-ling Wongs Afterward in Mulberry and Peach (New York: The Feminist
Press, 1998), 209235.
alliances with regard to diasporic studies. The open-ended struggle

in diasporic politics is in fact indeterminate and fragile: How can
we organize these huge, randomly varied, and diverse things we call
human subjects into positions where they can recognize one another
for long enough to act together, and thus to take up a position that one
of these days they might live out and act through as an identity?
(emphasis added).8
Indeed, the contingency of a discourse on global Chinese litera-
ture is how to come together in a committed but not binding alliance,
to mobilize the possibilities of a newly configured community. Such
a vision, of course, also raises new points of contention, as can be
seen in the dangerous conceit that Stuart Hall expresses only two sen-
tences later: It isnt that the subjects are there and we just cant get
to them. It is that they dont know that they are subjects of a possible
discourse.9 That pluralization might slip away, its constituents take up
different and even oppositional roles to the favored political alliance,
tempts even those with the most radical diasporic politics to reimpose
their own definition of enlightened and unenlightened subject posi-
tions. This, incidentally, was the main critique against the May Fourth
intellectuals who, in their desire to lead the masses out of despotism
and feudalism, committed to a nationalistic monolith.
Rey Chow speaks to the core of the problem when she elsewhere
criticizes the management of ethnicity as a deeply entrenched prob-
lem within China studies as well as within the implicit system of eth-
nic patronage inherent in the most liberal Western critical theory.10
Her critique rejoins the dialogue between Tu Wei-ming and Ien Ang,
where Ang staged a compelling defiance against a benignly defined
center proposed by Tu. Cultural China, famously ascribed to Tu,
posits three circles of Chineseness, expanding from the innermost core
of mainland Chinese and Chinese-speaking countries to the outer
reaches of cultural assimilation and accommodation, including foreign
8
Stuart Hall, Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identites, The House That
Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. David, Cornel West, and Others on Black
Americans and Politics in America Today, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage,
1998), 291.
9
Ibid.
10
Rey Chow, Introduction, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of
Theory: Reimagining a Field (Durham: Duke University Press), 15.
specialists and scholars.11 Ang cites for support the example of the Per-
anakans, or Straits Chinese, whose long lineage in Southeast Asia as
a mixed ethnic group of Chinese and local Malay has left little living
traces of its customs or language, Baba Malay. The point is that, at the
outer edge of diasporashared with Asian AustraliaPeranakans
demonstrate an unassimilable Chineseness that disrupts any attempt to
generalize a concentric universe of voluntary Chineseness.12
Angs argument, poignant and autobiographical, exemplifies Halls
call for strategic subjective positioning.13 Yet, to return to Tu Wei-
mings original remarks, the phrase cultural China, by Tus own
admission, was originally suggested by a group of Malaysian Chinese
writers in the audience. Interestingly, this credit was never given in
the criticism of Tus position. In other words, Southeast Asia was the
hidden third reference that did not get to participate in the dialogue
between China and the little-differentiated diasporic Chinese. How is
it possible that this third space, the exemplar of, paradoxically, both
the outer edge of diaspora and the inner core of Sinocentrism, could
not speak for itself? There is, in fact, an entire range of articulated
positions, as this volume demonstrates, that do not fall easily under
polarizing categories or familiar rubrics of alliance.
One might envision, as in Shu-mei Shihs general call for minority
discourses and transnational alliance, a different conversation. Angs
critique, which has been widely cited as a critique of cultural essen-
tialism, is perhaps better framed against fiction writer cum critic Kim
Chew Ngs exploration of the question of being Chinese in Southeast
Asia from a different marginality. Angs remarks on the 1998 anti-
Chinese riots in Jakarta need not carry the weight of the autobio-
graphical subject alone, but find meaningful interlocutors in the writ-
ings of manylike Ngs short story, Supplementthat testified to
the event through a different lens of nativity and discontinuity. Such
new possible relations for global Sinophone literature would facilitate a
network of discourse beyond centrism and marginality. Each can serve
11
Tu, Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center, in The Living Tree: The Chang-
ing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (City: Publisher, 1994), 1330.
12
Ang, Can One Say No to Chineseness? in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between
Asia and the West (New York: Routledge, 2001), 48.
13
See Angs chapter, Indonesia on My Mind: Diaspora, the Internet and the
Struggle for Hybridity, in On Not Speaking Chinese, 5274. Kim Chew Ng ,
Buyi (Supplement), in Dari Pulau Ke Pulau/You dao zhi daoKebei
(From Island to IslandCarved Back) (Taibei: Maitian, 2001), 267290.
as a new reference point, not only connecting national and minor his-
tories but also further differentiating other histories within the minor.
It is within this social and literary spatiality of the global Sinophone
that we begin this discussion. The volume is organized according to
the following progression: 1) critical issues and historical frameworks;
2) analyses and case questions that corroborate or challenge these
views; and 3) an outside response. The first part begins with Kim
Chew Ngs consideration of the uneven development of Sinophone
literature and the contentions between literary aesthetics and nativist
realism. Speaking as a Malaysian Chinese writer and literary scholar
currently residing in Taiwan, Ng points out the conceptual limitations
in existing discussions of minor literature, which tend to overinvest it
too quickly with a theorized optimism. Using Deleuze and Guattaris
discussion of Kafka as an example, Ng notes the contrasting reality
of minor writers in the Chinese diaspora who lack access to a linguis-
tic capital that is separately determined in the contexts within which
they negotiateMalaysia and Taiwan. Advocating for an exterior
vision, Ng proposes to ground Sinophone literature simultaneously in
three words: native land, colonial heritage, and a universal diasporic
structure yet to come. In so doing, he proposes to dislodge Sinophone
writing from the conflicting imperatives of homeland and exile.
In a similar way, Shu-mei Shihs piece is a programmatic call for a
transnational approach to the study of Sinophone literature. Whereas
Ng urges the emergence of an individual aesthetics, Shihs vision of
Sinophone production seeks and requires the alliance of other minority
formations. Drawing from the framework of ethnic studies and other
postcolonial and diasporic studies, Shih argues against the reification
of Sinophone as an atemporal category. Sinophone is possible, she
underscores, only within a place-based politics of recognition where
the most powerful articulations against China-centrism are voiced.
Writing from within the context of Chinese American studies, Sau-
ling Wong cautions, in contrast, against tempting alliances under the
rubric of the global. Through an analysis of Wang Ruiyuns short
story, The Visitor from Paris, Wong analyzes how the very possibil-
ity of the Chinese migrant is undergoing new transformations with
Chinas rise to global dominance. Wong identifies three key terms
in theorizing the Chinese diaspora: genocentrism (rhetoric of origin),
translocalism (portable nativism), and racinationism (creation of new
roots). She demonstrates how the three are often intertwined in practice
and use this triangulation to question the implications of being drawn

into an orbit of a China-based critical point of view.
Taking yet another perspective, Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese
critic Kim Tong Tee parses the genealogy of the discussion of over-
seas or Sinophone literature. Tracing it to debates in 1986, when the
Sinophone was first viewed as a form of Commonwealth literature
at conferences in Gunzburg and Singapore, Tee prefers, following
Itamar Even-Zohar, the notion of overlapping polysystems. On this
view, minor traditions are part, but not necessarily exclusively so, of
an international mega-polysystem. Tee further distinguishes Sino-
phone from Anglophone and Francophone studies to the extent that
the Chinese language is the mother tongue rather than an ex-colonizers
language.
Jing Tsu, in an examination of the historical formation of the mod-
ern Chinese language (guoyu ) urges taking the phonic in Sino-
phone literature seriously. Excavating a largely overlooked movement
of script reforms in the late nineteenth century, Tsu returns the notion
of national language to a larger attempt to conceptualize new rela-
tions between sound and script, standard language and dialects. By
going inside the medium in which the Sinophone is written, Tsu pro-
poses a different point of departure that revises the notion of national-
language literature and engages with the possibility of a global Chinese
literature at its linguistic roots.
Each of the first five essays outlines a theoretical and historical
framework for the study of Sinophone literature. In contrast, the next
five essays propose new reference points that do not necessarily abide
by these five perspectives and further extend the horizon of global
Chinese writing to alternative modes of language, speech, orality, and
aurality. Carlos Rojas, turning to the inner constituents of Chinese-
language literature, looks at internal diaspora through the work of
Tibetan writer Alai. Analyzing his use of Tibetan phrases in juxta-
position to standard Mandarin, Rojas points out the communicative
failure that serves as a larger analogy for the linguistic politics of
diaspora.
Rey Chow, expressing the Sinophone through a different orality and
locality, considers the works of Hong Kong writer Leung Pin Kwan
(Ye Si) and critic John Ma Kwok Ming. Teasing out the experience
and metaphor of food and ingestion on different scales of hunger, con-
noisseurship, and global corporatism, Chow traces a circuit of culinary
production that suggests an ongoing ideological conflation between

cognition and food consumption. Writing about food, these writers
exercise a power of knowledge through the gradual assimilation and
omission of minor marginalia, metabolized as new additions to the
dominant cultural capital.
Further displacing orality onto aurality and directing attention to
yet another kind of phonics, David Der-wei Wang uncovers a different
register of Sinophone allegiance and history writing in the lyricism of
Taiwan-born composer Jiang Wenye. A diasporic figure who lived and
practiced his art through multiple phases of colonialism and national-
ism, Jiang was trained in Taisho Japan under its translated European
influence. His subsequent friendship with Russian composer Alexan-
der Tcherepnin led him to seek the ideal vernacular sound through a
return to Confucian musicology, resulting in the 1939 appearance of
his orchestral piece The Music of the Confucian Temple. Jiangs prodigal
return is articulated in the distancing mode of nostalgia, mirroring a
later construction of Taiwan through a similar musical lyricism.
Focusing on Malaysian Chinese writer Zhang Guixings rework-
ing of the Chinese script, or sinograph, Andrea Bachner analyzes the
mediality of Chinese writing as a space for reinvention and difference.
Arguing that writing itself bears out a resistance to cultural essential-
ism, she demonstrates how Zhang subjects the Chinese language to
the specific interethnic and interlingual inflections of Southeast Asia.
In contrast, Bachner notes how different Western theoristsfrom
a Eurocentric point of viewhave staged bodily inscriptions as the
other of writing.
If Sinophone literature is being written, interpreted, and contested
largely in the Sinophone world, it nonetheless requires a global audi-
ence as it mediates and continues to reshape its parameters. In the final
piece, Julia Lovell takes a close look at the international mechanisms
for literary recognition and Chinas nationalistic desire to achieve it.
Examining the case of Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Laureate in
Literature, Lovell analyzes the intersecting anxieties between national
literature, its relation to national reality, and its writing in anticipation
of a projected world readership.
While the first set of five essays engages with the primary debate
of what it means to speak of modern Chinese literature globally, the
second set suggests important ways of bridging this new orientation
and the existing approaches and topics that have developed from the
field itself. From the kind of critical and poststructuralist theory that
has been familiar in literary criticism in the past thirty years to the
new areas of inquiry in the more specialized domain of modern Chi-
nese literary studies, all the essays in this volume demonstrate how an
emphasis on the Sinophone can neither be subsumed under nor fully
extricate itself from the history of modern Chinese writing. This col-
lection also shows the extraordinary diversity of the subject, such that
no single approach is possible or desirable. In all its various guises as
script, phonics, mediality, aurality, or orality, global Chinese writing
is none other than the scalar reorientation of literary studies as a new
global, regional, and local practice.
MINOR SINOPHONE LITERATURE:
DIASPORIC MODERNITYS INCOMPLETE JOURNEY1
Kim Chew Ng
A critical diasporic cultural politics should privilege

neither host country nor (real or imaginary) home-
land, but precisely keep a creative tension between
where youre from and where youre at. . . . Chi-
neseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires
its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction
with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic
Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new,
hybrid identities and communities.
Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic
Identifications and Postmodern Ethnicity
Writing like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its
burrow. And to do that, finding his own point of
underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third
world, his own third world, his own desert.
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature
Although the Sinophone identity and Sinophone literature undoubt-
edly originate in modern Chinese overseas migration, not all places
where large numbers of Chinese people gather produce an equivalent
amount of such literature. Compared with the famous Californian
communities of mistreated Chinese laborers in North America, for
example, the displacement of piglet Chinese, concentrated in parts
of Southeast Asia like Malaysia, remarkably created key sites of Sino-
phone literature. These places, furthermore, came to develop a rela-
tively comprehensive infrastructure that established the social conditions
necessary for literary production and readership: Chinese-language
schools, newspapers, and magazines, along with their related networks
of Chinese-language associations and Sinophone communities. These
1
Kim Chew Ng, Huawen shaoshu wenxue: lisan xiandaixing de weijing zhi lu
, translated for this publication by Andy
Rodekohr.
16 kim chew ng
conditions exist in direct relation to the percentage of the population

that is ethnic Chinese, but are even more closely related to historical
contingencies and Southeast Asias geographical position. Given its
proximity to China, its place in the geographical imagination as the
land of milk and honey, and its connotations as a place of asylum
and imaginary extension of the mainland, the designation of South-
ern Oceanthe name given to Southeast Asiacaptures it all. For
these reasons, the historical circumstances for nan lai (traveling
south) directly led to the emergence of local Sinophone literature. Nan
lai has also become an important fact in the writing of local literary
history. Southbound authors came to occupy a large portion of prewar
Sinophone literary history, directly extending mainland political issues
southward and making the relationship between Sinophone literature
and its cultural lineage even more fraught and ambivalent. Moreover,
they virtually determined the character of local Sinophone literature.
The decisive debates in Malaysian Chinese literary history, for exam-
ple, over the unique characteristics of Malaysian Chinese arts and
literature (traits of the Southern Ocean, nativism, local subjectivi-
ties) have become the raison dtre of local Sinophone literature, its
grounds for differentiation and demarcation, contributing to the cease-
less struggles of regional Sinophone literatures for independence.
Sinophone literature, however, is inescapably a Chinese ethnic
minority literature (in Malaysia, it is excluded from the ranks of
national literature). It is a nationless ethnic tribe in the literary king-
dom. In this kind of literature, language directly signifies the writers
ethnic identity. Even though the overwhelming majority of the popu-
lation of Singapore is ethnically Chinese, the dominant language is
English, and hence further demarcates Sinophone writing as a label of
ethnicity. Undoubtedly, the ethnicity invoked here does not indicate a
species, but signifies culture. In this way, it is entwined with the oldest
structure of Chinese cultural nationalismThe demarcation between
Yi and Xia (Yi Xia zhi fang ): The barbarians that enter
the Central Plains are to be regarded as of the Central Plains; the
Chinese who withdraw to barbarian lands are to be regarded as of
the barbarians , ; ,
. One of Sinophone literatures most basic paradoxes can
be thus articulated: the raison dtre of this literature is itself cultural,
and thereby proves the fact of ethnic cultural existence. It is precisely
this tendency that compels Sinophone literature toward Chinese char-
acteristics and along a retrospective path toward ancient China. The
minor sinophone literature 17
symbolic meaning of this return to the north and to the Chinese lan-
guage has always been one of the most creative directions taken by
Sinophone literature. From Li Yongping to members of the
Sirius Poetry Society to Lin Xingqian , Sinophone
writing overflows with richly expressive requiems of exile in the manner
of the banishment of Qu Yuan (Qu Yuan jifang ), the poet of
the ancient Chu Kingdom. At the other end of this self-legitimation
of cultural identity, and also what makes Malaysian Chinese literature
distinctive, is the structural perception of a sense of place (difang gan
). This sense of place is molded by the material conditions of
geographical, historical, and social differences and established by the
need for a literature that identifies with local consciousness, which,
when it was under the influence of the prewar trend of left-wing lit-
erature, took the path of realism ( just as in Taiwans nativist literature
[xiangtu wenxue ]). These two basic directionsthe former
more amenable to a complicitous relation with modernismexpress
the fundamental problem vis--vis the divergence between Chinese
(zhongwen ) and Sinophone (huawen ) writing.2 The danger of
the former is the possibility of slipping back into the formulaic logic of
2
See also Huang Jinshu (Ng Kim Chew) , Huawen/zhongwen: shiyu de
nanfang yu yuyan zaizao : [Sinophone/
Chinese: Southeast Asian Aphasia and Language Regeneration], in Ma Hua
wenxue yu Zhongguoxing [Chinese Malaysian Literature and Chineseness]
(Taipei: Yuan zun Cultural Enterprise, 1998), 5392; Zhongwen xiandaizhuyi?
Yige weiliao de jihua ? [Chinese Modernism? an
Incomplete Project]. In Huangyan huo zhenli de jiyi
[The Craft of Falsehood or the Craft of Truth: Contemporary Chinese Fiction Criticism]
(Taipei: Maitian Publishing, 2003), 2157; Lin Jianguo (Kien Kit Lim) ,
Yixing [Heterotype], in Zhongwai wenxue [Chung-wai Literary Monthly]
22, no. 3 (August 1993): 7391; Zhang Jinzhong (Tee Kim Tong) , Xiao
wenxue, fuxitong: Dongnanya Huawen wenxue de (yuyan wenti yu) yiyi ,
: () [Minor Literature, Polysystem: the
Significance (and Language Issues) of Southeast Asian Literature]. In Dangdai wenxue
yu renwen shengtai [Contemporary Literature and Human Ecology], ed.
Wu Yaozong (Taipei: Wan Juan Lou Books, 2003), 31327. The Sinophone/
Chinese issue interrogates the linguistic predicament of Malaysian literature. One
point of focus is in the multilingual and multidialectal environment of the Malaysian
people, whose language of everyday verbal communication is a kind of pidgin, but
one not easily transformed into literary language; even when it is transformed in this
way (and this is Sinophone), it is still a literary aesthetics of lack by comparison. In
contrast, the literary language of modern Chinese-language literature (Hanyu xiandai
wenxue ) already had a tradition that the mainland and Taiwan, as the
principal representatives, inherited from the classical, elegant formulations of ancient
China. Malaysian authors have invariably had to choose one of these.
18 kim chew ng
mainland Chinas discursive apparatus and expressive style, replicat-

ing its archetypes and motifs. That repetition reconfirms identification,
and identification takes precedence over representation, thereby dis-
sipating other possible experiences and realities. Does this set limits in
the experiential realm of representative possibilities? The latter direc-
tion, in contrast, directly confronts this problem by way of the lack of
technique in the use of literary language. Literary writing, after all, is
a highly specialized craft in which writers need to confront the fact of
their inheritance from previous writings, and that the power of their
works in actuality depends on their command of cultural capital. Both
the nativist literature and literary realism espoused in Taiwan and
Malaysia tend to consider themselves closer to reality, yet underesti-
mate the importance of cultural capital.3 Consequently, they under-
estimate the complexity of the domain of representation (the craft
of language and literature) to the extent that the impoverishment of
language and technique is construed as one of the manifestations of
nativeness (bentuxing ) or its unique characteristic. A corollary
operation is an attempt to revise the criteria for universal value in
literature, reorienting it toward the regional standard of reflecting
reality ( fanying xianshi ), nativism (bentuxing ), local
identity (), which takes precedence over literariness. Writ-
ings that meet the criteria for universal meaning, then, are accused of
acting either on behalf of the hegemonic nations standards (perpetuat-
ing the tyranny of the homeland) or as accomplice to colonial empire
(being imported, Western-centered). This is the logic of guaranteed
quota for regional demographics or the disadvantaged. As the basis
for constructing the subjectivity of Sinophone literature, the political
would obviously take precedence over the literary. Political subjectivity
would therefore become the foundation of literary subjectivity.
3
For criticism on related issues of Malaysian literature, see Huang Jinshu (Ng
Kim Chew) , Ma Hua wenxue xiandaizhuyi de shixian kunjing
[The Practical Dilemmas of Realism in Malaysian Chinese
Literature], in Ma Hua wenxue yu Zhongguoxing [Malaysian Chinese
Literature and Chineseness] (Taipei: Yuan zun Cultural Enterprise, 1998), 179210. In this
essay, I take the works of Fang Beifang (19182007), the venerated Chinese
Malaysian author (and part of the first generation of southbound Chinese), as a case
in point to criticize the total loss of the initial promise of Malaysian Chinese literary
realism in postindependence Malaysia with the concessions to the mainstream value
of government proclamations.
If we say the former approach (Chinese) often results in a cultural

surplus, the latter (Sinophone) is, then, a cultural deficiency. If we say
that the former carries the risk of sinking into Chineseness (Zhong-
guo xing ), then wouldnt the latter indicateas some would
argueminor literatures logical way out as riding on the strength
of uncultivated speech and unruly words, vulgar speech and barbaric
tongue? In the end, is this kind of unsophisticated, artless deficiency
Sinophone literatures genuine escape? Or, in major or minor litera-
ture, is the real problem whether we can create a theoretically mean-
ingful idiolect? It matters little whether the chosen process is a naked
rhetoric (modernist distortion or the splendorous language of inhibi-
tion) or a concealed rhetoric (the age-old instructions of Chinas lyrical
tradition: naturalism instead of ornateness, candor and dispassionate
calm). In fact, each method is highly technical and assumes a generous
endowment of cultural capital as its basic condition, while presuppos-
ing a rich foundation of cultural cultivation. In other words, neither
chosen process is a natural state of linguistic lack. It is, rather, a kind
of stylistic choice.
In his most recent monograph, Minor Literatures, Polysystem (Xiao
wenxue, fuxitong , , 2003), Kim Tong Tee fol-
lows the argumentative thread of Kien Ket Lim , who more
than ten years ago used Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris theory of
minor literature in an attempt to explore the dilemmas of Sinophone
literature and to propose possible solutions. As Deleuze and Guattari
propose, minor literature, or that which a minority constructs within
a major language,4 has three fundamental characteristics: language is
affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization, everything . . . is
political, and everything takes on a collective value.5 I have already
produced a fairly comprehensive treatment of the third point; here
I just want to supplement my argument through a discussion of the
other two. The second and third points are interrelated: it is precisely
because the political constructs an absolute horizon that it coerces all
individual singularities into the collective. Kim Tong Tee rightly sup-
plements this with Fredric Jamesons observation: third-world litera-
ture is always oriented toward the national allegory or, put differently,
4
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16.
5
20 kim chew ng
is always amenable to a national allegorical interpretation.6 However,

as Deleuze and Guattari propose, Indeed, precisely because talent
isnt abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an
individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that master and
that could be separated from a collective enunciation. Indeed, scarcity
of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the conception of something
other than a literature of masters.7 The plausibility of their point,
however, is inevitably difficult to defend, as they are arguing for the
recognition of Kafka as the consummate modern master. Kafkas bour-
geois background, however, is endowed with an astonishing amount
of cultural capitala degree in law, attendance at Pragues German-
language university (Charles University), and erudition in the German
classics. The city of Prague itself, moreover, is an enormous cultural
capital. As Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal puts it, Pragues involve-
ment with the Greek spirit goes deeper than the faades of its build-
ings, it goes straight into the heads of the populace, because classical
gymnasia and humanistic universities have stuffed millions of Czech
heads full of Greece and Rome.8 It would be difficult indeed to draw
a parallel between Prague and the capital cities of third world postco-
lonial nations whose rise was initiated under colonial modernization.
Similarly, the cultural capital Kafka enjoys as a Doctor of Law cannot
be viewed as comparable to that of Sinophone authors, most of whom
make a living as schoolteachers or newspaper staff writers. Here, then,
we can see the paradoxical dialectic between the collective and the
individual. Only through transcendent subjectivity, which gathers the
various contradictions of that dialectic and displays its symptoms, does
one get a glimpse into absolute collectivity. The collective in all likeli-
hood remains as submerged rather than being represented. Because
of their limited representational power, experience, and language, the
small collective is unlikely to arrive at the nameless utopia that Deleuze
and Guattari had presupposed.
6
As a matter of fact, although the individual and collective natures of literature are
dialectically related, a wholly individual literature does not, strictly speaking, exist. All
of the established rules (the most basic techniques, genres, motifs) and social content
from which these ideas originate are collective, while between the individual and
collective exists a metaphorical isomorphism.
7
8
Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 24.
While in Malaysia in 1939, Yu Dafu published a short

article, Jige wenti (Some issues), in which he issued a call
for major writers (da zuojia ). At first glance, his view seemed
superficial, but the problems he posed, I believe, remain unresolved.
I cite below a passage from his discussion of the artistic traits that
demonstrate Southern Ocean flavor:
I think the writings of my compatriots, who were raised in the South
Seas and received their education there, ought to carry more or less
an amount of the local flavor of the Southern Ocean. Their works nar-
rate events that take the Southern Ocean as the backdrop and certainly
appear as though they took place there. The matter is merely a question
of the strength of this flavor, of whether the accompanying details are
fitting. Local color is not something that can be completely expunged
from their works out of total disregard. However, to focus on empha-
sizing the local flavor at the expense of relegating to a secondary con-
cern the subject matter of the literary work would also not be optimal.
Therefore, I believe the basic problem lies with the person, indeed, in
the emergence of the author. If the Southern Ocean can produce a
major writer who takes the Southern Ocean as the central theme in his
works and is able to write well and profusely, producing ten or even a
hundred works, then Southern Ocean literature and arts, literature and
arts with the local qualities of the Southern Ocean, will be established
as a matter of course. . . . However, to write a book that can shine and
stand out for the Southern Ocean is not a terribly easy task. Its not
something that can be written by just anyone, and it certainly doesnt
get written every day.9
In this passage, Yu Dafu poses the question of South Seas local color
(in recent rhetoric, nativism or localism) not as a problem but some-
thing inherent to native-born Chinese (we can easily satisfy this mini-
mal regional requirement). The problem, however, is in the need to
overcome locality. The fundamental condition for a writer to attain
greatness is that he must be able to endure the harshest trials. He must
introduce the Southern Ocean into the global domainsatisfying the
criteria for universal literary value and entering the world literature
systemaccording to the same evaluative standards as those observed
by the great writers of his homeland, nation, and colonizers national
setting. Furthermore, his writings ought not emulate the exoticism of
9
Yu Dafu , Jige wenti [Some Issues], in Yu Dafu haiwai wenji
[Collected Overseas Writings of Yu Dafu] (Beijing: Sanlian Publishing,
1990), 482.
22 kim chew ng
white travel writing like that of Conrad or Maugham.10 This latter

point involves the issue of how to construct the subjective position of
Southern Ocean Sinophone literature (a Southern Ocean subjectivity).
Later in the essay, Yu cites the example of the founding father of the
Philippines, Jos Rizal and his novel Noli Me Tangere (sometimes trans-
lated as The Social Cancer): With its publication, Filipino literature was
de facto established.11 We can supplement this with reference to the
impact of Goethe on German literature, Pushkin on Russian litera-
ture, Shakespeare on English literature, Natsume Sseki on modern
Japanese literature, and Lu Xun on modern Chinese literature. These
major writers are exactly this collective, the founders of literary stan-
dards; Rizals name is no more than a shared symbol of culture, the
name of the father.
Given Yu Dafus cultural cultivation, the breadth of his knowledge,
his achievements in classical poetry, and his command of multiple lan-
guages, that even such a cultural capitalist as he is still not consid-
ered a major writer conveys the enormity of the difficult challenge
(during his time in Southeast Asia, as is well known, he was constantly
saddled with editing work). One issue is the political problem of recog-
nition, an aspect of which is the soundness of a system that legitimates
only shared, common languages (like Chinese or English). Since 1949,
for example, there has been no shortage of masterful writers in the
Taiwan literary scene (like Yang Mu in poetry and prose and
Guo Songfen in fiction). Within a system of literary and politi-
cal recognition that takes mainland Chinese nationalism, the Central
Plains, as its center, the status of the minority writer is bound to be
subordinate to that of the mainland Chinese writer. Those overseas
(haiwai ) outside of Taiwan or Hong Kong are further subordi-
nated, moreover, as a subset of the Chinese (Huaren ). The most
prominent Malaysian Chinese writers in Taiwan, like Li Yongping
and Zhang Guixing , are still typically placed at the margins.
If the literature specialist himself lacks the appropriate literary training
and local knowledge, one can expect even less that he will be able to
figure out an approach to this dilemma. Another aspect of the prob-
lem of political recognition is that, in the context of multiculturalism,
10
Though Yu Dafu did not specifically emphasize this point, the reader he targets
is the native Southeast Asian Chinese, and so it is worth mentioning his implication
here.
11
Yu Dafu , Jige wenti [Some Issues], 483.
literatures composed in minor languages (like Sinophone literature in

Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines) go unrecognized
by national traditions and are devalued as ethnic literature. Under
these circumstances, even given the presence of literary masters, they
are not likely to be discovered under the national machinery (national-
ist ideology demands their natural dissolution), much less recognized.
The writer will as a matter of course be pushed out and forced to
join his or her own language collective, only to face the favor or dis-
dain of another system of legitimation. The proposed notion of the
so-called world Sinophone literature (shijie Huawen wenxue
) exempts China as the exception; Sinophone minority literature
became a nationless Sinophone literature long ago.
Another issue the idea of a major writer involves is literary dis-
tinctiveness, which is related to the first characteristic of minor lit-
erature put forth by Deleuze and Guattarithe deterritorialization of
language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafkas Prague Ger-
man dialect, a withered vocabulary, an incorrect syntax, is actu-
ally elegant German, deterritorialized: an impoverishment becoming,
consciously or not, a kind of revolutionary act, consciously or not.12
Going a step further, they point out that this is not merely a prob-
lem of minor literature; instead, minor no longer designates specific
literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within
the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.13 To bor-
row Paul de Mans perspective, so-called deterritorializationwhich
declares the abandonment of tradition and historyis precisely the
site of literary modernism and the source of literatures own power:
The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of lit-
erature toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn,
folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition and the continua-
tion of literature.14 This is also literary revolution, the avant-garde
12
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22. For a similar argument see the fourth chapter of
Testaments Betrayed, by Kafkas compatriot Milan Kundera: A Sentence, in Testaments
Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995),
97118. Also see another of Kafkas compatriots, Ivan Klma, The Swords Are
Approaching: Franz Kafkas Sources of Inspiration, in The Spirit of Prague and Other
Essays, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Granta, 1994), 15588.
13
14
Paul de Man, Literary History and Literary Modernity, in Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 162.
24 kim chew ng
movements principle of negativity, and literatures creative principle:

that dialectical abandonment and a return to (literary) history. To put
it another way, we might displace the question of minor literature with
that of literary modernism.
With regard to third world intellectuals, this means taking a jour-
ney to the centers of resource capitaloften the colonializers national
capital, a modern metropolis, or at least the national capital or a
neighboring capitalthrough studying abroad, emigration, or exile.
The journeys of Latin American authors to Europe formed the intel-
lectual conditions of their literary explosion. The wave of Chinese
youths studying abroad in Europe, America, and Japan since the May
Fourth period has, similarly, molded modern Chinese literature. Young
Malaysian Chinese writers journey to Taibei has fostered two impor-
tant novelists, Li Yongping and Zhang Guixing. With regard to the
British Commonwealth, the experience of the 2001 Nobel Prize win-
ner V. S. Naipaul, a third-generation Indian English-language author
from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, is exemplary. In one essay, he
discloses his reason for refusing metropolitan literature (which can be
considered as the whole of modernism). He had difficulty relating to it
and it was of no help to his particular circumstance and experience.15
Possessing two worlds but still lost between them, Naipaul writes in
the novel A Way in the World: We didnt have backgrounds. We didnt
have a past. For most of us, the past stopped with our grandparents;
beyond that was a blank.16 How do we confront this blank? How do
we fill it? Likewise, how to overcome the impoverished existence cre-
ated by this voidlike Naipauls experience of Trinidad? Relatedly,
how does one confront the colonial metropole? At the core of all these
issues is self-understanding, a comprehension of the Other as having a
different kind of historical existence.
In his Nobel lecture, Two Worlds, Naipaul candidly admits that
his great novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, exhausted his Trinidadian
material, and that travel rescued him: I traveled in the Caribbean
region and understood much more about the colonial set-up of which
I had been a part. I went to India, my ancestral land, for a year; it
15
V. S. Naipaul, Prologue: Reading and Writing, a Personal Account, in Literary
Occasions: Essays (New York: Knopf, 2003), 334.
16
V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1994), 81.
was a journey that broke my life in two.17 To overcome the lack of

a homeland life experience (a native land!), his perusal of the colonial
archives and investigations while traveling offered two significant ways
out. The scope of his work was broadened, and his field of vision
expanded as a result; he extended his view to the land that for large
stretches suffered the wounds of colonialism, while directly apprehend-
ing peoples grief.
Naipauls writings began on the street of his hometown (Miguel Street);
it evolved into a house, an Indian immigrant community (A House for
Mr. Biswas), then extendedthrough colonial archives and travelto
the entire Caribbean (The Middle Passage), South America (The Return
of Eva Peron), Africa (A Bend in the River), India (the third volume of An
Area of Darkness), and the Islamic world (Among the Believers). The genre
of his writing similarly migrated from fiction to history (The Loss of
El Dorado), in-depth observational reportage, ultimately filling in the
former blankness of his background and the dark nationhood outside
his native home. He confesses to the barren sense of homelessness that
originated in his immigrant childhood:
I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to
get the true feel of the history of the colony. I had to travel to India
because there was no one to tell me what the India my grandparents had
come from was like. . . . And when that Indian need was satisfied, others
became apparent: Africa, South America, the Muslim world. The aim
has always been to fill out my world picture, and the purpose comes
from childhood: to make me more at ease with myself.18
The desire to structure a background constructs an immense puzzle of
the world that is comprised of both the places actually traversed and a
literary world completed through language. Naipauls is a prototypical
story of transcending ones hometown. By way of expedition and read-
ing, three times he penetrates his ancestral land, India, the heart of
darkness that endured the wounds of colonialism, at different historical
moments. Stretching across South American, African, and Asian liter-
ary territories, the scope of his imagination, shouldering the legendary
literary world of Conrad, peels away at the cruelty of reality, beneath
which is the colonial inheritance of tyranny.
17
V. S. Naipaul, Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture), in Literary Occasions: Essays
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 193.
18
Ibid., 191.
26 kim chew ng
Consequently he is in two worlds: a politically instable postcolonial

nation that is at the same time his home and ancestral land, and his
colonial mother countryEnglandwithin the Western world.19 In
those two worlds he teased out certain historical depths and analytical
peaks, which allowed his two later masterworksThe Enigma of Arrival
(1987) and A Way in the World (1994)to achieve, in different ways,
the modernism of minor literature (in great contrast to the works of
native English and American authors). The Enigma of Arrival focuses on
the historical and emotional relationship between the colonized island
of his childhood and his later years of living in seclusion in the colonial
metropole. It ponders the events of departure and arrival, and the
uneasy discovery that his hometown is merely a miniature reproduc-
tion within the colonial empire that nevertheless shaped his perceptual
experience as a child. A Way in the World chronicles the multilayered
history of the loss of the island of his childhood. Set in the great age
of maritime exploration, it probes the wild ambitions and illusory fan-
tasies of a Spanish explorer in juxtaposition to his various contempo-
raries, who were ambitious adventurers and revolutionaries fighting
for national liberation. Through them Naipaul contemplates how the
protagonists of history, at the vanishing point of most peoples vision,
drove the force of fate and manipulated the world around them. In
this way, Naipauls entire literary undertaking is an allegory of minor
literature, exhausting all the possibilities of postcolonial writing within
his capabilities and thereby setting its standard.
To a certain extent, Naipaul has outlined the possible world that is
still beyond the reach of the Southern Ocean writersincluding the
nativesfor whom Yu Dafu had expressed his hopes. In terms of
individual experience and that of the ethnic community, this world
seems particular; but through the experience of being colonized, or
from the vantage point of the colonial wound, it extends to an over-
arching structurethe colonial experience and the colonial system
that is collective. This possible world, paradoxically, cannot depend on
the anonymous, voiceless collective but relies on the transcendent indi-
vidual, who seemingly continues the efforts of many generations. On
this point, local Sinophone authors resemble the prematurely passing
19
Actually we should say three worldsthe land in which he was born and where
he grew up, the colonial metropole, and his ancestral homeland. This first world,
however, is a duplicate of the second and third worlds.
generation of Naipauls father, Seepersad Naipaul. Finally proficient

in writing and basic literary techniques, they use the Sinophone in
an attempt to capture the particular experience of their immigrant
community (Naipaul also writes of his fathers English as a broken
language),20 but still lack a kind of necessary, exterior vision, requisite
to cope with three worlds simultaneously. Those writers who journey
toward the Chinese language (zhongwen), though, excessively indulge
in an imagined ancestral homeland and prematurely fall into a mode
of diasporic nostalgia for the Central Plains and the small world of
their own ethnicity. They are likewise unable to (or taking great pains
to) avoid the historical and aesthetic tensions among the three worlds.
The routes of high modernism (like Li Yongping) and the premature
aesthetic utopia (like Zhang Guixing) are each still limited, similar to
the way that Taiwanese writers, whether they are concerned with the
metropole or native soil, are unable to transcend their first world selves.
Chinese-language literature of Southeast Asia and Taiwan still finds
it difficult to solve the basic dilemma under the conditions of postco-
lonial modernity and of its own island (minor) literature. Naipauls
reflection on his fathers predicament deserves consideration:
Writers need a source of strength other than that which they find in
their talent. Literary talent doesnt exist by itself; it feeds on a society and
depends for its development on the nature of that society. . . . The writer
begins with his talent, finds confidence in his talent, but then discovers
that it isnt enough, that, in a society as deformed as ours, by the exercise
of his talent he has set himself adrift.21
Works Cited
Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic Identifications and Postmodern Eth-
nicity. In On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2001, 2136.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
de Man, Paul. Literary History and Literary Modernity. In Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983, 14265.
20
V. S. Naipaul, Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva, in Literary Occasions: Essays
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 127.
21
Ibid.
28 kim chew ng
Fang Xiu . Zhanhou Ma Hua wenxueshi chugao [A Preliminary

Draft on Postwar Malaysian Chinese Literary History]. Singapore: T. K. Goh, 1978.
Hrabal, Bohumil. Too Loud a Solitude. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1990.
Huang Jinshu (Ng Kim Chew) . Huawen zhongwen: shiyu de nanfang yu
yuyan zaizao : [Sinophone/Chinese:
Southeast Asian Aphasia and Language Regeneration]. In Ma Hua wenxue yu
Zhongguoxing [Chinese Malaysian Literature and Chineseness]. Taipei:
Yuan zun Cultural Enterprise, 1998, 5392.
. Ma Hua wenxue xiandaizhuyi de shixian kunjing
[The Practical Dilemmas of Realism in Malaysian Chinese Literature]. In
Ma Hua wenxue yu Zhongguoxing [Malaysian Chinese Literature and
Chineseness]. Taipei: Yuan zun Cultural Enterprise, 1998, 179210.
. Zhongwen xiandaizhuyi? Yi ge weiliao de jihua
? [Chinese Modernism? An Incomplete Project]. In Huangyan huo zhenli de jiyi:
dangdai zhongwen xiaoshuo lunji [The Craft
of Falsehood or the Craft of Truth: Contemporary Chinese fiction Criticism]. Taipei: Maitian
Publishing, 2003, 2157.
Klma, Ivan. The Swords Are Approaching: Franz Kafkas Sources of Inspiration.
In The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays, trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Granta, 1994,
15588.
Kundera, Milan. A Sentence. In Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Trans.
Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, 97118.
Lin Jianguo (Kien Kit Lim) . [Heterotype]. In [Chung-wai
Literary Monthly] 22, no. 3 (August 1993): 7391.
Naipaul, V. S. Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva. In Literary Occasions: Essays.
New York: Knopf, 2003, 11227.
. Prologue: Reading and Writing, a Personal Account. In Literary Occasions:
Essays. New York: Knopf, 2003, 334.
. Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture). In Literary Occasions: Essays. New York:
Knopf, 2003, 18195.
. A Way in the World: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Yu Dafu . Jige wenti [Some Issues]. Yu Dafu haiwai wenji
[Collected Overseas Writings of Yu Dafu]. Beijing: Sanlian Publishing, 1990,
48086.
Zhang Jinzhong (Tee Kim Tong) . Xiao wenxue, fuxitong: Dongnanya Hua-
wen wenxue de (yuyanwenti yu) yiyi , : (
) [Minor Literature, Polysystem: the Significance (and Language Issues)
of Southeast Asian Literature]. In [Contemporary Literature and
Human Ecology], ed. Wu Yaozong . Taipei: Wan Juan Lou Books, 2003,
31327.
AGAINST DIASPORA:
THE SINOPHONE AS PLACES OF
CULTURAL PRODUCTION1
Shu-mei Shih
This chapter offers a broad, programmatic view of the parameters

of Sinophone studies (huayu yuxi yanjiu ), situated at the
intersection of postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, transnational stud-
ies, and area studies (especially Chinese studies), as the study of Sin-
itic-language cultures and communities on the margins of China and
Chineseness. Here, the margins of China and Chineseness is under-
stood not only specifically but also generally, to include Sinophone
communities situated outside the geopolitical China proper and found
in many parts of the world as a consequence of historical processes
of (im)migration and settlement spanning several centuries, as well as
those non-Han communities within China where the imposition of
the dominant Han culture has elicited variegated responses ranging
from assimilation to anticolonial resistance in the dominant language,
Hanyu . Sinophone studies as a whole is therefore inherently
comparative and transnational, but it is everywhere attentive to the
specificity of time-and-place, i.e., chronotopic, configurations of its
different objects of study. In this spirit, this chapter does not focus
explicitly on literature, but lays out the broad contours of Sinophone
studies through an analysis and critique of what I consider to be the
misconceived category of the Chinese diaspora.
1
This chapter is based on excerpts from Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations
Across the Pacific (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) but
has been extensively revised for the present volume. I would like to thank Jing Tsu
and David Der-wei Wang for their invitation to present this chapter at the Global-
izing Modern Chinese Literature: Sinophone and Diasporic Writings conference at
Harvard University in December 2007, where many provocative and exciting ideas
on the contours and definitions of Sinophone studies were exchanged.
30 shu-mei shih
I. The Chinese Diaspora
The scattering of peoples from China across the globe over a millen-
nium has long been an object of study as a subfield in Chinese studies,
Southeast Asian studies, and Asian American studies, and also has a
small presence in European studies, African studies, and Latin Ameri-
can studies in the United States. This subfield, whose parameters are
set by wherever the peoples from China have gone, has been called the
study of the Chinese diaspora. The Chinese diaspora, understood as
the dispersion of ethnic Chinese people around the globe, functions
as a universalizing category founded on a unified ethnicity, culture,
language, and place of origin or homeland. A Uyghur from Xinjiang
province, a Tibetan from Tibet and surrounding regions, or a Mon-
golian from Inner Mongolia who has immigrated out of China is not
normally considered part of the Chinese diaspora, for instance, while
the Manchus may or may not be included. The criterion of inclusion
appears to be the degree of sinicization of these ethnicities, because
what often gets completely elided is the fact that the Chinese diaspora
refers mainly to the diaspora of the Han people. Chinese, in other
words, is a national marker passing as an ethnic, cultural, and linguis-
tic marker, a largely Han-centric designation, when, in fact, there are
altogether fifty-six official ethnicities in China and far more diverse
languages and topolects spoken across the nation. The Chinese lan-
guage, as it is generally assumed and understood, is nothing but the
standardized language imposed by the state, that is, the language of
the Han, the Hanyu, also known as Putonghua (literally, the common
language); the Chinese, as is generally assumed, are largely limited
to the Han people; and Chinese culture refers to the culture of the
Han. In short, the term Chinese functions as a category of ethnicity,
language, and culture only to the extent that it designates the Han,
excluding all the other ethnicities, languages, and cultures. The term
ethnic Chinese is therefore a serious misnomer, since the Chinese
nationality should designate not one but fifty-six ethnicities, if not more.
In short, there is no such group called ethnic Chinese, only groups
that can be specifically designated as Han Chinese, Tibetan Chinese,
Uyghur Chinese, or Hmong (Miao) Chinese. The reduction of Chi-
neseness to Han ethnicity in places outside China is the inverse of the
hegemonic claims on Chineseness by the Han majority within China.
Historically, various ethnic peoples have contributed significantly to
what China has become today, such as the important legacies of the
the sinophone as places of cultural production 31
Manchu dynasty of the Qing (16441912), whose expanded territory

was inherited by the Republic of China and todays Peoples Republic
of China. Hence, this ethnicized reductionism of the Chinese as the
Han is not unlike the racist misrecognition of authentic Americans
as white Anglo-Saxons. In each case, a different but similar form of
ethnocentrism is in operation.
To elaborate further on how the uniform idea of the Chinese was
coproduced by agents inside and outside China, we may trace it back
to a racialized ideology of the Western powers in the nineteenth cen-
tury that determined Chineseness according to the color line, which
disregarded the many diversities and differences within China. This
was when the Chinese became yellow and reduced to one ethnic-
ity, when in fact there were historically people of many different phe-
notypes within the changing geopolitical boundaries of China. The
external production of Chinese uniformity paradoxically worked well
with the unifying intent of the Chinese state, especially after the end
of Manchu rule in 1912, which eagerly presented a unified China
and Chineseness to emphasize its cultural and political autonomy from
the West. Only in this context can we understand why since the turn
of the nineteenth century the notion of Chinese national character-
istics that had been propounded by Western missionaries became
popular among Westerners and the Han Chinese alike, inside and
outside China, and why it continues to be a compelling idea for the
Han majority in China in the present.2 On the one hand, there is no
explanation for this desire to universalize Chineseness as a racialized
boundary marker than that, for the Western powers, it legitimated the
semicolonization of the Chinese up until 1949 and the management of
the Chinese immigrants and minorities within their own nation-states
from the late nineteenth century to the present; for both purposes,
the discourse of the Yellow Peril was distinctly useful. On the other
hand, for China and the Han Chinese, the racialized concept of the
Chinese correlates at least with three different purposes: the unified
nations resistance against imperialism and semicolonialism in the
2
The early twentieth-century version of national characteristics is evinced in the
work of none other than the reputed father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun,
who saw his mission, as a literary doctor, to be curing the diseased Chinese people
inflicted with a host of recognizable, negative characteristics. The contemporary ver-
sion of the idea of national characteristics is the hot topic of the quality (suzhi )
of the Chinese people. The argument goes that the quality of the Chinese needs to be
improved in order for China to advance quickly on the path of modernization.
32 shu-mei shih
early twentieth century; a practice of self-examination that internal-

ized Western categories of the self; and, finally and most importantly,
the suppression of ethnic minorities for their claims on and contribu-
tions to the nation in addition to the sovereignty claims of some of
these groups.
What is abundantly clear from this very short and broad exposition
of the problems of such umbrella terms as the Chinese and Chinese-
ness is that these terms were activated through contacts with other
peoples outside China as well as confrontations with internal Oth-
ers. These terms not only operate on the most general level for their
signification, but also on the most exclusive; thus they are universal
and particular at the same time. More precisely, they are hegemonic
particulars passing themselves off as the universal, which is complicit
with the crude generalizations imposed on China, the Chinese, and
Chineseness by the West, and to a certain extent, by other Asian coun-
tries such as Japan and Korea where resistances to the Chinese sphere
of cultural and political influence have been most prominent since the
nineteenth century. Both Japan and Korea had explicitly engaged in
de-Hanification campaigns to define their national languages against
Chinese cultural hegemony, for instance, undermining the importance
of Kanji ( Japanese for the Han script) and Hanja (Korean for the Han
script) in their respective languages.
As much as the study of the Chinese diaspora has tried to broaden
the question of the Chinese and Chineseness by emphasizing the local-
izing tendencies of those peoples who migrated out of China in their
countries of sojourn and sometimes colonial settlement, such as in
various countries in Southeast Asia (especially Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore), Chineseness continues to
be the major category within this field. It is important to interrogate,
however, the unifying category of the Chinese diaspora in the present
moment, not only because it is complicit with Chinas nationalist call
to the overseas Chinese who are supposed to long to return to China
as their homeland and whose ultimate purpose is to serve China, but
also because it unwittingly correlates with and reinforces the Western
and other non-Western (such as American and Malaysian) racialized
constructions of Chineseness as perpetually foreigndiasporic
hence not qualified to be authentic locals. In postcolonial nation-states
across Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, it is not far-fetched
to argue that the Sinophone peoples have been historically constitutive
of the local. After all, some of them have been in Southeast Asia since
as early as the sixth century, long before nation-states ever existed, and
surely long enough to outlast most identity labels tied to nationality.3
The question is then who is preventing them from being just a Thai, a
Filipino, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, or a Singaporean who happens
to have ancestors from China and who can be recognized as simply
multilingual and multicultural like their fellow citizens.4 Similarly, who
is preventing the immigrants from China in the United States (who
have been coming since as early as the mid-nineteenth century) from
simply being or becoming Chinese Americans with emphasis on the
latter word of the compound term, American? We can consider
the various racialized acts of exclusion, such as the Chinese Exclusion
Acts in the United States, the expulsion of the Hoa (local construction
of the Chinese) by the Vietnamese government, ethnic riots against
the Chinese in Indonesia, the massacre of the Chinese by the Span-
ish in the Philippines and by the Dutch in Java, the kidnapping of
Chinese children in the Philippines, and many other such examples
to see how the reified category of the Chinese as a racial and ethnic
marker readily serves such purposes of exclusion, scapegoating, and
persecution. While Italian, Jewish, and Irish immigrants have gradu-
ally become white, merging into the mainstream white American
society, the yellowness of the Chinese has continued to plague Chi-
nese Americans struggles for recognition.
Paradoxically, scholarship on the Chinese diaspora provides ample
evidence of the desire of these immigrants to localize within their lands
of settlement. In Singapore, even before it became an independent
city-state, intellectuals who immigrated from China saw that their
culture was centered in the land of their settlement. They coined
the category Nanyang (the Southern Ocean) for themselves, and
many rejected the claim that theirs was an overseas Chinese culture.5
The locally born Peranakans in Indonesia and mixed-race Babas in
3
Trade routes between China and Southeast Asia were opened as early as the
second century, and by the sixth century, communities of people from China could
already be found in port cities throughout the region. See C. F. Fitzgerald, The Third
China (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1965).
4
Instructive comparisons can be made between Sinophone societies and those
European countries where nationality and ethnicity are clearly not equated. For
instance, in Latvia, only about 56 percent of the population is Latvian, and the rest
are Russians and others.
5
David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the
Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 19191932 (New York and London: Routledge, 2003),
16385.
34 shu-mei shih
Malaysiathe so-called Straits Chinesedeveloped their own par-

ticular cultures of hybridity and resisted the resinicization pressures
from China.6 Many Chinese Americans have long considered them-
selves to be the children of the civil rights movement and refuted the
dual domination and manipulation by both the Chinese state and
the U.S. state.7 The Sino-Thais have localized their surnames and
have more or less completely integrated into the fabric of Thai society.
The Malaysian Communist Party, established in 1930, was one of the
most active anticolonial units against the British and the Japanese, and
its membership was mainly Chinese Malaysians of Han ethnicity.8 The
racially or ethnically mixed populations with some traceable ancestry
in China such as the Lukjins of Siam, the Metis of Cambodia and
Indochina, the Injerto and Chinocholos of Peru, the Creoles in Trini-
dad and Mauritius, and the Mestizos of the Philippines present us with
the question whether it makes any sense to continue to register these
categories at all and what purposes and whose benefit such registra-
tion serves.9 We continue to see a certain ideology of racial and eth-
nic purity mandating the tracing of origins even after centuries have
passed. Whether racialized pressure from the outside or internalized
racialization, the basis of such an ideology is not unlike the one-drop-
of-blood rule for African Americans in the United States.
The sentiments of Sinophone settlers in different parts of the world
of course are various, and there was a strong sojourner mentality
in the earlier phases of the dispersion since many were traders and
coolies. Their intentions to stay or leave provide different measuring
mechanisms for their desire to integrate or not. But the fact of the
Sinophone peoples dispersion through all continents and over such a
long historical span leads one to question the viability of the umbrella
concept of the Chinese diaspora where the criterion of determination
6
Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7997.
7
Dual domination is Lingchi Wangs descriptive term for this condition. See
Wang, The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of
the Chinese Diaspora in the United States, Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1 & 2 (1995):
14969.
8
Carolyn Cartier, Diaspora and Social Restructuring in Postcolonial Malaysia,
in The Chinese Diaspora, eds. Lawrence J. C. Ma and Carolyn Cartier (Lanham, Boul-
der, New York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 6996.
9
Lynn Pan lists these peoples under the category Hybrids, which is also a chap-
ter title in Pans book, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (Boston,
Toronto, London: Little Brown, 1990), 15658.
is Chineseness, or, more precisely, different degrees of Chineseness. In

this scheme, for instance, one can be more Chinese, and another can
be less Chinese, and Chineseness effectively becomes evaluatable, mea-
surable, and quantifiable. For instance, Wang Gungwu, the renowned
scholar of the Chinese diaspora, posited the idea of the cultural spec-
trum of Chineseness in this vein. As an illustration, he notes that the
Chinese in Hong Kong are historically more Chinese, even though
they are not as yet fully Chinese as their compatriots in Shanghai,
but the Chinese in San Francisco and Singapore have more complex
non-Chinese variables.10 Another renowned scholar of the Chinese
diaspora, Lynn Pan, states that the Chinese in the United States have
lost their cultural grounding and are therefore lost to Chineseness.
Pan further charges that Chinese Americans involvement in the civil
rights movement was nothing short of opportunism.11 Here, we hear
echoes of the accusation by immigrant parents, in the early twenti-
eth-century San Francisco Chinatown, that their American children
were less than satisfactorily Chinese by calling them empty bamboo
hearts (juksing), or the nationalistic Chinese from China claiming their
Chineseness to be the most authentic in comparison to those living
outside China. If one Chinese American can be complimented for
speaking good English in the United States due to the racist equation
of whiteness and authenticity, he or she can be equally complimented
for speaking good Hanyu in China for someone who is not authenti-
cally Chinese enough.
Two major blind spots in the study of the Chinese diaspora are its
inability to see beyond Chineseness as an organizing principle and the
lack of communication with the other scholarly paradigms such as eth-
nic studies in the United States (where ethnic identities and nationality
of origin can be disaggregated), Southeast Asian studies (where the
Sinophone peoples are inevitably seen more and more as Southeast
Asians), and various language-based postcolonial studies such as Fran-
cophone studies (where the French-speaking Chinese are French per
the ideology of French Republicanism).12 In most of the scholarship
10
Wang Gungwu, Chineseness: The Dilemmas of Place and Practice, in Cosmo-
politan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed.
Gary Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 11834.
11
Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 28995.
12
See Leo Suryadinada, ed., Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 1997).
36 shu-mei shih
on the Chinese diaspora, furthermore, the Chinese American is a

missing person, and even the Hongkongers and Taiwanese can only
be recognized as Hong Kong Chinese or Chinese in Taiwan.13 The
overinvestment in the notion of the homeland in the study of the
Chinese diaspora cannot account either for the global dispersion of
Sinophone peoples or for the increasing heterogenization of ethnici-
ties and cultures within any given nation. From the perspective of the
longue dure of globalization, Samir Amin tells us, heterogenization and
hybridization have been the norm rather than the exception since time
immemorial.14
II. The Sinophone, as Such
I coin the notion of the Sinophone to designate Sinitic-language cul-

tures and communities outside China as well as those ethnic commu-
nities in China where Sinitic languages are either forcefully imposed
or willingly adopted. The Sinophone, like the history of other nonmet-
ropolitan peoples who speak metropolitan and/or colonial languages,
has a colonial history. When China was a cultural empire, the liter-
ary, classical Sinitic script was the written lingua franca of the East
Asian world where scholars could converse through so-called pen
conversations (bitan ) in writing. In the past two decades, studies
of Qing imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have
also shown the continuous effects of this imperialism on those internal
colonies within China today: Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, for
instance. This is similar to the official Francophonie whose existence is
due largely to the expansion of the French empire and its cultural and
linguistic colonization of parts of Africa and the Caribbean, a similar
process as that of the Spanish empire in Hispanophone America, the
British empire in India and Africa, and the Portuguese empire in Bra-
zil and Africa, etc. Not all empires acted the same way, it goes with-
out saying, and linguistic colonization and influence occurred through
varying degrees of coercion and cooperation and to different degrees
of success. What these empires uniformly left behind, however, are
13
Both Wang Gungwus and Lynn Pans books referred to earlier exemplify this.
14
See, for instance, Emanuel Wallersteins three volumes, The Modern World-System
(San Diego: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989) as well as Samir Amin, Capitalism in
the Age of Globalization (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997).
the linguistic consequences of their cultural dominance. As mentioned

earlier, in standard Japanese and Korean languages, for instance,
there is a lasting, clearly recognizable presence of the classical Sinitic
script in localized forms. In todays China, the imposition of the stan-
dard Hanyu and the Sinitic script on its non-Han othersTibetans,
Uyghurs, Mongolians, etc.is akin to a colonial relationship that most
dare not criticize for fear of the governments ire.
Contemporary Sinophone communities outside China, however,
are not strictly colonial or postcolonial in relation to China except in
a few cases. This is the major difference between the Sinophone and
the other postcolonial language-based communities such as the Fran-
cophone, the Hispanophone, etc., except in the case of settler colonies.
Singapore as a settler colony with the majority of population being
Han is akin to the United States as a settler, Anglophone country. As a
result of historical developments in the twentieth century, Singapores
postcolonial language is Anglophone, not Sinophone. Taiwan, whose
Han majority population settled there during the seventeenth century
and after, is also similar to the colonial United States in its intention
to become formally independent from the country of immigration.
Furthermore, Taiwans situation is akin to that of Francophone Que-
bec, where roughly 82 percent of the population is Francophone. The
French-Canadian identity in Quebec has increasingly given way to a
localized, modern Quebecois identity through what has been known
as a process of Rvolution Tranquille,15 just as the uniform Chinese
identity imposed by the Guomindang regime in Taiwan has gradually
given way to a localized New Taiwanese identity today. Mandarin is
now only one of the official languages in Taiwans multilingual society
where the majority of the people actually speak the Minnan, while the
rest speak Hakka and various indigenous languages. As settler coloniz-
ers, however, Han peoples of Singapore and Taiwan, no matter which
Sinitic language they speak (Minnan/Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese,
Teochiu, or others), are colonial vis--vis the indigenous peoples. From
the indigenous perspective, the history of Taiwan is a history of a serial
colonialism (Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.), which has never
ended. For indigenous peoples, Taiwan has never been postcolonial.
Those Chinese immigrants who settled in various parts of Southeast
Asia also rarely speak the standard language defined by the Chinese
15
Margaret A. Majumdar, Francophone Studies (London: Arnold, 2002), 210, 217.
38 shu-mei shih
state, but instead use various old forms of topolects from the time when
and the place where they had emigrated.16 The time when is impor-
tant, since the topolects would have evolved differently inside and out-
side China. The Han people living in South Korea, for instance, speak
a mixture of Shandongnese and Korean, often creolized to the extent
that the semantics, syntax, and grammar of the two languages are
intermingled to a very high degree and the two seem to be organically
interdependent. This is especially true for second- and third-genera-
tion Shandongnese in South Korea, even though the standard Hanyu
was taught in the educational system set up by the locals originally
supported by the Taiwan government, and now by the Chinese gov-
ernment since the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between South
Korea and China. Like elsewhere, Hanyu there is standard only to
the extent that it is a written language; when spoken, it is sounded out
in Shandongnese. The Shandongnese they speak is also different from
Shandongnese spoken in the Shandong province of China, where
there are in fact many topolects all calling themselves Shandongnese.
The same can be said about the speakers of Teochiu, Hokkien, Hakka,
Cantonese, and Hailam in Southeast Asia, Cantonese in Hong Kong,
and all the different topolect speakers and Chinglish or pidgin speak-
ers in the United States. The Straits Chinese such as the Babas speak
English as well as patois Malay.17 It goes without saying that there are
various degrees of creolization of the Sinitic languages as well as out-
right abandonment of any ancestral linguistic links to China. Increas-
ingly, for instance, the main linguistic influence on Sinophone Chinese
Malaysians comes from Hong Kong television shows and movies, a
Hong Kong-style Cantonese with distinct divergences from the Can-
tonese spoken in Guangdong province in China. Essentially, creolized
to different degrees, these Sinitic languages comprise a multilingual
Sinophone world across national borders.
16
Victor Mairs important work shows that what we know to be standard Chinese
belongs to the Sinitic language group, where the mistakenly named dialects are not
variations of standard Chinese but actually different languages. Minnan and Cantonese
are thus different languages from Mandarin (Taiwan standard) and Putonghua (China
standard). See Victor Mair, What is a Chinese Dialect/Topolect? Reflections on
Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms, Sino-Platonic Papers 29 (September 1991):
131. See also Mair, Introduction, Hawaii Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed.
Victor Mair et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 17.
17
Cartier, Diaspora and Social Restructuring in Postcolonial Malaysia.
Speaking fractions of different Sinitic languages associated with

China is a matter of choice and other historical determinations, and
hence the Sinophone exists only to the extent that these languages are
somehow maintained. The Sinophone recedes or disappears as soon as
the languages in question are abandoned, but this recession or disap-
pearance should not be seen as a cause for lament or nostalgia. Fran-
cophone African nations have, to varying degrees, sought to maintain
or abandon the colonial language, and to devise their own linguistic
futures. Hence, unlike the conception of the Chinese diaspora, the
Sinophone foregrounds not the ethnicity or race of the person but the
languages he or she speaks in either vibrant or vanishing communities
of those languages. Instead of being perpetually bound to national-
ity, the Sinophone may be inherently transnational and global and
includes wherever various Sinitic languages are spoken on the mar-
gins of China and Chineseness. By virtue of its residual nature, the
Sinophone is largely confined to immigrant communities across all of
the continents as well as those settler societies where the Han are the
majority. As such, it can only be a linguistic identity in the process of
disappearing just as soon as or soon after it comes into being, when
local concerns voiced in local languages gradually supersede preimmi-
gration concerns for immigrants and their descendents through gen-
erations, with the Sinophone eventually losing its raison dtre. The
Sinophone as an analytical and cognitive category is therefore both
geographically and temporally specific.
From the perspective of Democratic Party members in Hong Kong
or independence advocates in todays Taiwan, Sinophone articula-
tions, furthermore, may contain an anticolonial intent against Chi-
nese hegemony. The Sinophone is a place-based, everyday practice
and experience, and thus it is a historical formation that constantly
undergoes transformation to reflect local needs and conditions. It can
be a site of both a longing for and rejection of various constructions of
Chineseness; it can be a site of long-distance nationalism, anti-China
politics, or even nonrelation with China, whether real or imaginary.
Speaking Sinitic languages with a certain historical affinity to China
does not necessarily need to be tied to contemporary China, just as
speaking English does not tie a person to England per se. In other
words, Sinophone articulations can take as many different positions
as possible within the realm of human expression, whose axiologi-
cal determinations are not necessarily dictated by China but rather
by local, regional, or global contingencies and desires. Rather than a
40 shu-mei shih
dialectics of rejection, incorporation, and sublimation, there is at least

a trialectics, since mediation is exercised by more agents than one,
the so-called perennial Other. The Sinophone, therefore, maintains
a precarious and problematic relationship to China, similar to the
Francophone to France, the Hispanophone to Spain, and the Anglo-
phone to England in its ambiguity and complexity. The dominant
Sinophone language may be standard Hanyu, but it can be implicated
in a dynamic of linguistic power struggles. Being a major language,
standard Hanyu is often the object against which various minor articu-
lations are launched resulting in its de-standardization, creolization,
fragmentation, or sometimes outright rejection.
The Sinophone may express a China-centrism if it is the nostalgic
kind that forever looks back at China as its cultural motherland or the
source of value, nationalist or otherwise; but it is also often where the
most powerful articulations against China-centrism are heard. Sino-
phone Taiwan, for instance, is only an aspect of Taiwans multilingual
community in which indigenous languages are also spoken, and post-
martial law Taiwan cultural discourse is very much about articulating
symbolic farewells to China.18 The Sinophone pre-1997 Hong Kong
also saw the emergence of a nativist fetishization of Cantonese against
the looming hegemony of Beijing standard Hanyu.
It goes without saying that the Sinophone is a very important, criti-
cal category for literature. In the past, the distinction between liter-
ature written in the standard Sinitic script from inside and outside
China has been rather blurry, and this has had the effect of throwing
literature written in Sinitic languages, standard or otherwise, outside
China into neglect and marginalization, if not total oblivion. What
used to be categorized in English as Chinese literature (Zhongguo
wenxue , literature from China) and literature in Chinese
(huawen wenxue , literature from outside China) added to the
confusion. The singularity of the word Chinese in both terms shows
the Chinese as the hegemonic sign and easily slips into or becomes
complicit with China-centrism. In effect, the notion of literature in
Chinese or world literature in Chinese places Chinese literature
as the hegemonic model in relation to which the various different
18
Farewell China is the title of a film made by then Hong Kong-based, Britain-
trained filmmaker Clara Law. Taiwan cultural critic Yang Zhaos famous book, Fare-
well China (Gaobie Zhongguo ), captures this sentiment vividly.
kinds of Chinese literature are categorized and organized. There is

a burgeoning industry of studies of world literature in Chinese (shijie
huawen wenxue ) with established scholarly associations
and academic programs in China, the political intentions of which
are probably not very dissimilar to the official notion of the Francoph-
onie of the French state. Much like the model of categorization where
European and American literatures are deemed normative, universal,
and hence generic, while the rest of the world produced literature of
the world at large, world literature as such was therefore often
a code word for all of those literatures that are non-European and
non-American. World literature in Chinese has a similar function
where Chinese literature is its unnamed but hegemonic, generic,
and empty signifier, with the rest of the world producing world litera-
ture in Chinese. In this construction, the world is the gathering of
particular places beyond the centerthe universe of China proper
but everywhere connected to China in their insistence on writing in
the Sinitic script. The historical coincidence of the expansion of studies
of world literature in Chinese in China with Chinas global ambi-
tions invites a critical analysis of the political economy of this particu-
lar knowledge formation.
The Sinophone therefore usefully designates Sinitic-language litera-
tures in various parts of the world without the assumed centrality of
Chinese literature. It is multilingual in and of itself by virtue of the
simple fact that the Sinitic language family consists of many differ-
ent languages, and different communities tend to speak a particular
Sinitic language in addition to its non-Sinitic inflections. Sinophone
Malaysian literature, for instance, vividly captures Cantonese and
other Sinitic languages alongside the standard Hanyu, not to mention
their sometimes occasional and sometimes extensive creolizations by
Malay, English, and Tamil. Similarly, in Sinophone Taiwan literature,
the body of works written by indigenous Austronesian peoples often
mix their various indigenous languages with the Hanyu imposed by
the Han colonizers in a dialectical confrontation and negotiation. To
a different extent, Taiwan writers have experimented with writing in a
newly invented script of Minnan, just as Hong Kong writers have tried
to invent a Cantonese script to register the distinctness of Sinophone
Hong Kong literature in distinction with Chinese literature.
In the different context of American literature, there had been no
clear way to designate Chinese American literature written in a given
Sinitic language, hence Sau-ling Wongs recent, important distinction
42 shu-mei shih
between Anglophone Chinese American literature and Sinophone

Chinese American literature.19 In Chinese American literary history
and criticism, literature written in the Sinitic languages has been sys-
tematically marginalized, if not considered politically suspect for its
presumed un-Americanness that can arouse fears of unassimilatabil-
ity. Dismissed in the canons of both Chinese literature and Chi-
nese American literature, which are based on models of nationality
and ethnicity with standard Hanyu and standard English as their lan-
guages of value, the Sinophone literally had been crying for a name
for itself. Early Sinophone American literature had largely been writ-
ten in Cantonese or with Cantonese inflections, while the post-1965
body of literature is largely in standard Hanyu, refracting the par-
ticular geographical contours of immigration from China, Taiwan,
and elsewhere in different historical periods. The English-centrism
of American literature is necessarily fractured by the proliferation of
Sinophone American literature by generations of immigrants from
various other Sinophone communities. American literature, like all
other national literatures, is multilingual. This is a simple and obvious
fact that is often occluded by linguistic and literary politics exercised
by the dominant.
If both Sinophone Taiwan literature written by the indigenous peo-
ples and Sinophone American literature written by Chinese Ameri-
can minorities register their discontent under the respective dominant
cultures in Taiwan and the United States and express anticolonial or
decolonial intent (the former does so more than the latter), we must
consider Sinophone Tibetan or Sinophone Mongolian literature in
a similar vein. Many Sinophone Tibetan writers, for instance, are
themselves subjects living under a colonial condition, external (if their
desire is sovereignty) or internal (if they feel oppressed but accept Chi-
nese nationality). They may write in the standard Sinitic script, but
their sensibilities are ambiguously positioned vis--vis politico-cultural
China and a uniform construction of Chineseness as Han-centered
19
Sinophone Asian American literature may simply be changed to Sinophone
American literature, as it is categorized by language. Similarly, one can make a
distinction between Chinese America and Sinophone America, the latter referring to
Sinitic-language speaking American communities. Again, linguistic designation allows
the possibility of overcoming distinctions made solely based on ethnicity or race. See
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, The Yellow and the Black: The African-American Pres-
ence in Sinophone Chinese American Literature, Chung-Wai Literary Monthly 34, no. 4
(September 2005): 1553.
and Han-dominant. As historians tell us, the expansion of the Qing

empire brought the far-flung regions such as Tibet, present-day Xinji-
ang, and Inner Mongolia into the fold of China with effective military
conquests and cultural managements in a typical colonial fashion.20 A
case must be made, therefore, about internal colonialism in China, and
Han hegemony over its linguistic, cultural, and ethnic Others needs
to be thoroughly investigated. Ethnic writers such as Tibetans and
Uyghurs who choose to write in the standard Sinitic script do so with
a distinctively bicultural, if not bilingual, sensibility in which cross-
epistemological conversations21 take place in antagonistic, dialectical,
or any number of other ways. The Sinophone, like the category of the
third world that can also exist within the first world, then also exists
on the margins within China, albeit these margins are both symbolic
and territorial. In fact, these marginsthe regions colonized by the
Qing and inherited by todays Chinaactually helped expand Chinas
territory more than twofold.
Similar to its complex relationship to China and Chineseness, the
Sinophone also evinces a complex relationship with the sites of settle-
ment and lived experience. For first-generation Chinese Americans
who immigrated from various other Sinophone sites or China, for
example, their relationship to the cultures and languages of the United
States is, though equally ambivalent and complex, of a qualitatively
different kind. As the Sinophone distinguishes itself from the dominant
construction of Chineseness, it also distinguishes itself from the domi-
nant construction of Americanness in a way that is borne out by the
exigencies of lived experience in the United States. Via heterogenizing
the dominant constructions of both Chineseness and Americanness, it
maintains its own subjectivity. Some might flaunt this as the postmod-
ernist in-betweenness, others might see this as the existential condition
of the Sinophone as a local practice. Place matters as the grounding
where Sinophone acquires its valance and relevance.
The definition of the Sinophone must therefore be place-based and it
must be sensitive to time, able to attend to the process of its formation
20
See for instance Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds.,
Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Culture
of War in China: Empire and the Military Under the Qing Dynasty (London, New York: I.B.
Tauris), 2006.
21
The phrase cross-epistemological conversations is from Walter Mignolo, Local
Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 85.
44 shu-mei shih
and disappearance. For recent immigrant communities in the United

States that speak Cantonese, Minnan, and various other Sinitic lan-
guages, political allegiances often run the gamut of extreme positions
at odds with each other, while their psychosocial investment in the
land of settlement may increasingly outweigh older attachments. The
Sinophone is kept alive by successive waves of new immigrants while
earlier immigrants may move further toward the mainstream to het-
erogenize the mainstream culture in a bid for pluralism and equality.
The history of the official Francophonie cautions us that the notion
of the Sinophone also risks being co-opted by the Chinese state. In
the case of the Francophonie as an institutional concept, the French
state can willfully neglect the anticolonial character of the Franco-
phone and instead highlight the states potential as the champion of
pluralism in order to refute the overpowering pressure of American
cultural hegemony.22 The Francophonie can be partly seen as spec-
tral remains of the French empire under whose shadow contemporary
Frances waning cultural influence across the globe can be temporarily
displaced. Unfortunately it can be turned into a new fantasy of French
global influence, if not a point of mobilization for imperial nostalgia.
The notion of the Chinese diaspora has led to similar consequences: it
centered China as the place of origin and implicitly demonstrated its
global influence. Rather than being a testament to the classical Chi-
nese empire, such as the premodern Sinophone worlds of Vietnam,
Japan, and Korea, or to an emerging Chinese empire that claims the
sole right to Chineseness, contemporary Sinophone articulations may
determine whether to respond to such claims or to ignore them alto-
gether. Over the last two centuries, Japan tried to overcome China
militarily by instigating the two Sino-Japanese Wars, and symbolically
through a vernacular movement that displaced the Sinitic script. For
Korea, the resistance was more circuitous: denouncing the ideology
of serving the great (sadae chuui) in the seventeenth century simulta-
neously produced its authenticity as preserver of Confucian Chinese
culture against the Manchus,23 but twentieth-century history saw a
22
Margaret Majumdar, The Francophone World Moves Into the Twenty-First
Century, in Francophone Post-colonial Cultures, ed. Kamal Salhi (Lanham, Boulder, New
York, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), 45.
23
Choson Korea considered itself the sojunghwa (literally, small China), that was
more authentically Chinese than the Manchu Qing dynasty.
gradual move away from Chinese influence until the rise of China in
the global scene in the early twenty-first century.
III. Sinophone Studies, Literary, or Otherwise
To sum up then, the conceptualization of the Sinophone here empha-

sizes two major points:
1. Diaspora has an end date. When the (im)migrants settle and become
localized, many choose to end their state of diaspora by the second
or third generation. The so-called nostalgia for the ancestral land
is often an indication or displacement of difficulties of localization,
voluntary or involuntary. Racism and other hostile conditions can
force immigrants to find escape and solace in the past, while cul-
tural or other superiority complexes can estrange them from the
locals. To emphasize that diaspora has an end date is therefore
to insist that cultural and political practice is always place-based.
Everyone should be given a chance to become a local.
2. The linguistic community is a community of change and an open commu-
nity. When the descendants of immigrants no longer speak their
ancestors languages, they are no longer part of the Sinophone
community. The Sinophone is therefore a community of change,
occupying a transitional moment (however long in duration) that
inevitably integrates further with local communities and becomes
constitutive of the local. It is an open community, furthermore,
because it is defined not by race or nationality of the speaker but
by the languages one speaks. Just as Anglophone speakers are not
necessarily British or American, Sinophone speakers need not be
Chinese by nationality. To the extent that communities are most
often multilingual, linguistically determined communities necessar-
ily trace porous and contingent boundaries.
What does Sinophone studies do, then? Or rather, what can Sino-
phone studies do? To these questions, I offer several tentative answers
by way of proposals below:
1. By debunking the Chinese diaspora as the organizing concept

for the study of various immigrant peoples who left China, from
centuries ago up to the present, it is possible to propose organizing
46 shu-mei shih
concepts other than such essentialist notions as Chineseness and

the Chinese. Instead, rigorously rearticulated concepts such as
localization, multiplicity, difference, creolization, hybridity, bilin-
gualism, biculturalism, and others can be deployed for more com-
plex understandings of histories, cultures, and literatures. Ethnic
studies, other phone studies such as Francophone studies and
Anglophone studies, postcolonial studies, transnational studies, and
additional relevant modes of inquiry may all be drawn from for
Sinophone studies in a comparative vein.
2. Sinophone studies allows us to rethink the relationship between
roots and routes by considering the concept of roots as place-based
rather than ancestral, and routes as a more mobile understand-
ing of homeness rather than wandering and homelessness.24 To
decouple homeness and origin is to recognize the imperative to
live as a political subject within a particular geopolitical place in
a specific time with deep local commitments. To link homeness
with the place of residence therefore becomes an ethical act that
chooses concrete political engagement in the local. The claim of
rootlessness by some nostalgia-driven, middle-class, first-generation
immigrants is, for example, oftentimes narcissistic to the extent that
it is not aware of its own trenchant conservatism and even racism.25
The place of residence can changesome people migrate more
than oncebut to consider that place as home may thus be the
highest form of rootedness. Routes, then, can become roots. This
is a theory not of mobile citizens who disidentify from the local
nation-state and disengage from local politics, but of the politiciza-
tion of that mobility that unsettle the relationship between routes
and roots.
3. When routes can be roots, multidirectional critiques are not only
possible but also imperative. Transcending national borders, Sino-
phone communities can maintain a critical position toward both
the country of origin and the country of settlement. It is no longer
24
The term wandering Chinese had enjoyed much currency. See for instance the
now classic group of essays under the special issue title The Living Tree: The Chang-
ing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, Daedalus 120, no. 2 (Spring 1991).
25
Sau-ling Wong analyzed racism against African Americans prevalent in Sino-
phone American literature written by first-generation immigrant students in the
United States. While wallowing in self-pity over a sense of rootlessness, some of these
writers had the most conservative tendencies toward issues of race, gender, and class.
See Wong, The Yellow and the Black.
an either/or choice between the ancestral land and the local place,
which has been shown to jeopardize the well-being of the immi-
grants and their descendants. A Chinese American can be critical
of China and the United States at the same time. In the case of
Taiwan, such a multidirectional critique allows for the emergence
of a critical, articulatory position beyond the conventional associa-
tion of Taiwan with the American Right, so that Taiwan can be
critical of Chinese and U.S. policies of containment as well as their
collusion and complicity without needing to choose one over the
other. The Sinophone as a concept, then, allows for the emergence
of a critical position that may not succumb to nationalist and impe-
rialist pressures, and allows for a multiply mediated and multidi-
rectional critique. In this way, the Sinophone can be considered a
method. Starting from being a historical and empirical category of
communities, cultures, and languages, the Sinophone can thus also
be rearticulated as an epistemology.
By way of conclusion, Chinese Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fongs intrigu-

ing short story Never Mention It Again offers a refreshingly sharp
and critical look at the world from Sinophone perspectives.26 In this
story, a married Chinese Malaysian man has secretly converted to
Islam in order to take advantage of tax breaks and other economic
benefits provided by the government. In Malaysia, a policy of positive
discrimination has been practiced for over four decades as a way to
guarantee Malay success in economy and government, while restrict-
ing Chinese Malaysian and Indian Malaysian access to success. This
man has also apparently married a couple of Muslim women without
his Chinese Malaysian wifes knowledge. Things go really well until he
dies. At his funeral, planned as a Daoist ritual by his Chinese Malay-
sian wife and children, government officials storm the ceremony and
announce that only Muslims can bury a Muslim. A physical battle
ensues over the corpse of the man, with each side grabbing and hold-
ing onto one half of the corpse in a tug-of-war. At the height of this
struggle, the corpse defecates. Small, hard, broken pieces of his feces
land on everyone, as the violent motion of the tug-of-war creates a
26
He Shufang, Never Mention It Again [Biezai Tiqi ], in The Man Who
Longed for a Far Away Home [Yuanxiangren ], ed. David Der-wei Wang and Kim-
chew Ng (Taipei: Ryefield, 2004), 22834.
48 shu-mei shih
large radius for their spread. In the end, the Muslims take his corpse,
the Chinese Malaysians are reduced to gathering the feces and bury-
ing them in a family grave, and the Chinese Malaysian wife is, by
Malaysian law, disinherited, because she cannot inherit a Muslims
property. This theater of the absurd may serve as a perfect allegory for
a double critique of state racism (of the Malaysian state) and Chinese
cultural essentialism (of the Chinese family) as flipsides that reinforce
and enhance each other, while the feces of the corpse contaminate
everyone equally. This is the ugly and smelly picture of hybridity,
not the hybridity that is celebrated by some scholars of postcolonial
theory, ugly and smelly precisely because hybridity is not acknowl-
edged by state racism and Chinese cultural essentialism, and it is not
an easy condition. The Sinophone articulates itself into being through
such difficulty and complexity.
GLOBAL VISION AND LOCATEDNESS:
WORLD LITERATURE IN CHINESE/BY CHINESE
(SHIJIE HUAWEN/HUAREN WENXUE )
FROM A CHINESE-AMERICANIST PERSPECTIVE
Sau-ling C. Wong
In the last ten years or more, invocations of the term global (quanqiu
) in various collocations have become common in Chinese criti-
cism published on the mainland, in the body of work I provisionally
refer to as Sinophone literature outside China1provisionally
because the very nomenclature of it, contention-laden since the 1980s,
will be subjected to scrutiny in the following essay.2 Some of the com-
mon formulations include global consciousness (quanqiu yishi
) (e.g., Lin); a global citizens consciousness/sensibility (shijie gong-
min yishi ) (e.g., Shi, Cong bianyuan zouxiang zhuliu 2),
and global vision (quanqiu shiye or shijie shiye )
(e.g., Wu Yiqi 79). I use global vision as an umbrella term to refer
to a core meaning expressed by such phrases: an interest in looking
at, understanding, experiencing, and interacting with the world out-
side China.
The nationwide eruption of euphoric celebration in 2001 over
Chinas entry into the World Trade Organization and the selection of
Beijing for the 2008 Olympics vividly illustrated a pervasive national
desire to engage the world. And the Beijing Olympics, especially the
shock and awe-inducing spectacle of the opening ceremony, ren-
dered Chinas eagerness to stake out an important place in the global
order unmistakable even to the most casual observers. This essay
examines Sinophone literature outside China in the context of Chinas
1
A considerable body of criticism on the subject has been produced in Taiwan,
but analysis of it falls outside the scope of this essay.
2
My usage of the term Sinophone here is strictly denotational, without the
theoretical complexities in Shu-mei Shihs sophisticated analysis in Visuality and Iden-
tity (Shih 2339; see also this volume). In other contexts I have used Sinophone
diasporic literature quite freely, but for the purposes of this essay I would like to place
diaspora (alongside other related terms) under interrogation, and have thus selected
phrasing that is as neutral-sounding as possible.
50 sau-ling c. wong
preoccupation with quanqiu. As an Asian Americanist who has been

teaching and researching both Anglophone Chinese American litera-
ture and Sinophone Chinese American literature since the 1980s,3 I
am curious about the implications of shifting nomenclature for Chinese
American literary studies, especially the transition from shijie huawen
wenxue to shijie huaren wenxue , which I
translate in the title as world literature in Chinese and world litera-
ture by Chinese respectively, to mirror the difference of one word
( yizi zhicha ) in the original. I note the uneasy coexistence,
under a shared global rubric, of nuanced, heterogeneity-respecting
criticism from China and essentialist discourse that seeks to level dif-
ferences in the name of a triumphalist Chineseness.
This essay consists of four loosely articulated parts. Part I is a para-
bolic reading of a short story, Bali laike (The Visitor from Paris),
by a mainland-origin writer now resident in the United States, Wang
Ruiyun. I draw analytically productive provocations from the story
regarding the varieties of trajectory, status, cultural interpellation, and
self-contextualization of migrating Chinesemore specifically, how
these have changed since Chinas reform and opening-up (gaige
kaifang ). I move on in Part II to three conceptsgeno-
centrism, translocalism, and racinationismthat I find useful in my
attempt to understand a migrants relationship to the place of origin
in this era of worldwide population mobility and dispersal, including
the massive out-migration from post-Cultural Revolution China. In
Part III, I link the three concepts to the characters in The Visitor
from Paris, who may be said to enact various forms and combina-
tions of genocentrism, translocalism, and racinationism. I argue that
what appears to be global vision may in fact be colored heavily by
genocentric concerns and compromised by an excessive preoccupa-
tion with visibility before a validating yet agency-draining audience.
In Part IV, I analyze the notion of global vision as seen in certain
literary criticism on Sinophone Chinese American literature produced
in Chinese or by Chinese-ancestry writers outside China proper. An
examination of the implications of shifting naming practices leads me
3
The majority of my publications are on Anglophone Asian American (including
Chinese American) literature, but I have been offering a course on Chinese immigrant
literature (later on Chinese immigrant film as well ) at the University of California
at Berkeley since the 1980s, and have published a number of articles on Sinophone
Chinese American literature in both English and Chinese.
global vision and locatedness 51
to make a case for the continued need to attend to the locatedness

(zaidixing )4 of Chinese American literature both Sinophone and
Anglophone, and to respect the discursive space carved out by Asian
American discourse as it has developed since the 1960s.
Parts I and III, offering very close readings of a single short story, are
not meant (and by nature cannot be pressed into service) to prove
anything about the theoretical analyses in Parts II and IV, which are
based on scholarly research. Rather, they function rhetorically to open
up possible lines of inquiry for the remaining sections.
Through my inquiry, I attempt to address some of the key ques-
tions raised by editors Jing Tsu and David Wang in this anthology.
Foremost is the one they raise at the beginning of their introduc-
tion. Noting the fraught nature of all three words in their focal term,
global Chinese literature, they ask: Why global? Why now? Tsu
and Wang note in their introduction (p. 1) that the historical fact of
diaspora makes the present invocation of the global also somewhat
belatedin other words, the issue can be defined as one of naming/
renaming preexisting cultural productions. At the same time, I would
like to emphasize how naming is not merely labeling but also creating:
under some circumstances, a name can actively enable a consolidation
of cultural changes discernible but as yet inchoate, until something
previously nonexistent is brought into being.
A second key question informing this anthology concerns how to
conceptualize Chinese literature in a global contextspecifically,
whether analyses of Chinese literature(s) produced around the world
must always presuppose a center. In much current Sinophone cul-
tural discourse, not only in Chinese-dominant geographical commu-
nities but also among overseas Sinophone writers, a center is often
spoken of as if it were a powerful gravitational field, made up of some
unspecified and irresistible (not to be resisted) combination of the
Chinese nation-state, the Chinese cultural tradition (including the Chi-
nese language), the Chinese national literature, and the Chinese people.
(The definite article the is obligatory here).5 If a center is considered
4
I prefer locatedness to the more idiomatic localness because of the latters
unfortunate association with local color, a reductive and superficial concept. I first
encountered the Chinese term zaidixing in the writing of literary critics from Taiwan.
5
The other, common meaning of irresistible, attractive, hard to resist, should
also be kept in mind as Chinese Americans, an ethnic minority in the United States,
begin to sense certain economic and cultural advantages in being associated with a
putative majority in a rising China. This will complicate some of my discussion below
52 sau-ling c. wong
incontrovertibly natural, centripetal cultural tropism would be a simple

corollary, and Sinophone literature produced outside Chinese national
boundaries could all be made by critical practices to serve a redound-
ive effect.6 The opposite of centripetal is perhaps best thought of not
as centrifugal but as localizing. While the term centrifugal still
assumes the primacy of the center and risks connoting betrayal, local-
ization (similar to related terms used in this essay, such as racination
and locatedness) suggests a historicized process and at least the theo-
retical possibility of the centers eventual irrelevance to the emerged
cultural formation. From my location of intellectual and institutional
affiliation with minority discourses (ethnic studiesAsian American
studiesChinese American studies), Sinophone writing produced in
the United States offers a rich body of work for pondering the question
of the center in a grounded manner.
I. Wang Ruiyuns The Visitor from Paris
I begin with Bali laike (The Visitor from Paris), published in 2005
by Wang Ruiyun, a U.S.-resident writer from China.7 There are three
main characters in the story, each engaged with the world outside
about the contestation of literary categories. However, treatment of such nuances

must be left to another study.
Eric Lius The Accidental Asian, especially the chapter Fear of a Yellow Planet,
registers the ambivalence of a self-described banana confronted with a new global
geopolitics in which Chinas rise figures centrally. He notes with some wistfulness
the growing desirability of knowledge of the Chinese language (which he has largely
lost) but cannot shake his sense of alienness in China; at one point he hesitantly
assumes the mantle of the activist Asian American.
6
Redoundive is an awkward formation from the verb redound; I coined it in
order to try to capture what I consider a new kind of attitude toward the Chinese
diaspora expressed by those at the center. Instead of a sign of the failures of the
nation-state (Chinas weakness forcing people to emigrate), it is now considered a sign
of the greatness of the Chinese people (they can survive and thrive everywhere). Phe-
nomena such as haigui returnees, or wealthy overseas Chinese buying guobao (national
treasure)-grade antiques to donate to museums in China, can be considered aspects
of this redoundive trend.
7
The Visitor from Paris appeared in Yidai feihong (Rong Rong and Chen, 2005),
which was billed as the first major anthology of literary works by North American
Chinese writers from mainland China. A considerably revised second edition of Yidai
feihong appeared in 2008 (Rong Rong). Translations of excerpts from the story are
my own.
China in his or her own way. The unnamed narrator is, by her own
admission, an unremarkable woman who went to the United States to
study, got married, had children, and is now settled in a comfortable,
if staid middle-class existence in Los Angeles. One day, the narrator
is visited by her childhood friend from Beijing, Liangzi, whom she
hasnt seen for eight years. Liangzi is a much-admired beauty married
to a French artist, a man of wealth, sophistication, and leisure. She
enjoys fine dining and shopping in Paris when not globetrotting with
her husband. During the friends catch-up chat, Liangzi relates the
following incident.
Liangzi is asked by a friend in China to receive a young man who
is visiting Paris. This young man makes an unusual request: all he
wants is for Liangzi to have coffee with him in a caf on the Champs-
Elysees. Initially apprehensive about being embarrassed, Liangzi is
relieved when she meets the young man, who turns out not to be the
kind of first-time tourist from China going around looking gauche
and sheepish in a Western suit (43). He has actually done his sar-
torial homework and shows up in casual chicjeans, sweater, and
jacketblending easily into the European cityscape. Liangzi learns
that the young man is a TV and computer repairman in Beijing who
has saved for some seven or eight years in order to pay for this trip.
His dream of having coffee with a woman in a caf on the Champs-
Elyses comes from a French movie he saw many years ago. After
fulfilling it, he is ready to return to Beijing to get married and raise a
family. He explains that he wont be coming up with new dreams to
pursue: Ive had one. Now that I have fulfilled it and know what its
all about, I feel settled (45). Liangzi appears to be touched by some-
thing about this ordinary young man. The narrator too seems to have
been struck by some sort of epiphany, but Liangzi cuts her off before
she can say anything, and the author ends the story without making
any revelations.
The Visitor from Paris is intriguing for the way it indexes a trans-
formation in the horizon of possibilities for Chinese emigrants as the
Peoples Republic of China rises to global prominence. During an ear-
lier period, when China first opened up to the West, the United States
was regarded as the destination of choice for those fortunate enough
to be able to leave, as reflected in the titles of some of the best-selling
publications during that period, such as Manhadun de Zhongguo nren
(A Chinese Woman in Manhattan) (Zhou) and Beijingren zai Niuyue
54 sau-ling c. wong
(Beijingers in New York) (Cao).8 In this the mainland writers have fol-
lowed a tradition initiated by liuxuesheng writers from Taiwan
in the 1960s (although the valorization of the United States at the
time was, naturally, attributable to very different historical reasons).
Correspondingly, the cultural compass in earlier Sinophone Chi-
nese American literature is bipolar, consisting of the homeland and
the hostland9 posed in opposition. In contrast, in The Visitor from
Paris, Wang Ruiyun, though resident in the United States, puts forth
three geocultural points of reference: China, the United States, and
France. Indeed, France does not function merely as a single coun-
try, but, given its long association with cosmopolitanism, becomes the
stand-in for the world. As the narrator characterizes the period in
which she and her friends left China, It was the 1990s: Chinas doors
were wide open, and the world came rushing toward us (38). Liangzi,
like many in her generation, dreamed of traveling the world with a
backpack (38), the Chinese term for the world here being tianxia,
with connotations of conquest or adventure much used in history
and historical romances, among other contexts. The narrator explicitly
points out: we were oriented toward the entire worldthat is, the
globe (diqiu a more contemporary term) (38). The characters
ambition for global engagement is palpable.
Relative to the United States, the narrator was once a visitor from
Beijing, but having put down roots in Los Angeles, she has become,
to a certain extent, a representative of the hostland and a literal host to
Liangzi, the visitor from Paris. At the same time, relative to Liangzi,
who has made Paris her home, the young man is the visitor from
Beijing to whom she plays host. Wang Ruiyun has carefully set up
a cluster of complex, unstable, and shifting host-visitor relationships10
not only to illustrate what Victor Bascara, in another context, calls
the dynamic of mutual validation at the core of the relationship of
host and guest (Bascara 67) but also, more importantly, to highlight
8
At first glance, the famous epigraph of Beijingers in New YorkIf you love some-
one, send him to New York, for it is heaven. If you hate someone, send him to New
York, for it is hellappears to be a balanced assessment, but the sensationalistic
vilification of New York merely betrays the intensity of the idealization.
9
Here I follow the usage of Laguerre (and others); the term hostland is rela-
tively free from biological metaphors, and biologism is one of the concepts under
interrogation.
10
Given the paratactic nature of Chinese, it is even arguable that Bali laike could
suggest, albeit only peripherally, a visitor to or in Paris, namely, the young man.
the question of the preferred direction and place for the Chinese
peoplethe question of hequ hecong amid globalization.
The interplay among Beijing, Paris, and Los Angeles dramatized in
Wang Ruiyuns story registers shifts in geocultural desire, expressed
through migration, among mainland Chinese in the last two-plus
decades. In the early years of reform and opening up, many Sino-
phone works of Chinese American literature described the yearning,
indeed the obsession, of the Chinese to go abroad, with the unques-
tioned assumption that the trip is one way: return is equated with
defeat. In recent years, with the decline in U.S. global political influ-
ence and economic power, the haigui phenomenon, or return
from overseas (also known as huiliu , reflux) has arisen: whereas
the United States was once equated with the world, imagined as all
but Edenic by Chinese immigrants, it is now a place for the second-
rate.11 Nevertheless, preoccupation with the world, of which the
American fever was one manifestation, continues in other forms.
In The Visitor from Paris, Liangzi represents the realization of this
yearning by the elite of contemporary China: on the basis of her own
assets (symbolized by her exceptional beauty), she is able to have her
pick of potential husbands and ends up not only making a place for
herself in cosmopolitan Paris but also gaining unfettered access to the
world (tourist destinations in Europe and other continents). The narra-
tor, whose life trajectory once represented fulfillment of the American
dream, pales noticeably before her friends more dazzling personal
attributes, more aggressive ambitions, and more impressive successes.
The narrators placidity is contrasted with the ambitiousness of the
young man, who, although based in Beijing, is attracted by a glamor-
ized notion of globality, represented by the streets of Paris. In Wang
Ruiyuns account, New York has been displaced from its once iconic
position in Sinophone Chinese American literature. Though New
York is arguably the cultural, though not administrative, capital of
the United States, on a par with Beijing and Paris, which are capitals
in both senses of the word, Los Angeles, where the narrator resides,
is a city whose nonelite hybridities result in no small part from labor
immigration, a noncosmopolitan version of the ethnoscape.
11
Since the first writing of this essay, as the global economy experiences a severe
downturn, the haigui phenomenon has intensified greatly, giving rise to a new term,
haidai , which refers to returnees who are unemployed and waiting (dai ) for a
job. is a pun on , a seaturtle, and is a pun on , an edible seaweed.
56 sau-ling c. wong
II. Genocentrism, Translocalism, Racinationism
To facilitate an analysis of The Visitor from Paris in terms of its

relevance to the notion of global vision, I will introduce three terms
that I have developed elsewhere (Wong, Circuits/Cycles of Desire)
in connection with theorization of the Chinese diaspora, with special
attention to Chinese American examples: genocentrism, translocalism,
and racinationism, each denoting tangled strands of rhetoric, senti-
ment, and practice. The English terms could be roughly translated
into Chinese as benyuan zhongxin zhuyi , kuadiyu zhuyi
, and zagen zhuyi , respectively, but zhuyi, unlike the
suffix -ism, has the disadvantage of suggesting a coherent and ratio-
nal set of tenets, an object of conscious subscription or even advocacy.
What I would like to emphasize instead is the often messy and quirky
braidedness of rhetoric, sentiment, and practice in each orientation.
Together, genocentrism, translocalism, and racinationism are config-
ured in complicated layerings, transmutations, synergies, and mutual
subversions.12
Briefly, genocentrism posits the meaning of life in diaspora primar-
ily if not exclusively in terms of relationship to origin: descent (Greek
genesis), race/descent/generation (genea), kind (genus). There is supposed
to be only one home, that single irreplaceable place where a person
naturally and indisputably belongs. Genocentric rhetoric ranges from
private expressions of homesickness to political programs of homeland
restoration. In sentiment, it can be nostalgic-elegiac or celebratory-
revivalist or anything in between. Genocentric practices take many
forms: refusal to alter ones original citizenship status, physical return
to the homeland, preservation of ones native language and/or cul-
ture in the hostland, preference for those from ones own place of
origin or dialect group, celebration of shared blood, participation
in homeland politics via long-distance nationalism (e.g., Anderson;
Glick-Schiller), and so on. Genocentrism is readily visible in Chinese
American history and contemporary life: in the well-known proverb
luoye (or yeluo ) guigen (when leaves fall they return
to the root), early immigrants practice of sending the bones of the
12
I am greatly indebted to L. Ling-Chi Wang for his much-cited seminal essay,
Roots and the Changing Identity of the Chinese in the United States; it was engage-
ment with his proposed identity categories, all involving gen (roots), that led me to my
current inquiries.
deceased back to China for burial in the home village, the proliferation
of contemporary after-hours or weekend Chinese language schools, for
example.
In contrast to the fixedness of genocentrism, translocalism does not
regard the condition of displacement from the homeland, shuttling,
and interstiality as necessarily deplorable, or tie identity formation to
the homeland or even to any single place of settlement. Translocal-
ism can be seen in a variety of rhetoric, such as atopic claims (the
diasporic subject is nowhere), the concept of the mobile home,
and the idea of home in the heart (China is in the heart; China
is wherever Chinese people are). Wen-ching Ho has provided a useful
review of theorists who have expressed translocal views, among them
Gayatri Spivak, who emphasizes the portability of culture (Spivak
93), and Trinh Minh-ha, who argues that home is where one moves
(Trinh 89). Rey Chow speaks of the involuntary passenger-in-transit
between cultures, for whom homelessness is the only home state
(Chow 197; cited in Zhang 29). In the Chinese context, the emotional
shadings of translocalism range from the sentimental lesson learned by
a Cong Su character that China is in my heart; wherever Chinese
are, there China is (Cong Su 240) to the hard-nosed practicality of
Hong Kongers pre-1997 acquisition of flexible citizenship (Ong);
from the grudging acceptance of mobility as the basis for a revised,
nodal definition of home (Zhang 2972) to the celebration of cos-
mopolitan mobility and unsettledness expressed in the often boastfully
pronounced phrase chuchu wujia chuchu jia (home-
less everywhere but at home everywhere). Because of the geographic
reach implicit in translocalism, it is most readily associated with dis-
courses of globality.13
Racinationism is premised on the possibility of creating a new home
in the land of settlement after dislocation from the homeland. (It should
be noted although the racinationist believes belongingness is made, not
born, the original racination in the homeland is usually naturalized,
so that only secondary racination is rendered visible.) Luodi shenggen
(putting down roots where one lands) is the racinationist
formulation most familiar to the Chinese; identity formation does not
have to be defined solely by the trauma of displacement but can take
13
Laurence Ma provides a nuanced discussion of the complexities of translocalism
in the Chinese diaspora (Ma and Cartier 149).
58 sau-ling c. wong
place in a new setting. Racinationism can be tinted with feelings of

reluctance, regret, and second-bestness, as in Ling-Chi Wangs asso-
ciation of luodi shenggen with the accommodationist survival strategy
of Chinese Americans during the Cold War (L. Wang 206). But it
can also take on a bright hue: during the optimistic Asian American
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, claiming America was a key
rallying point. In practice, racinationism can be manifested in such
actions as altering ones diet and other cultural practices, producing
progeny, taking an interest or playing a role in the politics and cul-
ture of the hostland, becoming naturalized as a citizen, and so on.
The complexities of racinationism in a postcolonial context (that is,
after Chinas exposure to the West) have been succinctly captured in a
recent essay by Wang Dingjun entitled He Lin xiaozhang ruji
(Congratulations to Headmaster Lin on the Occasion of His Natu-
ralization), which sketches out his friends multiple transformations
from a Chinese by blood, who drinks brandy and eats steak,
to an American by law, who drinks maotai and eats jiaozi.
While acknowledging that such a naturalized immigrant is destined to
have two identities, Wang Dingjun also advises Headmaster Lin that
it is impossible to straddle two boats; he calls upon him to put aside
his regrets to become an utterly committed (sixin tadi )
American.
As can be seen in the above brief account, each of the three terms
genocentrism, translocalism, and racinationismis a loose collection
of inclinations representing a certain orientation or emphasis, not a
distinct type of subjectivity categorically incompatible with the others.
The possibility of slippage among rhetoric, sentiment, and practice
results in numerous permutations. A familiar example is an immi-
grant who persists in considering, and calling, himself a temporary
sojournerexhibiting genocentric rhetoric and sentimentswhile
engaging in racinationist practices such as obtaining citizenship from
the hostland. Another example is how the practice of studying the
ancestral language, generally seen as genocentric, could be conducted
for instrumental racinationist purposes, e.g., studying Chinese in order
to enhance ones chances for college or to get a better job in a multi-
national corporation in the United States.
III. Varieties of Global Vision and the Question of Spectatorship
Returning now to The Visitor from Paris, we can see convoluted

enmeshments and recombinations among genocentrism, translocalism,
and racinationism, as they are experienced and invoked by human
beings faced with life choices and options for self-narration in a glo-
balized context. Each of the main charactersthe unnamed narra-
tor, Liangzi, and the young man from Beijingembodies some form
of engagement with the world outside China, but analysis of their
engagements is immensely complicated by the issue of spectatorship. If
nothing else, just because the characters are set up in an overlapping
array of hosts and guests, each ones actions cannot but become self-
presentations on display for another (or others) to see and interpret.
Who is looking at whom? Is there an explicit audience? An implicit
audience?
The young man from Beijing has chosen a highly circumscribed
and symbolic form of global vision entailing some attention but not
full deferral to the gaze of Westerners. To him, having coffee on the
Champs Elyses is a necessary performance of contemporary Chinese-
ness: it is a remake of the old French movie that he saw as a child,
when China was still weak and impoverished. This reenactment is
accomplished by substituting Chinese characters for Western ones and
exhibiting the appropriate cultural literacy and wealth. (He has saved
enough to order coffee at the expensive caf as if money were no
object.) After this performance, the young man is able to go home
satisfied and at peace with himself. His indifference to expatriation
undermines the seeming inevitability of the narrators and Liangzis
aspirations for a deserved place in the world outside the homeland.
Vis--vis this larger world, the young mans stance is characterized by
curiosity without adulation. Toward his motherland, so long victim-
ized and despised by Western powers, his reaction is neither extreme
rejection nor extreme defensiveness. Certainly, he exhibits the double
consciousness of the culturally colonized about how he is seen by
foreigners; hence the effort he has put into dressing for the part. But,
as Liangzi puts it, Ta meiyou pinqi (43), which can be
loosely rendered as He doesnt act cheap or He doesnt act like
a poor man. To put it another way, the young man from Beijing
from the capital, and thus qualified to represent the national sub-
ject, or at least a version of itis neither self-debasing nor arrogant
60 sau-ling c. wong
(bubei bukang ): he has preserved his dignity even while con-

ceding the need to take the gaze of foreigners into consideration and
to improve the image of the Chinese.
Liangzi, by her self-reckoning, has snatched a good part as global
citizen on the world stage, someone for whom identification with any
specific place, even the homeland, is deemed too limiting. At one level,
she believes that only total participation in globalization is good enough
for the elite of a powerful new China. Yet at heart translocal Liangzi
cannot avoid genocentrism, and the contradiction is her downfall: in
the end, her victory seems pyrrhic. Her confusion is clearly a prod-
uct of Chinas recent phenomenal economic growth and confronta-
tion with globalization. As the narrator jokes, half consolingly and
half gloatingly: This is not your fault but the fault of modernization.
Imagine, if you and your husband were traveling around the world on
an oxcart, you would never exhaust the globe in your lifetime (42).
The putative global citizen ironically ends up experiencing disap-
pointment and ennui because she has misrecognized her audience.
Liangzi has subjected herself to the gaze of foreigners who equate
their way of life with modernization tout court and grant little merit
to the occasional redeemed Chinese individual. Yet it is not the West-
ern audience but the Chinese one, conscious of a history of national
humiliation, who can truly appreciate the magnitude of her cultural
conquest. Unfortunately, her choice has necessarily removed her from
the one audience that matters, and her tantalizing global vision will
never bring its anticipated gratification. A vocabulary and narrative of
globality (here coded as translocalist glamour) has obscured Liangzis
genocentric preoccupations from herself. If power to validate Chinese
superiority is vested in an extranational, global source, frustration of
the desire for validation will be built in, as genuine, grounded inter-
action with the rest of the world is foreclosed by an introverted gaze
mistaken as an extraverted one.
In contrast to Liangzi, the young man takes his own counsel and
serves as his own audience: the foreign audience watching him on
the world stage (the Champs-Elyses) is more in the nature of human
props for his national-allegorical psychodrama. They can be dispensed
with as soon as it is proven that he is not a parochial country bumpkin
(tubaozi ). Afterward he returns to China to live as a worker, to
participate in globalization through technical or economic activityin
other words, instrumentally. Culturally he remains genocentric with
no apologies.14 Although Liangzi seems to express admiration for the

young man, the question remains whether he has really effected a
remaking of the Western-imposed cultural script and a reaffirmation of
the inviolate cultural self-sufficiency of China, or his contained engage-
ment with globalization is an A-Q-style15 salving of Chinas historically
wounded pride.
Lastly, if the world is the stage for the citizens of a newly risen
China, the narrator, by choosing to become located in the hostland,
a contented practitioner of racinationism, has relinquished any signifi-
cant claim on the globe. She is free from worries about audience and
validation, but at the cost of irrelevance. Ultimately, the author appears
reticent about what the narrator stands for. By making her a patently
ordinary and unambitious Chinese diasporic subject ensconced in a
single place, is Wang Ruiyun illustrating the irrelevance of racina-
tionism in a globalized world or subtly expressing misgivings about
the obsession with globality, shared by so many Chinese today and
evinced by both Liangzi and the young man in different but equally
convoluted forms?
IV. Global Vision and Shijie huawen/huaren wenxue
Transposing insights drawn from the above parabolic reading of

The Visitor from Paris, I now turn to the question of global vision
in Chinese criticism on Sinophone literature outside China. How is
14
Interestingly, left out of Wang Ruiyuns array of fictional choices is the coerced
participation in globalization by numerous Chinese emigrant workers, many of them
smuggled across borders to labor in oppressive conditions. For these emigrants, there
is no life of modest prosperity (xiaokang ) to return to in the homeland, such as
the young man from Beijing can expect. Saving for years to perform cultural vindica-
tion would be an unthinkable self-indulgence. Lumpen migrationalong with resultant
demographic concentration in Chinatowns around the worldis the unspeakable in
the relentlessly upbeat picture of contemporary Chinese global prominence circulat-
ing in the public imagination. Note that the geographical nodes of The Visitor from
Paris do not include any Chinatowns.
15
A Q (also spelled Ah Q in some English translations) is the protagonist of Lu
Xuns 1921 eponymous satirical novella A Q Zhengzhuan, or The True Story of A Q. He
is a consummate reality-denier who rationalizes away all humiliation and bullying
by imagining himself to be superior and by declaring mental victory. A Qs name
has come to represent the unregenerate, self-deluding aspects of the Chinese national
character.
62 sau-ling c. wong
global vision understood by various critics? In what form(s) is global

vision manifested? To what extent can the concepts of genocentrism,
translocalism, and racinationism help shed light on Chinese critical
scholarship on Sinophone literature outside China? Do the same
enmeshments among three orientations obtain in theorizations of this
body of work? And, from a Chinese Americanist point of view, what
are the repercussions of being drawn into the orbit of a China-based
critical practice? In this inquiry, I am most intrigued by the contro-
versy in China surrounding the shift from shijie huawen wenxue to shijie
huaren wenxue. While the subsumption of Sinophone Chinese Ameri-
can literature under shijie huawen wenxue, based on the use of the Chi-
nese language, is easily understandable if not universally endorsed,
the criterion of ethnic membership implicit in shijie huaren wenxue
would implicate Chinese-ancestry writers in the United States in ways
that they and their critics in the Asian American tradition may find
problematic.
Chen Liaos 2008 chronological survey of Sinophone literary stud-
ies, Huawen wenxue yanjiu shanshi nian ,
traces the development of the field in three stages, each covering a
decade.16 Sinophone literary studies is said to have begun with the
literatures of Taiwan and Hong Kong (19791982); in 1986, a con-
ference in Shenzhen entitled Tai Gang yu haiwai huawen wenxue
xueshu yantao hui (Academic
Conference on Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Overseas Chinese Litera-
tures, my translation) represented an expanded scope and marked the
official beginning of haiwai wenxue as a recognized field of study.17 In
the second decade, 19891999, the Sinophone literature of Macau
was added to those of Taiwan and Hong Kong. In 1993, shijie hua-
wen wenxue was first used in the name of an international academic
conference, and its study has since developed into a new discipline,
with courses offered in institutions of higher education and masters
and doctoral students working under this rubric. In the third decade,
16
Yang provides another survey of the field.
17
A minor historical footnote: Wu Bing (11) notes that it was because the 1986
Shenzhen conference accepted my paper on Sinophone Chinese American literature
that the name of the conference had to be expanded from Taiwan and Hong Kong
Literature to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Overseas Chinese literature. Having been
an unwitting player in this process, I am struck by a certain haphazardness in what
might appear to be a reasoned conceptual evolutiona good reminder that too-
smooth developmental narratives should always be taken with a grain of salt.
from 1999 to 2008, a new professional organization, Zhongguo shijie

huawen wenxue xuehui , was established. In
Chens account, shijie represents the culmination of a quasi-natural
growth process: the scope of Sinophone literary studies moves from
the narrow to the broad, ending with the globe.
While Chen Liao concentrates on institutional history, some Chi-
nese scholars have expounded on their understanding of the mean-
ing of global vision. Rao Pengzi has been one of the most vocal and
thoughtful critics to remark on this concept. In a 1994 essay (Guanyu
haiwai huawen wenxue yanjiu de sikao), she argues that the entire
globe is in a period of major cultural transformation, and in that con-
text students of haiwai huawen wenxue should adopt a broader cultural
perspective, that is, to examine Sinophone literatures in various coun-
tries and regions from the perspective of world culture and literature,
in order to reveal their cultural and aesthetic value (75; my transla-
tion). Rao Pengzi and Fei Yong, in a 1996 essay on the meaning of the
naming of haiwai huawen wenxue, state: As the twentieth century draws
to a close, Chinese writers both inside and outside China can finally
transcend the constraints of ethnicity, nation, etc. and write in a spirit
of capaciousness (37; my translation). The authors go on to quote,
apparently approvingly, Wang Runhuas prediction of a utopia of
world Chinese-language literature (my translation of shijie huawen
wenxue de datong shijie ), datong connotating a
Confucian ideal of a harmonious, compassionate society. Rao Pengzis
2007 speech at the Second Summit Forum on shijie huawen wenxue (Zai
dierjie), reflecting on the previous conference in 2005, highlights the
participants interest in the diversity of Chinese all over the world,
the Sinophone writers multiple identities and bidirectional identifica-
tion (3), and the process of localization their works must undergo
(4). In a 2007 essay, Wu Yiqi associates quanqui/shijie yishi and quanqiu/
shijie shiye with the qualities of diversity (duoyuan ) and tolerance
(kuanrong ) (79).18 If sometimes vague on details, these critics expli-
cations of global vision share a belief in tolerance and respect for the
18
Du Guoqing, a comparative literature scholar from Taiwan now teaching in the
United States, has also spoken on the spirit of shijie huawen wenxue in terms echoing
those of his China-based colleagues: diversity, shijie datong, the need for comparative
study. It is precisely because of global vision (shijie shiye) that it is possible to do com-
parisons (Tao 84; my translation).
64 sau-ling c. wong
diversity and differences to be found in Sinophone literature from all

parts of the world.19
Interestingly, however, alongside these mostly nuanced accounts of
global vision, a number of superficially globalist but, in my view, at
heart narrowly genocentric formulations have appeared in the criti-
cal literature. These threaten to elide differences by prescribing a
homogenized definition of Chineseness applied to writers outside
China.20 For example, Chen Xianmao, in a 1997 essay entitled Hai-
wai huawen wenxue yu Zhongguo chuantong wenhua (Overseas
Chinese Literature and Traditional Chinese Culture), writes:
Many Chinese overseasespecially those in countries in Europe and
Americain spite of having obtained foreign citizenship, still identify
themselves as Chinese, or even if they dont say so, at heart they still
consider themselves Chinese. By China I refer not to China in the
sense of nationality but to China in the sense of culture. . . . [The culture
of a people] . . . is a super-stable psychic structure, one that displacements
in time and space can hardly alter. China is a country with an ancient,
5,000-year-old civilization. All of Chinas descendants ( yanhuang zisun
) are proud of owning the most ancient civilization on earth. And
Chinese culture, led by Confucian thought, stresses that the interests of
the country, the people, the collective, and the clan supersede the inter-
ests of the individual, thus strengthening the Chinese peoples sense of
nationhood and peoplehood. Therefore overseas Chinese people have
developed the common characteristics of attachment to Chinese culture
and self-confidence and respect toward ones people. Overseas Chinese
literature written in Chinese (the majority composed by Chinese writers)
has thus become a vehicle of culture, bearing witness to the vicissitudes
of Chinese culture overseas. (46; my translation)
Chen Xianmao conceptualizes culture as a transhistorical and trans-
geographic super-stable psychic structure impervious to changes in
material conditions. As such, it is deterministic, sweeping up everyone
willy-nilly. Thus Chens description of the common characteristics of
overseas need not be supported by evidence but is simply proclaimed
19
Europe-based writer Zhao Shuxia attempts to reconcile centripetal and centrifu-
gal impulses in a theory of Sinophone writing that is genocentric (classifiable under
Chinese literary history) as well as global and universalist, as a member of a global
village (Zhao Shuxia 4).
20
One of the anonymous reviewers of this essay suggests that my critique of
Sinocentric scholarship might be guilty of targeting the more unsophisticated Chinese
critics and thus might not be fair. It should be pointed out that Chen Xianmao and
Shi Jianwei are established, well-published, and frequently cited scholars on global
Chinese literature and cannot be dismissed as fringe elements.
as doxic, brooking no dissent. In truth, if an overseas Chinese person

doesnt say so, how does Chen come by the knowledge of his or her
feelings about identity? And if overseas Chinese inevitably develop
self-confidence and respect toward ones people, how does one
account for stories of their unsavory exploits and mutual exploitation
that abound in any overseas Chinese newspaper on any given day?
The function of motherhood statements like Chens is less to learn
about specific works of literature in specific locales than to provide
self-flattery to an insecure Chinese ego. One is reminded of Liangzi
in The Visitor from Paris, whose global pretensions reveal a geno-
centric desire to gain validation. Only in this case Chen provides the
reassurance himself by predetermining the nature of overseas Chinese
and their literatures.
From a Chinese Americanist point of view, Sinocentric cultural
chauvinism is threatening to the discursive space that Asian American
cultural nationalist discourse carved out with great effort in the 1960s
and 1970s. A hermetic, ahistorical concept of Chinese culture erases
wholesale the challenges faced by Chinese Americans, especially those
in the American-born generations, in a far different social, economic,
political, and cultural setting. Furthermore, it forecloses the possibility
of a locally generated culture whose main concern is not to uphold
the homelands injured pride. It is not surprising that in another essay,
Haiwai huawen wenxue yu Zhongguo wenxue de guanxi (The
Relationship Between Overseas Sinophone Literature and Chinese
Literature) (1996), Chen Xianmao dismisses the possibility, raised by
Singaporean Chinese scholar Wang Runhua, that overseas Chinese
literatures could develop centers outside China. Nature-based meta-
phors underlie Chens argument:
China is a country where the entire population uses the Chinese language.
Its literary soil is extremely rich. This dictates that Chinas Sinophone lit-
erature will constantly be in a state of vitality and transformation, like an
endlessly flowing mighty river. The flower of overseas Sinophone litera-
ture, however, does not bloom in societies where the Chinese language
occupies a minority status. The literary soil in these places is not rich;
thus the Sinophone writing cannot absorb the kind of nutrients neces-
sary for growth that can only be found in the mother country. From this
standpoint, Chinese literature is the source, overseas Sinophone litera-
ture is the tributary; Chinese literature is the roots, overseas Sinophone
literature is the leaves. This sums up the relationship between Chinese
literature and overseas Sinophone literature at this point in time. Away
from the source and the fountainhead, a river will run dry. Away from
the roots and the tree trunk, the leaves will wither. (48; my translation)
66 sau-ling c. wong
Chens organic/biologistic dictates again threatens to silence a critical

tradition like the Asian American one, which is built on the premise
that affiliation could replace filiation to create a new community and a
new culture. To say that away from the roots and the tree trunk, the
leaves will wither is to negate any possibility of luodi shenggen, as if the
soil that overseas writers have landed on were nothing: thin air from
which no alternative nutrient could be drawn. While this bolsters
Chinese cultural pride, the material presence and cultural vitality of
the non-Chinese locale, as well as the creativity of the overseas writer,
are obliterated with a stroke of Chens pen.
In light of the strength of genocentrism in certain critical quarters,
as a Chinese Americanist I am particularly intrigued by the shift from
shijie huawen wenxue to shijie huaren wenxue, since what appears at first
sight a simple expansion of scope actually brings out thorny issues at
the heart of the concept of culture.21 The body of work that I have
tentatively referred to as Sinophone Chinese American literature has
been (or some of its components have been) variously classified by
scholars. Among the many categories under which it has been sub-
sumed are:
1. wanqing xiaoshuo : late Qing dynasty fiction, in the tradi-

tion set forth by David Der-wei Wang; applicable to such works
as Kushehui and others collected in A Yings Fanmei huagong jinyue
wenxue ji.
2. tangrenjie wenxue : Chinatown literature (e.g., Wen-
quan), a term preferred by Chinese American leftists from at least
the 1940s to the 1960s, but later often spurned for its narrowness
of outlook. A recent literary heir of this tradition is the group of
mainland-origin immigrant writers named caogen wenqun
(Zong Ying, Jueqi; Cong Meiguo).
3. huaqiao wenxue : Chinese sojourner literature or more
loosely, overseas Chinese literature.22
4. fangzhu wenxue : literature of exile, Bai Xianyongs pre-
ferred term.
21
The following list and analysis of nomenclature appeared in a slightly different
form in my 2005 essay Huang yu hei.
22
For an early analysis of terms such as tangrenjie wenxue and huaqiao wenxue, see my
1989 essay Whats in a Name.
5. liuxuesheng wenxue : literature of the foreign student

or study-abroad literature.23
6. haiwai huawen wenxue and haiwai huaren wenxue: both loosely trans-
latable into English as overseas Chinese literature, which, how-
ever, collapses the distinction between language and ethnicity.
7. In English, Chinese American literature: a subset of Asian
American literature with two possible Chinese renditions: meihua
wenxue and huamei wenxue . Xiao-huang Yins
Chinese American Literature Since the 1980s is based on such a concep-
tualization of a bilingual tradition.
8. huamei wenxue: a superordinate body of work conceptualized as
having an Anglophone and a Sinophone component. The Chinese-
language equivalent of Chinese American literature.
9. meihua wenxue: American Chinese literature, whose difference in
word order from Chinese American literature registers a greater
emphasis on the American status of the authors and texts.
10. huaren lisan wenxue : Chinese diasporic literature
or literatures of the Chinese diaspora, with the plural form sig-
naling multiplicity (e.g., Zhao Yiheng, Liuwai sangzhi; Nian-
nian suisui).24
11. shijie huawen wenxue and shijie huaren wenxue: both translatable into
English as Chinese world literature but again blurring language
and ethnicity. In the title of this essay I have translated them as
world literature in Chinese and world literature by Chinese
respectively. A fuller discussion is provided below.
12. postcolonial literature (S. Ma).
13. LOWINUS or Literatures of What Is Now the United States
(Shan).
14. the Sinophone (Shih).
As I have argued at length elsewhere (Tales of Postwar Chinatown;

The Stakes of Textual Border-crossing), nomenclature is not simply
labeling but also production of a critical and pedagogical practice.
Thus debates surrounding naming are inevitably markers of contes-
tations in cultural territory. As with any system of classification, the
23
The second term is Wang Chih-mings. See his Transpacific Articulations for
a comprehensive study of this type of literature.
24
Zhao Yiheng advocates translating diaspora as sanju in the first essay, but
changes to the more widely accepted lisan in the second essay.
68 sau-ling c. wong
risk of overlooking the porosity between categories is real, but they

do serve a useful function when placed relationally to each other.
Professionally and personally, I am most committed to (7) Chinese
American literature and open to and interested in (10) huaren lisan
wenxue. But within the investigative framework of this essay, I am most
fascinated and provoked by (11) shijie huawen wenxue and shijie huaren
wenxue, which I see as an updated version of (6) haiwai huawen wenxue
and haiwai huaren wenxue. I do not find the merging of Sinophone and
Anglophone literatures under the rubric of Chinese American litera-
ture to be excessively problematic, since there is a material basis, a
common history and shared current conditions, between Sinophone
writers (thus far, to the best of my knowledge, all from the immigrant
generation) and Anglophone writers (typically of the second or sub-
sequent generations). (In recent years, an increasing number of first-
generation writers in the United States, such as Ha Jin and Yiyun
Li, have attained success publishing in English.) However, the shift
from haiwai to shijie is not about material continuitiesthe material
phenomenon referenced, that of the physical movements of Chinese
people from China to various parts of the world, is identical in both
casesbut about re-valuation, a rebranding of sorts. If haiwai evokes
the process of scattering as well as a muted anxiety about the center/
origin, shijie, in completely ignoring the issue of center/origin (the
world is spoken of by everyone everywhere), connotes an ambition to
make ones presence known and appreciated in the world. Shijie huawen
wenxue reflects a desire to resist the previous domination of language-
based literatures such as the Anglophone and the Francophone (Tao;
Shih). In a decolonizing move, when shijie huawen wenxue takes center
stage, locatedness recedes to the background, and Sinophone Chinese
American literature may simply be reduced to serving the cause of
huawen wenxues presumed greatness.
The shift from shijie huawen wenxue to shijie huaren wenxue strikes me as
even more vexed, opening up a host of difficult issues. Assembling a
literature by language is relatively defensible because of the simplicity
of the criteria applied. A single written language is in question,25 and,
at least at this juncture in history, Sinophone writing across the globe
is directly tied to the immigration and settlement of people of ethnic
25
Of course, Shu-mei Shihs concept of the Sinophone contests even this seemingly
commonsensical idea that Chinese is a single language.
Chinese extraction. However, when one moves from world literature

in Chinese to world literature by Chinese, the maneuver is not
simply a quasi-natural expansion or extension (as some critics seem to
assume, using terms like kuozhang ; e.g., Liu 28); rather, the het-
erogeneity quotient takes an immense leap as one language becomes
many. What, then, holds world literature by Chinese together except
ethnicity? While comparative study attentive to the multiple located-
ness and the constructedness of ethnicity is still possible, given the cur-
rent Chinese obsession with numerical strength, historical vindication,
and global recognition, the most appealing conceptualization of eth-
nicity might be shared blood: blood is thicker than water (xue nong
yu shui ), as the saying goes. The discourse of shared blood
allows disparate writers in non-Chinese languages, some of whom are
quite distanced by circumstances or by choice from Chinese culture,
to be claimed as one of us (zijiren ). This serves a redound-
ive function, turning the Chinese diaspora into yet another source of
glory: any award given to Chinese-ancestry writers in any country and
any language could then be celebrated as huaren zhi guang ,
the light of the Chinese. If my reading is validthat the turn to
shijie huaren wenxue echoes a national desire to maximize evidence for
Chinese global powerthen no wonder the study of shijie huaren wenxue
has grown so quickly. In 1997 Zhao Yiheng lamented that he could
find hardly any criticism on mainland-origin Chinese writers in vari-
ous parts of the world (France, England, the United States) (Liuwai
sangzhi 116); today the study of shijie huaren wenxue is thriving (Rao,
Zai dierjie).
In the case of Chinese American literature, Sinophone and Anglo-
phone, what might happen if the Sinophone component is drawn into
the sphere of world literature by Chinese? One serious consequence
is the attribution of cultural genocentrism to everyone with Chinese
blood. Like Chen Xianmaos description, cited above, of superior
Chinese common characteristics shared by all overseas Chinese, the
attribution of a shared promulgative and promotional function to all
Chinese-ancestry writers is done by fiat. For example, in a 2000 essay,
Shi Jianwei, using a militaristic metaphor, refers to Sinophone Chinese
American literature as shenglijun (reinforcement troops) that
add to the strength of shijie huawen wenxue (Meiguo huawen wenxue
gaiguan). In a 2003 essay, Shi goes on to elaborate on what he sees
as the proper role of overseas huaren wenxue; in this formulation, the
concept of descent ( yi ) is used to blur any distinction between
70 sau-ling c. wong
Chinese in China, overseas Chinese of the immigrant generation, and

Chinese-ancestry people born abroad.
In haiwai huaren wenxue studies, Chinese people (huaren) and Chinese-an-
cestry individuals (huayi) are regarded as vehicles for carrying messages
from the culture of the Chinese people. . . . Long ago I said that the core
of huaren wenxue is culture. Huaren wenxue should be a literature that dis-
plays Chinese culture. . . . Haiwai huaren wenxue is the vehicle for overseas
Chinese culture, and overseas Chinese culture is the overseas extension
of the culture of the motherland. (Cong bianyuan zouxiang zhuliu
5, 7; my translation)26
The attraction of a vision of Chinese cultural genocentrism multiplied
throughout the world fits well into a vindicating and triumphalist nar-
rative of the recent rise of China; its power must not be underesti-
mated. It is a short slide from self-congratulation to contempt for those
deemed outside the pale of civilization by the China-centered. Witness
these words from Lin Nan:
From language use to stylistic nuances, overseas Sinophone literature
clearly bears the literary genes [my italics] of the Chinese literature of
China. This is the result of nurturance from a strong maternal culture.
May I suggest the following metaphor: mainland Chinese literature is
an overdeveloped, richly resourced, and muscular older brother, while
overseas Sinophone literature is a late-born, scrawny little brother who
can only suck up canned mothers milk long distance. [Here the meta-
phors seem to have gotten a little mixed up.] But still, they are from
the same mother. The older brother should love and care for the little
brother. He shouldnt keep saying that the little brother is ugly. (My
translation)
In a genocentric familial discourse where literary genes can be
asserted as a self-explanatory concept, all varieties of Sinophone Chi-
nese literature outside China are designated the permanent runt of
Chinese literature; reduced to fungible pieces of evidence of Chinas
belatedly recognized greatness; and conscripted to serve Sinocentric
global cultural ambitions (but voluntarily, naturellement!).
Would the use of a non-Chinese language give a Chinese-ancestry
writer outside China the right to some cultural autonomy? In the view
of some mainland Chinese critics, apparently not. For example, Hu
26
Rao has also suggested that huaren wenxue is a biaoxian huazu wenhua de wenxue
a literature that expresses the culture of the Chinese
people (cited in Liu 28), but her formulation is less prescriptive than descriptive in
intention.
Yong, a scholar of Anglophone Chinese American literature, has artic-

ulated a vision very similar to the genetics-inflected discourses of the
students of Sinophone Chinese American literature cited above. In his
2003 book Wenhua de xiangchou: Meiguo huayi wenxue de wenhua rentong, Hu
lays bare the blood-based genocentrism of certain studies of Chinese
American literature that use a deceptively global rhetoric. Making it
a point to differentiate Chinese American literature from other ethnic
minority American literatures, Hu writes:
Chinese American literatures homecoming complex (guixiang qingjie
) is different in nature from the roots-seeking literature of blacks.
As the saying goes, blood is thicker than water. Chinese people all over
the world are one big family. Chinese scattered overseas have all inherited
the superior traditions of the Chinese people. Behind them is a Chinese
civilization of venerable history, one that is ceaselessly developing and
seeking advancement, based in a nation-state growing daily in prosper-
ity. The shijie wenhua shiye (global cultural vision) of Chinese American
literature and literary studies is aligned with and echoes a historical fact,
a real condition: that Cultural China is exercising increasing influence
in the world. Therefore it is destined to help Chinese culture and Chi-
nese literature present a new image of vibrant vitality in the new world
order of the twenty-first century, allowing [Chinese culture and Chinese
literature] to develop together with the cultures and literary traditions
of other peoples [minzu ] in the new world order. (233; my transla-
tion; my italics)
The sons and daughters of China, Hu Yong declares, will all volun-
tarily assume the cultural mission [of promoting Chinese culture and
safeguarding the Chinese literary tradition] (232; my translation; my
italics).
A number of Chinese critics are opposed to the view that blood
dictates culture and that Chinese American writing, whether Anglo-
phone or Sinophone, functions only to transmit both, for the greater
glory of the motherland. For example, as early as 1997, in his survey
of diasporic Sinophone writers mentioned above, Zhao Yiheng made
an incisive argument against Sinocentric prescriptivism for Chinese-
ancestry writers outside China (those he refers to as diasporic):
In the most fundamental sense, diaspora as a cultural phenomenon is
nonutilitarian. We cannot judge it on the basis of whether a diasporic
sensibility in literature or art helps or does not help to promote the
great cause of nationhood, whether it helps or does not help assimila-
tion, whether it helps or does not help improve the image of Chinese
overseas. (Liuwai sangzhi 117; my translation)
72 sau-ling c. wong
Guo Yingjian bluntly raises this question: Is the claiming of Anglo-

phone Chinese American literature as part of some overarching Chi-
nese culture not a form of wishful thinking, a one-sided love affair?
(Yixiang qingyuan and zizuo duoqing are his own
words) (Lun Meiguo huayi wenxue yanjiu 3). Furthermore, disen-
tangling deceptive global rhetoric from questions of Chinese cultural
worth and transmission, Guo promotes a form of global vision (his
phrase is shijie yanguang ) based on diversity, multicultural-
ism, multiraciality, and simultaneous independence and mutual inter-
action (4). In Mingming, zhuti, rentong (2007), Guo elaborates on
his critique of certain genocentric Chinese scholarship that refuses to
consider the possibility that Chinese American literature is part of
American literature.
Most recently, Wu Bing, in a 2008 essay entitled Guanyu huayi
Meiguo wenxue yanjiu de sikao, considers the question Does [Anglo-
phone] Chinese American literature identify with or promote Chinese
culture? In answer, she points to the historical conditions under which
many Chinese-ancestry writers will have to engage Chinese culture
in ways hardly recognizable to the Chinese in China. Wus emphasis
on locatedness and historical specificity is what is lacking in the stri-
dently genocentric discourses, clothed in global rhetoric, espoused by
certain critics of Chinese American literature.
Conclusion
As a visual metaphor, global vision or quanqiu shiye cannot be innocent

of the politics informing any gaze: no one who leads a material exis-
tence in the world can be a quasi-Emersonian transparent eyeball
looking upon it without interest. As The Visitor from Paris shows,
many vexed questions about agency, direction, object, and purpose
underlie any representation of shiye. Who looks? From what location?
From what point of view? At what and for what? As invoked by cer-
tain Chinese critics of Sinophone Chinese American literature, quanqiu
shiye, in a conveniently fudged manner, refers simultaneously to China
looking at the world and the world looking at China. Again conve-
niently, both meanings feed into an overarching narrative of cultural
vindication and triumphalism, as we have seen in the analysis of shijie
huawen wenxue and shijie huaren wenxue. In certain prescriptive views, the
expansion of visual reach when China looks at the world means the
aggrandizement of cultural claims on the basis of shared blood. The

world looking at China, it is hoped, will provide the validation and
approval needed to remove vestiges of self-doubt carried from the days
of Chinas weakness and humiliation. The historical roots of such a
hope are readily understandable. Certainly, in terms of what Shu-
mei Shih calls the technologies of recognition (World Literature),
such as the Nobel Prize for Literature, China has long smarted from
Eurocentric bias and may have a justifiable grievance. But I doubt if
grievance can be an adequate basis for a cultural theory. When the
grand narrative of quanqiu shiye ignores locatedness and sweeps up liter-
ary works produced out of historically specific times and places, what
may result, I fear, may be a serious case of looking without seeing
shi er bujian .
Acknowledgments
I sincerely thank the editors of this volume, Jing Tsu and David Der-
wei Wang, for the invitation to present an earlier version of this essay
at the December 2007 conference, Globalizing Modern Chinese Lit-
erature: Sinophone and Diasporic Writings, at Harvard University,
and for the opportunity to revise and publish it for this anthology. I
especially owe an immense debt of gratitude to Jing Tsu for her saintly
patience and encouragement during the protracted birth of this essay.
Participants at the following gatherings asked me sharp questions and
gave me invaluable suggestions for revision: in March 2007, Diaspora
Studies Workshop, National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung,
at the invitation of Lee Yu-cheng, Huang Hsinya, and Tee Kim
Tong; in August 2007, the Eighth Symposium of the Chinese Cana-
dian Writers Association, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, at the
invitation of Lin Ting Ting, Leung Laifong, and others from the Chi-
nese Canadian Writers Association; in December 2007, the Harvard
conference mentioned above; and in May 2008, a series of lectures on
Asian American literature that I presented at Beijing Foreign Studies
University and Beijing Language and Culture University, at the invita-
tion of Wu Bing, Liu Kuilan, and Lu Wei. In particular, Li Jinchaos
and Ding Yuans engagements with my arguments during Q&A ses-
sions in Beijing were wonderfully stimulating and insightful. I thank
Wu Bing for generously sharing her essays on Chinese American lit-
erature with me. I had the pleasure of meeting some key Chinese
74 sau-ling c. wong
critics in the field, some of whom I have cited here: Huang Wanhua,
Liu Denghan, Rao Pengzi, Shi Jianwei, Wu Yiqi, and Zong Ying,
among others. I thank them for their pioneering work and for gener-
ously sharing their publications with me (in particular, Zong Ying for
answering my queries). While I dont always see eye-to-eye with some
of my China-based colleagues, I hope that my expressions of disagree-
ment have been respectful and based on sound arguments. My essay
is better for the expertise of Pu Ruoqian, Wen-ching Ho, and Lei
Lei; to them I render my heartfelt thanks. Without Estelle Yongbing
Zhaos highly competent research assistance, this essay could never
have been written. Sunny Xiang gamely assisted me with research and
proofreading at short notice. Last but not least, I thank the publishers
anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who made valuable sugges-
tions for improving my arguments.
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(RE)MAPPING SINOPHONE LITERATURE
Tee Kim Tong
In the early twentieth century, in spite of social and political turbu-

lence, a vernacular literature emerged in China and produced a mod-
ern literary tradition, particularly after the May Fourth new literary
movement of 1919. But the Chinese literati did not have a monopoly
as producers of Sinophone literary texts. Emigrant Chinese, who since
the nineteenth century have formed various diasporic communities in
the Nanyangor the Southern Ocean, as Southeast Asia as a region
was commonly known to the Chinese in the colonial daysand other
parts of the world, also produced literary works in the Sinophone.
These diasporic Chinese communities were able to maintain some
cultural activities and cultivate their literary fields, minor and margin-
alized though they were. After the Second World War, the political
situation in Asia changed greatly as most colonial Southeast Asian
countries gained their independence. In the Sinophone world, while
China became the Communist PRC in 1949, Hong Kong and Macau
remained colonies until the handovers in 1997 and 1999 respectively,
and Taiwan became the Nationalist KMTs base to strike back at the
mainland. Since then the development of Chinese language literature
in different cultural environments around China has followed different
historical trajectories.
Over at least three decades in the twentieth century, literature pro-
duced in the Sinophone communities outside China has been gener-
ally classified as either haiwai huawen wenxue (overseas
Chinese literature) or shijie huawen wenxue (world
Chinese literature/global Chinese literature) by critics and scholars
in Taiwan and China alike.1 Much has been written about such a
construction or categorization already. As an imprecise geopolitical
label, overseas Chinese literature indicates the dominant position,
1
In addition to the different shijie huawen wenxue xuehui
(associations of world Chinese literature) in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, there
have been conferences on the topic held and journals thus entitled published in these
regions.
78 tee kim tong
marginalizing ideology, and co-optive operation of Chinese literature

as both national and ethnic literature. By the same token, world
Chinese literature refers exclusively to Chinese literary articulations
around the world, but not those of China, as if it were an extrater-
restrial country. In earlier days other terms such as Huaqiao wenxue
and qiaomin wenxue (overseas compatriot litera-
ture) were used, claiming the literary products by Chinese who resided
overseas as Chinese sojourners literature. For obvious reasons, these
terms became misnomers in the postcolonial era. In recent years, to
overcome the limitations and problems of the old and the older con-
cepts and answer the call for a new concept that designates a structural
and ideological difference, scholars such as Dominic Cheung, Shih
Shu-mei, and David Der-wei Wang have respectively reformulated
the English term Sinophone literature to refer to the theoretical cat-
egory of literature written in Chinese (mostly produced outside China).
However, whereas Shih distinguishes Sinophone literature from
Chinese literature, both Cheung and Wang emphasize the terms
inclusive capacity and possibility.
Inspired by the phenomena of Anglophone and Francophone lit-
eratures and encouraged by Gao Xingjians reflections on literature in
Chinese, in a Chinese essay presented at the conference on Perspec-
tives in Global Sinophone Literature in the Twenty-first Century,
Dominic Cheung, himself a Sinophone Chinese American poet,
proposed that instead of national boundary, language should be used
as the criterion of categorization for Sinophone literature so as to avoid
unnecessary ideological conflicts (2003:13).2 According to Cheung,
categorized by language, rather than political entity, contemporary
Sinophone writings concentrate mainly on four regions, namely,
1) Mainland China; 2) Taiwan; 3) Southeast Asia; and 4) Hong Kong
and other overseas places (2003:13). In his observation, Sinophone
literature forms various imaginative communities: Using the same
language, like the many branches of one tree, they generate individu-
ally and become a multiple system, within which parallel development,
cross reference, mutual influence, and rejection take place (2003:14).
The tree in Cheungs context symbolizes the linguistic family tree.
2
Cheung translated Anglophone and Francophone in Chinese as Yingyu
muyu (English as mother tongue) and Fayu muyu (French as
mother tongue) respectively, referring to all global terrains where English and French
speakers use the colonial language as their mother tongue (Cheung, 2005).
(re)mapping sinophone literature 79
In 2005 Cheung reasserted his idea of Sinophone literature in another

Chinese paper on the theme of dispersion and reunion in TaiwanLit.3
However, whereas in 2003 he employed Huayu wenxue lingyu
for the Chinese equivalent of Sinophone literature, in 2005
Huayu quan was used. Here, the spatial concepts of field
(lingyu) and sphere (quan) are stressed so that they manifest the idea
of crossing or transcending the borders of a nation or nation-state.
In a 2004 paper on global literature Shih Shu-mei redefined the term
Sinophone literature, also following the concept of Francophone
and Anglophone literatures, to mean literature written in Chinese by
Chinese-speaking writers in various parts of the world outside China,
as distinguished from Chinese literatureliterature from China
(2004:29n5). For Shih it is crystal clear that Sinophone literature
is based on a particular language (Chinese) and place (outside China)
and includes literatures written in Chinese from Taiwan, pre-handover
Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Unlike Cheung, whose intention is to avoid unnecessary ideological
conflicts, Shih actively uses the term Sinophone literature to contest
the neglect and marginalization of literatures in Chinese published
outside China and the selective, ideological, and arbitary co-optation
of these literatures in Chinese literary history (2004:29n5; emphasis
mine). Furthermore, in this context and contention, Shih later speaks
of Sinophone Chinese American literature and about its disposition in
both Chinese and American literature.4 She asserts:
In the case of Chinese American literary history and criticism, literature
written in Hanyu has been systematically marginalized, if not consid-
ered politically suspect for its un-Americanness that can arouse fears of
charges of unassimilatability. Dismissed in both the canons of Chinese
literature and Chinese American literature, which are both based
on models of nationality and ethnicity, respectively, the Sinophone had
been crying for a name in itself. (2007a)
3
In this paper I use the acronym TaiwanLit to mean Taiwan wenxue
so as to avoid the ambiguity of Taiwanese literature and Taiwan literature.
4
Cf. the use of the term Sinophone Chinese American Literature in Sau-ling
Cynthia Wong, The Yellow and the Black: The African-American Presence in Sino-
phone Chinese American Literature, Chung-Wai Literary Monthly 34, no. 4
(2005): 1553. See also Wongs Global Vision and Locatedness: World Literature in
Chinese/by Chinese (Shijie huawen/huaren wenxue) from a Chinese Americanist Perspec-
tive in this volume.
80 tee kim tong
Shih, however, conceptualizes Sinophone literature to include litera-

ture in the Chinese language produced outside China, yet somewhat
paradoxically suggests the use of the same term to include literature
written by ethnic minorities inside China. Shihs argument here is that
the Sinophone, like the category of the Third World, which can also
exist within the First World, then also exists on the margins within
China (2007a). Her tactic is to displace or re-place the concept of
China by highlighting the heterogeneous nature of the Sinophone.
Unlike Shih, David Der-wei Wang proposes to use the term Sino-
phone literature globally to include all modern literatures in Chi-
nese, including Chinese literature produced inside China. For Wang,
although Sinophone literatures domain lies in overseas, it should also
be extended to the literature of Mainland China, and we should estab-
lish a dialogue between them (Wang, 2006). In such a dialogic con-
ceptualization, Sinophone literature refuses to be co-opted as another
version of world Chinese literature and thus manages to avoid the
latters hierarchical ideology. According to Wang, Sinophone literature
corresponds to Anglophone literature, Francophone literature, and
Hispanophone literature, referring to the use of an ex-colonizers
language to write, but it differs from them in terms of the relationship
between Chinese language and Chinese culture in the diasporic com-
munities and China. In Wenxue xinglu yu shijie xiangxiang
(Literary Traveling and Global Imagination), Wang
writes:
In the past hundred years or so, due to political and economic factors, a
great number of Chinese migrated abroad, especially to Southeast Asia.
They built various types of communities, in which a Chinese linguistic
and cultural milieu was consciously formed. In spite of all the familial
and national disorder and changes, Chinese writing has always been
a symbol of cultural (if not political ) continuity for the ethnic Chinese
of these regions. A typical example is Sinophone Malaysian literature.
(Wang, 2006; my translation)
Emphasizing linguistic and cultural ties, not ethnic and national bor-
ders, Wangs theory of Sinophone literature is significant especially
because it attempts to denationalize and deethnicize literature in
Chinese; for him the Sinophone is language- and community-based
(the Sinophone communities are entities within various nations). As
Wangs definition of Sinophone literature includes products from both
inside China and outside China, it is a literature that is Chinese but
not quite so; and China, in Wangs schema, is included outside the
Sinophone. Sinophone, therefore, is the mot juste to qualify such a
literature.
Cheung, Shih, and Wang model their concepts of the Sinophone on
the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone. However, whereas
generally speaking, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone
writers are ethnically not French, English, or Spanish, except most
Francophone writers in Quebec, who are French Canadians, writers of
the Sinophone are mostly ethnic Chinese, who are themselves speakers
of the Sinitic language. In short, as Chinese is the mother tongue and
not an ex-colonizers language, the diasporic Chinese writers should
be termed specifically Sinophone Chinese American, Sinophone Chi-
nese Malaysian, etc.
Cheung, Shih, and Wangs endeavor, however, is not the first
attempt to construct a theory of Sinophone literature in the study of lit-
erature in Chinese. In 1986 the first international conference on The
Commonwealth of Chinese Literature was held in Gunzburg, West
Germany (FRG). The conference is a historically significant event, as
it was probably the first time Sinophone literatures of different Chinese
communities around the world were discussed together in an interna-
tional interpretive space. Two years later the second conference on the
same theme, jointly organized by the Goethe Institut Singapore and
the Singapore Association of Writers, was held in Singapore, specifi-
cally focusing on Chinese Literature in Southeast Asia. In his closing
remarks of the conference, the late Professor Chow Tse-tsung
designated the idea of multiple literary centers for various Chinese
communities of literary production:
Originally there is only one center of Chinese literature, but in the past
century, owing to the frequent communication between China and for-
eign countries, ethnic Chinese communities have been established over-
seas. As there are more and more people writing in Chinese in these
communities, each community forms its own literary center. So, in addi-
tion to the Chinese literary center in China, there coexist a Singapor-
ean Chinese literary center, a Malaysian Chinese literary center, and
a Singaporean-Malaysian Chinese literary center, as well as a Filipino
Chinese literary center and an Indonesian Chinese literary center, etc.
(1988:360)
Though he used the term Chinese literature, Professor Chow helped
theorize Sinophone literary expression in each different Chinese
82 tee kim tong
community as a literary center, or to use Itamar Even-Zohars term, a

polysystem in its own right.5 Professor Chow, in fact, attempts to argue
against the China-centric ideology of marginalizing Chinese literary
products in Sinophone communities elsewhere as peripheral, frontier,
or tributary literature.
More recently, the Taiwanese poet Yu Kwang-chung has
posited a Three-World theory of Sinophone literature:
The First World of the Chinese language is of course Mainland China,
followed by Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, which jointly make up the
Second World. As for the Third World, that has to be Southeast
Asia . . . coming last since, in the countries of this region, the Chinese are
as a rule only a minority, albeit often a substantial one. (2007:3)
It goes without saying that Yus theory of a concentric Three Worlds
of Chinese-language literature is not a static concept. The three worlds
are interchangeable or dynamic in nature; their status changes accord-
ing to different historical situations. Yu argues that, for example, dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution . . . the Divine Land, as China is poetically
called, obviously did not qualify as the First World of Chinese lan-
guage and literature, but rather degraded itself to Third World level,
while it was left to Taiwan to uphold the torch of Chinese culture and
civilization (2007:5). Before the literary boom in the mid-1980s, the
field of contemporary ChinaLit,6 dominated and devastated by politi-
cal ideology, lay in ruins for decades. Its literary products could hardly
compete with the Sinophone literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong,
in terms of quality or quantity.
Yus Three-World theory of Sinophone literature also suggests the
concept of a literature of lesser diffusion. As he points out, what I
just said about Hong Kong writers frequently looking to Taiwan to
get their works published applies even more to authors in the Third
World, places such as Singapore and Malaysia (2007:7). Yus
remarks, in fact, echo the polysystemic observation of the nature of a
minor literary system: when a peripheral or weak system fails to dis-
seminate literature, it will use the channels of another (normally stron-
ger) literary polysystem to do so. Taiwan, from this perspective, has
5
For Even-Zohars theory of literary polysystems, see the polysystem studies issue,
Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990): 944.
6
In this paper the acronym ChinaLit, instead of Chinese literature, is used to
specifically stand for literature in Chinese produced in China.
for quite a long time been a literary First World. In the 1960s and
1970s, Sinophone writers from especially the Philippines and Malaysia
either published in Taiwan or went to Taiwan for higher education
and started their writing career in the island country. This was then
regarded as cultural return, indicating a cultural link between the
diasporic Chinese literary community and the metropolitan Taipei.
Moreover, it emphasized the dominant position of the Taiwanese liter-
ary field as the center of modern Sinophone literature.7
Each Sinophone literature works in its own field/system within
various environments that differ in geographical zone, dominant lan-
guage, ethnic combination, mainstream ideology, and literary as well
as cultural traditions. While the idea of Sinophone literature should
aim at eliminating or resisting the hierarchical order of the past China-
centric overseas Chinese literature or world Chinese literature,
future discourse on Sinophone literature as a global literature should
focus on two perspectives: 1) what is termed by Shih (and Franoise
Lionnet) as minor transnationalism,8 not the insignificant possibility
of an international mega-polysystem, for each Sinophone literature
is a minor literature in the national literary polysystem; 2) a different
form of diaspora that Shirley Geok-lin Lim, in an essay on diasporic
Hong Kong poets, terms traveling transnationalism (Lim, 2002). In
short, the transnational Sinophone writers frequently travel back and
forth between their homelands and territories of residence, suggesting
a departure-return process.
In 2000, when I guest-edited a topical issue on Sinophone Malaysian
literature for Chung-Wai Literary Monthly (now quarterly),9 an essay I wrote
especially for the issue entitled Haiwai cun yiji: Mahua wenxue
chaoxiang xinxing huawen wenxue lilun de jianli :
7
The term cultural return also metaphorically refers to the flow of a tributary
literature into the cultural mainstream. It further suggests the incorporation and co-
optation of the diasporic and border voices into the cultural center.
8
See the essays collected in Franoise Lionnet and Shih Shu-mei, eds., Minor Trans-
nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
9
Here I use the term Sinophone Malaysian literature to replace Mahua wenxue
literature so as to save the trouble of further explanation, for Mahua
could have literary, linguistic, and ethnic references, while Chinese Malaysian in the
term Chinese Malaysian literature refers specifically to the ethnic community. In
addition to the Sinophone, the ethnic Chinese community in Malaysia also consists of
Anglophone and Malayophone groups, and to a certain degree members of the com-
munity are trilingual. In most cases, when specificity and singularity are not the main
concern, Sinophone Malaysian literature is used to refer to Mahua literature.
84 tee kim tong
(Respecting Over-
seas Others: Sinophone Malaysian Literature, or, Toward a Theory
of New Chinese Literatures) was included. I propose, in my essay, a
theory of xinxing huawen wenxue (new Chinese litera-
tures or new literatures in Chinese) corresponding to the concept
of new English literatures or new literatures in English, to describe
the Sinophone literary articulations outside China, referring especially
to the literary polysystems of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia,
Singapore, North America, Australia, and other places. I use the term
to distinguish such a Sinophone literature from Chinese literatureor,
rather, ChinaLit. My idea is to resist the incorporation and co-opta-
tion of the diasporic and border voices into the China-centric dominant
institution under the rubric of overseas or world Chinese literature.
The concept of new Chinese literatures, in my formulation, refers
to the writings in Chinese produced in the diasporic Chinese com-
munities, which form a deterritorialized and reterritorialized space in
the postcolonial and postmodern age. In short, it is a minor literature
(littrature mineure) in Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris sense of the
term. It is in this spatial aspect that new Chinese literatures differ from
ChinaLit.
The reason a new Chinese literature such as Sinophone Malaysian
literature can be constructed as minor is that for Sinophone Chinese
Malaysian writers it is impossible not to write in Chinese, since
their literature exists in a linguistic environment in which Malay or
Malaysian national literature is strong.10 These Sinophone writers in
Malaysia write to express their life in the country where their ances-
tors fought to gain independence from British colonialism. They write
(or choose to write) in Chinese because such an act helps manifest
their self and cultural identities as well as community consciousness.
But to write in Chinese in Malaysia is an act of double deterrito-
rialization (from both Malaysian national literature and ChinaLit).
Obviously in the polysystem of ChinaLit there is no space for literary
products of the Sinophone from its peripheral countries in the Pacific
10
For my discussion of Mahua literature as minor literature, see my Xiao wenxue,
fu xitong: Dongnanya Huawen wenxue de (yuyan wenti yu) yiyi :
[Minor Literature, Polysystem: the (Lin-
guistic Problem and) Meaning of Southeast Asian Sinophone Literature], in Dangdai
wenxue yu renwen shengtai [Contemporary Literature and the Ecology of
the Humanities], ed. Wu Yaozong (Taipei: Wanjuanlou Press, 2003), 31327.
Rim. Here, in fact, Sinophone Chinese Malaysian literature deviates

from the double resistance of Sinophone literature (which resists
incorporation both into China and into the place of residence [Shih,
2004:26]). Sinophone Malaysian literature does not resist the position
of Malaysian national literature. On the contrary, it is the state appa-
ratus of Malaysian national literature that refuses to acknowledge the
legitimacy of Sinophone Malaysian literature as national literature. In
short, Sinophone Malaysian literature is deterritorialized in its own
country because of the politics of recognitionas it is not written in
Bahasa Malaysia, it is not recognized as national literature.
New Chinese literatures are new because we have seen the flour-
ishing of TaiwanLit and Hong Kong literature in the 1970s and 1980s,
respectively, and that of Sinophone Malaysian literature in the 1990s,
all within recent decades, which could be considered a relatively new
phenomenon. Or as Dominic Cheung has sharply observed, it is quite
obvious that in the 1990s Chinese writing in the Southeast Asian areas
attempted ambitiously to reintegrate a Sinophone ASEAN literature
(2003:13). Such a notion of new Chinese literatures, of course, is not
unproblematic. For example, it is obvious that the idea of new sug-
gests a sense of contingency more than of temporality.11
It is not necessary for new Chinese literatures to highlight its differ-
ence or different way of thinking, for heterogeneity is always already
the nature of the Sinophone writers Chinese in difference, which is
the fundamental characteristic of Sinophone literature. In fact, from
a linguistic perspective, the plural form Chineses, instead of Chi-
nese, should be used since people from the Sinophone communi-
ties speak Chinese with different accents and use different idioms and
vocabularies. Given this variety, if a Sinophone writer in Malaysia
were to write with the stylistic features of Mo Yan or Jia Ping-ao,
the text produced would more likely become a parody than
be a creative work.
The following diagram represents the aforementioned theories of
Sinophone literature formulated over the past two decades:
11
For a critique of my theory of new Chinese literatures, see Yang Congrongs
response to my paper in the topical issue of Chung-Wai Literary Monthly on Sinophone
Malaysian literature: Cong yuanxiang lun dao xinxing lun
[From Discourse on Homelands to Discourse on Emergence], Chung-Wai Literary
Monthly 24, no. 4 (2000): 3235.
86 tee kim tong
ChinaLit included ChinaLit excluded

Cheung
Sinophone Shih
Wang
Centers of Chinese literature Chow
Three worlds of Chinese literature Yu
New Chinese literatures Tee
An apparent difference among the categorization of Sinophone litera-

ture by Chow, Cheung, Shih, Wang, Yu, and me lies in the inclusion
or exclusion of ChinaLit literature in the formulation. The difference
indicates, as Shih has pointed out, The Sinophone, therefore, main-
tains a precarious and problematic relation to China . . . in its ambiguity
and complexity (Shih, 2007b:30). For Chow and Yu, the Sinophone
centers or worlds operate and develop in parallel, but obviously the
hierarchy is there. For Wang and Cheung the term includes Chinese
literature because the Sinophone as an idea is already a language-
based concept that goes beyond difference in nation and ethnicity.
Shih emphasizes the placed-based nature of the term, but also includes
works of minority non-Han writers in China as Sinophone literature.
My idea of new Chinese literatures is also both language- and place-
based, but emphasizes the mobility and transnationalism of Sino-
phone literature. In many cases, Sinophone literature is not one-place
based, for it often travels or diffuses to other Sinophone spheres. Here
Sinophone Malaysian literature in Taiwan (SMLiT) serves as a good
example.12
12
Sinophone Malaysian literature in Taiwan is termed ZaiTai Mahua wenxue
(MahuaLiT) in Chinese. Its existence as a transnational literature in Tai-
wan has a long history that started in the early 1960s, when ethnic Chinese Malay(si)
an students were encouraged to travel to Taiwan for higher education under the
Nationalist governments Overseas Compatriot educational policy. For a brief sketch
of the development of Sinophone Malaysian literature in Taiwan, see my papers
(Baling niandai yilai) Taiwan wenxue fuxitong zhong de Mahua wenxue (
) [Sinophone Malaysian Literature in the Poly-
system of TaiwanLit Since the 1980s], in Nanyang lunshu: Mahua wenxue yu wenhua shux-
ing : [Studying Southeast Asian Chinese: Essays on Sinophone
Malaysian Literature and Cultural Identity] (Taipei: Rye Field, 2003), 13550, and Lisan
In recent decades SMLiT has become an active transnational ele-

ment in the field of TaiwanLit, though more and more Sinophone
Malaysian writers live in Beijing, Shanghai, or Nanjing. What are
these writers then? Third-world Sinophone writers in Chinese lit-
erature? Or third-world Sinophone writers in first-world Sinophone
literature? Moreover, Sinophone Malaysian literature in Taiwan as
transnational literature is, in fact, an exemplary case of the intersys-
temic relationships within Sinophone literatures. But the interaction
and intersection of SMLiT and TaiwanLit in terms of identity politics
reveal the ambivalent position of SMLiT in the TaiwanLit polysystem.
In the post-martial law age of Taiwan, in which the island country
began to reconstruct its own subjectivity as well as its political, cul-
tural, national, and ethnic identities, a nativist wave of cultural politics
has arisen. On the one hand, SMLiT is suspected, if not accused,
of being politically incorrect and un-Taiwan (or un-native) because it
generally expresses the Malaysian experience of the Sinophone writ-
ers, who reside in Taiwan but still write about memories of tropical
rain forests and rubber plantations in their homeland. What is the
cultural identity of these overseas Chinese writers? Should they be
regarded as Sinophone Chinese Malaysian writers or Sinophone Tai-
wanese writers, since they live in Taiwan and write outside their own
nation? Or simply Sinophone writers?
On the other hand, some Sinophone Malaysian writers in Taiwan
especially Li Yongping, who traveled to Taiwan in the late 1960s to
study abroadin addition to telling stories of their Malaysian imagi-
nation and experience, attempt to translate the language used from
vernacular Chinese (Huawen ), common in diasporic Chinese
communities, to standard Chinese (Guoyu/Zhongwen /). Li,
for example, attempts to embody in his novels, particularly Jiling chun-
qiu (The Jiling Chronicles) and Haidong qing (Haid-
ong Blues), a textual utopia of classical and elegant Chinese language.13
shuangxiang: zuowei Yazhou kuaguo Huawen shuxie de zaiTai Mahua wenxue

: [Double Diaspora: SMLiT
as Asian Transnational Sinophone Literature], Zhongguo xiandai wenxue Quarterly
9 ( June 2006): 6172.
13
Cf. Shih Shu-meis discussion of Zhongwen (Chinese) and Huawen
(Sinophone) and their distinction in Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the
Pacific (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2007), 3233; see also
Ng Kim Chews discussion of Li Yongping in Lisan de Poluozhou zhizi han tade
muqin, fuqin: lun LiYongping de wenzi xiuxing
88 tee kim tong
The result of this act of cultural translation could be regarded as a

kind of self-misplacement and self-displacement because in the post-
martial law age TaiwanLit tends to embrace a cultural syncretism and
hybridized literary style rather than a reterritorialized classical and
elegant Chinese. Such a hybridized Chinese, as mentioned, is one of
the fundamental characteristics of Sinophone literature.
The position of Sinophone literature in the singular polysystem of
national literature can be illustrated by Sinophone Malaysian litera-
ture as a border literature in Malaysia and as a transnational literature
in Taiwan. In an essay entitled Wu guoji huawen wenxue: zaiTai
Mahua wenxue de shiqianshi, huo Taiwan wenxue shishang de fei
Taiwan wenxueyige wenxueshi de bijiao gangling
: ,
(Sinophone Literature Without Nation: The
Prehistory of SMLiT or the Un-Taiwan Literature in the History of
TaiwanLita Comparative Outline of Literary History), Ng Kim
Chew explores the border (dis)position of SMLiT in Taiwan
and Malaysia by proposing the concept of Sinophone literature with-
out nation to deconstruct the name and nature of SMLiT (SMLiT
of Sinophone Malaysian literature/un-Taiwan literature of TaiwanLit,
or rather, un-Taiwan literature of Sinophone Malaysian literature/
SMLiT of TaiwanLit). Ng also uses paradoxical terms such as
ethnicnon-national literature and nonethnicnational literature
to describe the border position of Sinophone Malaysian literature in
the Malaysian literary system. Ngs radical concept, in short, questions
the problematics of literary, cultural, and political identities in Taiwan
and Malaysia.
Comparing the historiography of TaiwanLit with that of Sinophone
Malaysian literature, Ng Kim Chew advocates that since Taiwan is
(still ) not a nation, from the perspective of (national ) literary history,
we should say that (national ) TaiwanLit is a literature without nation
de facto because TaiwanLit refuses to accept its status of exilic Chi-
nese literature or border literature under the ideology of greater Chi-
nese culturalism (2006:218). Sinophone Malaysian literature is also a
[The Diasporic Son of Borneo and His Parents:

On Li Yongpings Pious Life of Words], in Mahua wenxue yu Zhongguoxing
[Sinophone Malaysian Literature and Chineseness] (Taipei: Meta Press, 1988),
299350.
literature without nation. Whereas the assumption of TaiwanLit as a

literature without nation is derived from the politics of recognition, the
theory of Sinophone Malaysian literature as a literature without nation
is based on the fact that Chinese is not an official or national language
in Malaysia. Maintains Ng:
Relatively speaking, even from the aspect of the language used by Sino-
phone Malaysian literature (Chinese as nonofficial language), we can say
that it is excluded by national literature and hence is forced to confine
itself to its ethnic and linguistic boundary. It is therefore legitimate for us
to say that Sinophone Malaysian literature is a literature without nation
or an ethnicnon-national literature. (2006:217)
In his paper Ng points out that the position of SMLiT as a transna-
tional literature lies actually in the intersection of the two Sinophone
literatures without nation. Such a position, of course, does not secure
SMLiT at all since it does not concur with the nativist agenda of
TaiwanLit. In this context, Ng concludes, SMLiT is by no means
TaiwanLit (for it is even not eligible to be patriotic) and hence should
be categorized as the unTaiwanLit in the history of TaiwanLit (2006:
21718). From this perspective of self-decentralization and deterrito-
rialization of SMLiT, I view Ngs theoretical endeavor as a project of
Sinophone literature as transnational literature.
Obviously Sinophone literature as theoretical category is replac-
ingor in the process of replacingoverseas Chinese literature,
world Chinese literature, and other ambivalent terms like Mahua
literature. However, the following question has been raised from time
to time in this process of reconceptualization: How seriously should we
take such a theoretical categorization? The (re)mapping, (re)locating, (re)posi-
tioning of Sinophone literature is but an act of naming and categoriz-
ing. Though that is significant in terms of cultural politics, geopolitics,
and ideology, the importance or the use of Sinophone literature, in
the final analysis, depends so much upon the literary products of Sino-
phone literature or the canonization of a Sinophone repertoire that
expresses the life of the Sinophone people around the world.
The various communities built by Chinese who migrated abroad
over the past hundred years have undergone some changes since
the late 1980s. Many Chinese from China fled to the West after the
Tiananmen massacre. Likewise, Chinese from Hong Kong migrated
to North America and Australia before the handover. In the 1990s
the number of Chinese students, a new generation of liuxuesheng
90 tee kim tong
(study-abroad students), who went to North America, Europe,

and Australia increased greatly, and many of these became natural-
ized Chinese Americans, Chinese French, Chinese Canadians, or Chi-
nese Australians. Consequently, the migration trend has changed the
structure of global diasporic communities, in which a new Sinophone
cultural aura has formed and Sinophone writing has become a symbol
of cultural continuity. In the past, Sinophone writers mostly expressed
themselves in the literary supplements of Chinese-language newspa-
pers circulated within their communities. To publish in book form is
expensive and the market is very small and limited, even in places like
Malaysia and Singapore, where the size of the ethnic Chinese commu-
nity is relatively large. However, in recent years, printing technology
has developed the economical publishing method of print/publish on
demand (POD), which provides the possibility of small-quantity publi-
cations and self-publishing. Quite a number of POD publishing houses
have been set up, for example, in the North American Sinophone
communities recently, and they have produced more titles in Chinese
than ever.14 This new phenomenon, which witnesses the emergence of
a Sinophone Chinese American literary repertoire, indeed helps to call
for a remapping of the Sinophone literary field in North America.
Works Cited
Cheung, Dominic . Wenxue jiang de zhengyi yu zhixing: shijie huawen wenxue

lingyu tantao yu zhanwang :
[The Controversy and Running of Literary Prizes: Inquiry and Perspectives
in Global Sinophone Literature]. In Ershiyi shiji shijie huawen wenxue de zhanwang:
yantaohui lunwen ji : [Proceedings of
Conference on Perspectives in Global Sinophone Literature in the Twenty-first Century]. Kuala
Lumpur: Sin Chew Daily Press, 2003, 1015.
. Lisan yu zhonghe: huawen wenxue neihan tansuojianlun Chen Yingzhen,
Zhu Tianxin de lihe zhuti : :
[Dispersion and Reunion: Inquiring Into the Content of Sino-
phone Literature; on Chen Yingzhen and Zhu Tianxins Themes of Separation and
Reunion]. Sixiang wenzong 9 (2005): 1825.
Chow Tse-tsung. Closing Remarks. In Dongnanya huawen wenxue/Chinese Literature
in Southeast Asia , ed. Wong Yoon Wah and Horst Pastoors. Sin-
gapore: Goethe-Institut Singapore and Singapore Association of Writers, 1988,
35962.
14
See, for examples, the books in Chinese by such POD publishers as Cozy House
Publisher, Green Light Press, Fellows Press of America, and BeAuthor Press.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Traveling Transnationalism: Locating Hong Kong Litera-

ture in English. Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 14 (2002): 5366.
Ng Kim Chew. Wu guoji huawen wenxue: zaiTai Mahua wenxue de shiqianshi, huo
Taiwan wenxue shishang de fei Taiwan wenxueyige wenxueshi de bijiao gangling
[Sinophone Literature Without Nation: The Prehistory of SMLiT, or the Un-
Taiwan Literature in the History of TaiwanLita Comparative Outline of Literary
History]. Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (2006): 21152.
Shih, Shu-mei. Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition. PMLA 119,
no. 1 (2004): 1630.
. Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production. Lecture
given at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, March 28, 2007(a).
. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007(b).
Shih, Shu-mei, and Franoise Lionnet, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005.
Tee Kim Tong . Haiwai cun yiji: Mahua wenxue; choaxiang xinxing hua-
wen wenxue lilun de jianli [Respecting Overseas Others: Sinophone Malaysian
Literature, or, Toward a Theory of New Chinese Literatures]. Chung-Wai Literary
Monthly 29, no. 4 (2000): 2031.
. Xiao wenxue, fu xitong: Dongnanya Huawen wenxue de yiyi [Minor Lit-
erature and Polysystem: the (Linguistic Problem and) Meaning of Southeast Asian
Sinophone Literature]. In Dangdai wenxue yu renwen shengtai [Contemporary Literature
and the Ecology of the Humanities], ed. Wu Yaozong. Taipei: Wanjuanlou Press, 2003,
31327.
Wang, David, Der-wei. Wenxue xinglu yu shijie xiangxiang [Literary Traveling
and Global Imagination]. United Daily News July 89, 2006, Literary supplement
section.
Yu Kwang-chung. Separation and Integration: Toward a Communion of Chinese
Minds and Hearts/Lixin yu xiangxin: zhongyuan tongxin : .
Paper presented at the 2007 International PEN Asia and Pacific Regional Confer-
ence, Hong Kong, February 25, 2007.
SINOPHONICS AND THE NATIONALIZATION
OF CHINESE1
Jing Tsu
A key analysis that has been missing from the newly laid founda-
tion of Sinophone and diasporic studies is a historical understanding
of what one means by the Chinese language when studying modern
Chinese literature and culture. The linguistic foundation of Chinese
and Sinophone studies puts recent polemics in a broader context that
extends beyond the contemporary purview. The English translation
Chinese does not capture the range of political and geographic differ-
ences among the northern mainland-based Mandarin (putonghua
, common speech), Taiwan Mandarin (guoyu , or national
language), and the more or less standardized practice of the Chinese
language (huayu ) in the Chinese-speaking communities around the
world. When referred to as zhongwen , Mandarin has the addi-
tional resonance of middle, recalling a historically centrist and
nationalist connotation that is not universally welcomed. This makes
it less preferred the farther one moves away from the mainland
Chinese centers and through the different networks of diaspora that
often involve several overlapping national and ethnic settings. In these
cases, the Chinese language is neither the dominant nor the most obvi-
ous choice. The significance of the need for an appropriate definition
grows if we include, as has been suggested, the different ethnic minor-
ity languages within the borders of mainland China under the general
rubric of Sinitic languages. The scenery is indeed extraordinary and
even unwieldy, as critics rush to essentially rescale the territoriality of
the Chinese cultural and linguistic space.
Although each of the possible alternatives offers a historically specific
counterpoint to the predominance of a national definition of language,
they have thus far been treated mainly as an extension of identity
politics. Shu-mei Shih proposes a potentially transformative concept of
the Sinophone, calling for a critical alliance with existing minoritarian
1
This essay is adapted from a chapter in my Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
94 jing tsu
debates in the fields of Francophone and Lusophone studies.2 Ng Kim

Chew, a writer and critic of Malaysian Chinese literature in Taiwan who
makes an important distinction between zhongwen and huawenor
Chinese and Sinophoneprefers to seek solidarity elsewhere in
the experiences of similarly fated diasporic writers, such as V. S. Nai-
paul, who are forced to find a new linguistic horizon in their writings.
It is a testimony to the geographical contingency of Sinophone studies
that its alliances are necessarily fragmented. Strategized with a view to
local and global political expediency and reflecting the uneven travel
of academic discursive capital from America to Taiwan, such alliances
rely heavily on the existing terms of postcolonial studies while search-
ing for a more compelling, original paradigm.3
These recognized limitations detract little from the timeliness of
the concept of Sinophone studies. It is more important than ever to
account for the inherent multiplicity of the idea of Chineseness,
which, despite its frequent invocations in highly charged debates, has
offered little historical traction in propelling literary studies forward.
To make it an analytically palpablenot just polemicalcategory for
examination, one might consider taking the issue of language beyond
how it bears on the familiar stakes of identity. Departing from the
currently proposed approaches, I therefore suggest a regrounding of
the political and social strategies of linguistic allegiance in the histori-
cal and orthographic conditions of the Chinese language. Customarily
the domain of linguists and archaeologists, language, seen in this way,
crosses the borders of literary studies in a crucial way. It occasions
an interdisciplinary investigation in an effort to understand how the
very institution of a standardized medium emerged in the early twen-
tieth century and led to the inevitability of, and current discontent
with, the idea of Chinese writing. As the nationalization of the Chi-
nese language was coterminous with the hallmark achievement of the
vernacularization of modern literature, this inquiry can also be seen
as a prerequisite to developing a new trajectory for modern Chinese
literary studies in a global context. By focusing on the material history
of modern Chinese writing, I chart out below a different course for
analyzing the intranational comparisons in Sinophone studies. The
first step, then, is to take the phone in Sinophone seriously.
2
Shui-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 2730.
3
This is often explicitly stated as the critical paradigm.
sinophonics and the nationalization of chinese 95
I. Dialects, Phonics, and Scripts
In 1900, twelve years before Beijing Mandarin was officially estab-

lished as the national language (guoyu ) of the new Republic of
China, a wanted Chinese fugitive returned from Japan. Disguised as a
Buddhist monk from Taiwan named Zhao Shiming , he secretly
crossed the border of the Qing empire into Shandong province,
went south to Jiangsu before traveling back up to the city of Tianjin.
All the while, he had on his person an important document. It was a
draft proposal of a new phonetic writing system for the Chinese lan-
guage in the Mandarin dialect called the Mandarin alphabet (guan-
hua zimu ), which he had developed during his two years of
exile in Tokyo.
Although his story is more exciting than most, Wang Zhao
his real namewas but one of more than a score of inventors and
pedagogues determined to change the Chinese writing system in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A largely overlooked
group of dedicated reformers and lovers of language, they held that
the Chinese script was structurally not amenable to the conditions
of modernity. The amount of labor required for mastering the cum-
bersome writing system was to blame, according to one of them,
for Chinas evolutionary belatedness.4 This was not a new com-
plaint, as it follows a well-known trail of woes left by missionaries
since Matteo Ricci and others. Instead of relying on the romaniza-
tion systems that the missionaries had developed for the purpose of
proselytization, late Qing language reformers aspired to something
greater. This time, the Chinese writing system had a decisive role
to play. Left unimproved, the ideogram would impede any form of
modern learningin the areas of technology, translation, commerce,
and communication. If a key could be found in the acoustic pat-
terns behind the written script to make it easier to learn and to use,
a world would open (tong ) with it. The changing times called for
technological expediency and fast precision rather than passive mne-
monics and accumulated stroke orders. Recognizing this, script inven-
tors and language reformers, infused with the spirit of science and
empiricism, responded with an array of imaginative, at times esoteric,
4
Liu Mengyang , Zhongguo yinbiaozi shu [Chinese Phonetically
Indexed Script] (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957), 84.
96 jing tsu
alternatives. Some proposed to replace the logogram with alphabet

letters, while others studied notations for the deaf-mute, shorthand,
and mathematics-based diagrams.
A consideration of the complex history of the modern Chinese script
rejoins literature to an examination of language in its social and tech-
nological context. What is the relationship of the medium of national
writing to standardization and nonstandard languages? What can pho-
nics tell us about the contingency of writing and native speakers?
What is the linguistic basis for continuing to receive the notion of a
national literature? Indeed, these questions prompt us to go inside
the national language. This is not, however, an obvious task. The idea
of a national language has come not only to enforce a logic of divi-
sion between literary disciplines but alsowithin each disciplineto
signal a sense of identity and relative cohesion. The expanding scope
of English as Anglophone, French as Francophone, or Chinese as
Sinophone might readjust the scale of such studies but not this fun-
damental assumption behind them. The point has been not so much
to define a given literary field according to a positivistic notion of its
predominant language as to maintain separate realms of containment
and jurisdiction, English from Chinese, German from Spanish. There-
fore, the notion of a national language has yet to be differentiated
through the lens of its various constituents or close kin, as in the case
of Japan, Korea, and China. The disaggregation of the unit of national
language has the potential to reinvigorate the traditional premise of
national literary disciplines by turning the comparative focus on the
problematic institutionalization of national writings. This would also
be a significant step toward softening the palpable tension between
area studies and comparative disciplines by recognizing the scalar
divisibility of the unit by which comparisons are made.
The by now proverbial wisdom that the difference between two
topolects in China can be greater than that between French and
Spanish imparts the lesson that the terms of comparison are often re-
created by the implicit needs prompting the comparison. Mandarin,
after all, has seven dialects and six times as many subsidiary
dialects and Wu, six dialects and thirteen minor tongues.5 The count is,
5
For an excellent bilingual introduction to the history of the Chinese language, see
Zhou Youguang , The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts (Colum-
bus, OH: Foreign Languages Publications, 2003). See also Qiu Xigui , Chinese
moreover, debatable, depending on the method of classification. Yet

these finer linguistic distinctions, and the even finer intranational web
of regional and local relations they mirror, do not often enter into the
predominant theorization of China and the West. These inner differ-
ences are treated as more of an empirical interest than a theoretical
concern. Here at what might be called a disciplinary interface between
area studies specialists, for whom finer distinctions matter as historical
specificities, and comparativists, who have a keener eye for the larger
patterns under which these lesser details are subsumed, is where intel-
lectual labor has been traditionally divided. To conduct comparative
work along topolectal rather than national units of language, however,
is a provocative interpretation of a possible task of comparative litera-
ture that is well worth considering.
This new direction would entail a reorientation toward the idea of
script. Instead of assuming it as the stable material substrate of the
written language, one should analyze it as medium of change, strife,
and assimilation. The nationalization of language is thus a particular
moment in the morphology of script as notations of perishable sounds.
The late Qing phoneticization movement (qieyinzi yundong ),
in which Wang Zhao was a key figure, partly took inspiration from
the examples of European nations, each having consolidated its own
national language from regional variants under the rubric of a re-
invented genealogy. The analogy of nationalism alone, however, does
not encapsulate the long-standing, growing problem of unbridged gaps
between different regional topolects due to geography and migration.
The problem of mutual incomprehensibility between more distant
regions was duly noted in official documents of population surveys and
famine relief. That a local speaker cannot understand even the dialectal
variant of another who lives perhaps only a few miles away poses an
even greater difficulty for the northerner who might have to negotiate
with a southerner in matters of trade and commerce. After the philolo-
gist Liu Xianting first proposed to construct phonetic notations
for studying phonemes in his seventeenth-century study of rhymes,
it took another two centuries before late Qing reformer Song Shu
revisited the issue in 1891.6 He advocated for the construction
Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (Berkeley: The Society for the
Study of Early China, Institute of East Asian Studies, 2000).
6
See Liu Xianting, Liu Xianting (Beijing: wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957), 2844.
98 jing tsu
of various phonetic scripts for the region south of the Yangtze River,
where the greatest subdivisions of topolects were found.
The enormity of that task needs no exaggeration. Late Qing lan-
guage reformers were keenly aware of the difficulty in preserving the
sounds of language when they could not be written down. They were
thus prompted to find a way to notate all their possible inflections,
a project that included the rephoneticization of Western, alphabetic
languages as part of its goal. Regional accents, mother tongues, and
undocumented speech sound patterns were as hard to capture as they
were varied. They perished with time and changing communities of
speakers in a way that the written Chinese script has not. Recogniz-
ing this, language reformers strove to account for the acoustic variety
in new script forms that would essentially restructure the relationship
between standard language and regional dialects. To this end, they
attempted different methods of phoneticization. Their idiosyncratic
efforts were important precursors to the institutionalization of the
national language in 1912, a project that was formally declared to
be synonymous with the writing of modern Chinese literature just six
years later.
While the rich history of the modern Chinese national language
is known to linguists and historians, few literary scholars have made
references outside the vernacular movement of 1905.7 Modern Chinese
literatures claim of distinction, writing in plain speech (baihua )
was the result of a hard-won battle with classical Chinese, a highly
prized literary language dating back to the third century. By the
time Hu Shi programmatically called for a literature in the national
language, a national language of literature (wenxue de guoyu, guoyu de
wenxue , ) in 1918, he intended to carry out
only a very small part of the radical agenda originally put forth by
the late Qing script reformers.8 Appropriated by the May Fourth
movement, the original scope was significantly narrowed. Colored
by the fervor of modern nationalism and building a strong Chinese
national identity, the earlier call to explore the phonics of dialectal
7
The standard reference for the national language movement remains Li Jinxis
Guoyu yundong shigang [History of the National Language Movement]
(Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934). It is discussed in detail in John de Francis
Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950).
8
Hu Shi, Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature, in Modern Chinese
Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 18931945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1996), 12339.
speech was simplified to a choice between the classical literary and

the vernacular written forms. The battle was waged under the banner
of everyday speech against elitist classical writing. It sidestepped the
thornier issue of how the tensions between dialectal tongues and com-
mon language had to do with precisely what falls outside the medium
of writing. The polemic between wenyan (literary Chinese) and
plain speech distracted attention from their actually shared view of a
normative literary language. They disagreed only on the candidate for
that standard.
The original question of the late Qing phoneticization movement
was inspired by not writing but speech, the unassimilatable idiosyn-
crasies of which were well recognized. In 1869, poet and emissary
Huang Zunxian, frustrated by the rigidity of the classical language,
imagined one solution to be the perfect transference from enunciation
to writing, My hand writes my mouth (Wo shou xie wo kou
).9 Taken as one of the first utterances advocating for the unifica-
tion of letter and speech (wenyan heyi ), this evocative phrase
is frequently cited to underscore the importance of the vernacular in
creating the language of modern poetry. Yet the vernacular took dif-
ferent acoustic forms. Baihua was, after all, the form of another written,
literary language with a tradition, admittedly middlebrow and largely
associated with performance literature, that has its most immediate
predecessor in the Song dynasty. Hu Shi cites the language of Water
Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber as examples of vernacular writing
worthy of emulation. That the former used the Shandong dialect and
the latter the Beijing vernacular was of less importance. What mat-
tered was an encompassing notion of the vernacular, pitted against
classical Chinese, that could compete for legitimacy as the new literary
and national language.
The late Qing interest in language, in contrast, expressed a wider
concern with the ephemerality of sounds in relation to the consis-
tency of writing. Fleeting manifestations of the breath, enunciations
belonged to a wider spectrum of acoustics on which the reformers set
their sights. Yang Qiong , author of the 1905 diagram-numeral
based (xiangshu ) notation system, Opening with Shapes and Sounds
9
Huang Zunxian, Zagan [Miscellaneous Feelings], in Huang Zunxian shixuan
[Selected Poems of Huang Zunxian] (Guangdong: Guangdong renmin chu-
banshe, 1985), 24.
100 jing tsu
(Xingsheng tong ), notes the peculiarity of the human voice. Its

myriad manifestations are remarkably generated from one physiologi-
cal organ, the throat. Unlike other natural phenomena that had been
increasingly unveiled under the scrutiny of the physical sciences, the
human voice was yet to be properly analyzed in a systematic fash-
ion that could be used to ease the communication between different
language speakers.10 Sounds inhabit a kind of heterogeneity that can-
not be easily broken down into discrete units. One might surmise the
enormity of this challenge by recalling Roman Jakobsons analysis of
childhood aphasia, where the process of speech acquisition entails a
forgetting and relearning of acoustics that were of a range much wider
than the sounds of language.11 Yang and others set themselves the task
of re-creating and recapturing a similar range outside of formalized
language, not in prelinguistic babble but from the remote corners of
the world of Sinitic speech, practiced and passed down by speakers of
different geographic regions and migratory nexus. Hence Yangs par-
ticular system promises to communicate with colloquial speech below,
classical Chinese above, and Western tones on the outside (Preface).
Not content with merely reaching the high and low, East and West,
Yangs coauthor, Li Wenzhi , further compares the universal
acoustic access to language to a phenomenological cosmology:
The good sirs who worry about contemporary affairs grieve the perils of
the Central Kingdom and lament the obstructed minds and hearts of the
people. They resolutely put their thoughts to the pen and unanimously
agree on opening up peoples minds as the first imperative. Yet, alas,
how easily they speak of unblocking! Writing is the vessel for transmitting
knowledge. If speech were blocked, there would be no way of accessing
writing. If the voice were blocked, there would be no means of commu-
nicating speech. The dao of voice manifests in the fact that it has a shape,
incomparably intricate. That is why it can be as loud as thunder, faint
as buzzing insects. . . . Only what humans produce with their mouths can
be called voice . . . if theres voice, there is also image, image is followed
by form. Form gives rise to image, image begets voice.12
Drawing from the system of trigrams in the Book of Changes, dating
back to the third millennium B.C.E., Yang and Lis system proposes
10
Yang Qiong, Xingsheng tong [Opening with Shapes and Sounds] (Beijing: Wenzi gaige
chubanshe, 1957), 5.
11
Roman Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague, Paris: Mou-
ton, 1971), 720.
12
Yang Qiong, Xingsheng tong, 5.
twenty-four vowels and twenty consonants, to be practiced through a

regimented four-step lesson in oral articulation. The physical repeti-
tion of enunciatory exercises aims to replace traditional mnemonics.
Instead of practicing stroke orders in the traditional way of learning
characters, one would carry out the repetition on the level of speech as
self-training. Perfecting the manipulation of different sounds through
muscular control, the student can use what is spoken to guide what is
heard, learning from his or her own voice rather than written char-
acters. The speaker, even with minimal literacy, can quickly pick up
what is being written by reading aloud the notation symbols. To fulfill
these criteria, the result of Yang and Lis suggested scheme is a rather
expansive but abstract, hybrid system of sounds that does not follow
any one dialect but prefigures indigenous and foreign verbal acoustics
into a theoretical framework of all possible enunciations.
The diagram-numeral system, to which Opening with Shapes and Sounds
and a few other proposals belong, operates on a generative principle
similar to that observed in how trigrams produce meaning in the Book
of Changes. The object of much scholarly scrutiny for centuries, trigrams
constitute a hermeneutics system based on correlative thinking. It also
fascinated outsiders, who looked toward China as a confirmation of
or exception to their own desires for universality. As is well known,
with the help of Flemish Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (16561730), Leibniz
found in the trigrams corroboration for his binarism as clavis sinica,
even though the isomorphism was not quite perfect and required read-
ing the trigrams only in a certain order and configuration.13 Europes
pursuit of universality inspired an analytical gaze toward its favorite
antithesis, China. If binarism could be found in even her pictographic
language, surely it could be applied to languages and cultures that
were less distant.
Li and Yang harbored a no less great ambition with regard to the
universality of acoustics. The imagined sequence of manifestation
from voice to image, image to form, then from form back to image,
image to voiceheavily resonates with twelfth-century Neo-Con-
fucian philosopher Shao Yongs (101177) explication of the
mutual transmutability between images and numbers, which provides
13
See David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1977); Donald F. Lach, The Preface to Leibniz Novissima
Sinica: Commentary, Translation, Text (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1957).
102 jing tsu
the cosmic basis for the diagram-numeral system: When there are
ideas, there will be utterances; when there are utterances, there will be
images; when there are images, there will be numbers. When numbers
are established, images will be born. When images are born, utter-
ances become clear and ideas manifest.14 Sound patterns, similarly
envisioned by Li, directly resonate with universal ebbs and flows of
change. Speech implies in itself the transmutation of sound into form,
shape, and writing. The different elements do not precede one another
in hierarchical order but serve to make one another apparent in a
continuum of sound and script. Tones are the individuated, arrested
moments in this process.
Commenting on the philological tradition of rhyme books, Li notes
the absence of tones such as r, sh, and z (roughly equivalent to the
rolling r and voiceless and voiced fricatives, respectively). These are
features found in dialects and foreign languages but not usually taught
in training manuals on verse and rhyme for the literati. Adding those
features gave his system a new versatility for even tongues not yet
encountered. Sound notations, in theory, can simulate and adapt to
any spoken tongue in the world. The acoustics of language, in this
regard, is far more useful than its written form. The former, once
properly investigated and systematized, captures the living breath and
real-time speech, while the latter remains dead so long as sound does
not reunite with script. Voice precedes image and form, while form
and image ultimately refer back to the voice. Coupling sound with
imagexing with shengthus restores the connection between voice
and writing, breath and body.
Linguistic historian Luo Changpei notes that although Yang
and Lis proposal aimed at making literacy accessible, the actual con-
ceptual scheme was too esoteric for the layman to comprehend.15 The
same can be said more generally for all the phoneticization propos-
als. Script inventors labored for years to perfect their schemes. The
carefully constructed programs often bear the imprint of sustained,
mostly solitary efforts. Lu Zhuangzhang , author of the first
phoneticization scheme in 1892, had been trying to launch his sys-
tem since the 1870s, three different methods for classrom instruction
14
Shao Yong , Huangji jingshi shu , in Wenyuange Siku quanshu
803 (1983): 25ab.
15
Luo Changpei, Guoyin zimu yanjin shi [A History of the Development
of the National Tone Alphabet] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934), 71.
and exhausting his modest fortune in the process. Li recalls that it

took Yang and him also more than three decades of studious learning
and testing before finally making public Opening with Shapes and Sounds.
Many more gave testimony to repeated setbacks and hardships. The
lack of audience and financial support plagued every aspiring script
inventor, as no official sponsorship was availableor reliableduring
the politically tumultuous decades of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Shen Xue , author of Universal System (1896),
was perhaps the most dramatic case.16 To rally interest, he gave free
lessons to merrymakers at a local tea shop in Shanghai every Sunday,
but died a pauper at the age of twenty-eight.
Shens system, however, shows an expansive vision in delving into
the anatomical mechanics of the human voice. He began composing
Universal System at the age of nineteen, while a medical student at what
became St. Johns University in Shanghai, training that enabled him to
draw his own illustrations.17 Originally composed in English, Universal
System was partly translated into Chinese as Unitary Sound for a Prosperous
Era (Shengshi yuanyin ), an alternate title to the formerly used
Universal Script (Tianxia gongzi ). Only excerpts that were pub-
lished in Liang Qichaos newpaper, Current Affairs, survive. For Shen,
literacy is the prerequisite to all branches of modern reformgover-
nance, military, agriculture, manufacture, mining, and education. He
acknowledges, however, the trade-off between an aurally organized
approach to language and a visual experience of script.
While governing with the ear (erzhi ) does not have the
endurance of script, governing with the eye (muzhi ) cannot
reach as broadly or expediently as phoneticization.18 To endure the
passage of time and not veer into an abstraction, moreover, writing,
properly speaking, has to be essentially pictographic in the sense of
image-shape (xiangxing ), which is a very small constituent and
impractical method of making characters. Of the Six Principles, an
early taxonomy of the six different ways Chinese characters were gen-
erated, image-shapeor the proverbial ideogramwas the most
laborious and easily exhausted category, constituting no more than
16
Shen Xue, Shengshi yuan yin [Unitary Sound for a Prosperous Era] (Beijing:
Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1956).
17
Shen Xue, Shengshi yuan yin, 24.
18
104 jing tsu
one percent of the modern Chinese lexicon. The characters that rely
on phonetics, in the sense of possessing a sound-bearing component,
comprise the greatest number. Li recognized as much when he said
that phonetics trump semantics. A characters semantic content can-
not carry its tone, but a characters tone can fully indicate its semantic
content (the sound of Han script changes depending on the geographic
region, while its meaning seldom changes).19 A focus on phonetics is
all the more important in view of the rampant confusion in translit-
erating foreign names and Western scientific and technical terms in
the late nineteenth century. Many Western tones, vowels, and conso-
nants cannot be spelled with Chinese characters.20 Western syllables
lose their distinct lengths in the monosyllabism of individual charac-
ters, and stress marks are flatly leveled in monotones. While a logical
solution was, for some, simply to promote the Western alphabet as a
second national language, Shen held a different opinion. Chinese lan-
guage reform must not abolish the existing sinoscript, the essence of
its cultural heritage. It can only try to develop an auxiliary, phonetic
script to work alongside it.
In his exhaustive documentation of the various language reforms,
Ni Haishu does not consider Shens contribution to be of
extraordinary pedagogical value, as it suffers from an excess of obtuse
terminology and general lack of clarity.21 Yet Shen was an inventor
in the wider sense. He designed a fountain pen ( fangdeng bi )
especially for the purpose of writing his particular phonetic alphabet.22
It holds enough ink to write more than 20,000 phonemes at one sit-
ting without refill. He also built a new script-writing machine along
with a new telegraphic system to transmit all tones under heaven.23
Modeled on the Western typewriter, the tai-yi-po-li-tou (
) machine was itself an example of how novel objects were identi-
fied and appropriated in language through transliterated sounds rather
than translation.24 Shens most extraordinary contribution, however,
19
20
21
Ni Haishu, Zhongguo pinyinzi yundongshi jianbian [A Short
Edition of the History of Chinas Phonetic Script Movement] (Shanghai: Shidai shubao chu-
banshe, 1948), 41.
22
23
24
For more discussion on the Chinese-language typewriter in the twentieth cen-
tury, see my Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010).
has to be an alleged language-learning system for the deaf and mute,

which was unfortunately never published.
Despite these original, individual efforts, the phoneticization move-
ment was cut short by the political turmoil of the falling dynasty and
the rise of nationalism. Its impact is faintly visible in the current stan-
dard romanization system of pinyin (phonetic alphabet), which is
based on Mandarin Putonghua. Whether pinyin is merely an auxiliary
phoneticization or a system of script on par with Chinese characters
is a question raising its own controversy in the digital age. Ongo-
ing debates about whether Taiwan should adopt pinyin, which was
not designed to accommodate the southern tones found in the Min
topolect, continues to fuel political controversies about identity and
national belonging.
II. Sounds of the National Language
The importance of building a national literature in the twentieth cen-

tury subordinated a more fundamental rethinking about the elision
between the sound and script of language. That the feats of the late
Qing reformers, in retrospect, seem to have more anecdotal value than
scientific seriousness reflects the degree of difficulty of the enterprise
itself. To track sound, in the absence of technological instruments,
required not only ethnographical meticulousness but also a good ear.
No matter how good, however, the ear is an inconsistent instrument.
The empirical data on which the studies were based drew from spo-
ken dialects from more than a century ago, and each has undergone
considerable demographic shifts and new language contacts. Even as
they tried to fix sounds to signs in order to ensure their acoustic trans-
parency, reformers intercepted only a moment in the breath of living
tongues. But the script reformers also had a motive different from
that of todays linguist or ethnographer. While it borrowed from tradi-
tional philology, their particular orientation toward indigenous as well
as foreign tonalities bespoke a greater desirewidely shared at the
turn of the last centuryto rearticulate China in terms of the modern
world, and vice versa. Their systems aimed at creating and discover-
ing underlying, universal laws about tones and orthography, with the
emphasis on universality as a global system.
The desired correspondence between the Chinese language and
a universal system, however, was significantly mediated. The grand
view of global sounds had to overcome the nagging reality of local
106 jing tsu
linguistic differences. Discovering the key to universal tone began with

ones native region. Each reformer started by scrutinizing his home
dialect, spoken by friends and neighbors, then extrapolated from
it a larger system. That local linguistic allegiances intruded on the
vision of universal language systems at times threatened the collective
effort. Not surprisingly, when the Ministry of Education called the
Congress on the Unification of Pronunciation in 1912, the question
regarding which dialect should serve as the standard stirred up heated
debates on the floor, ending in almost physical violence. At stake was
the murky tone (zhuoyin ), a voiced phonation characteristic of
southern dialect speakers. Proponents insisted that it is the heart and
soul of the Chinese essence, without which the southerner cannot sur-
vive for even one day. A month of intense discussions passed without
resolution. The tension finally climaxed when Zhejiang native Wang
Zhao (Monk of Formosa) misheard the Jiangsu representative Wang
Rongbao , who was speaking to another colleague in his own
dialect. A confusion was made between the word rickshaw and a
certain personal insult, and Wang Rongbao narrowly escaped a physi-
cal altercation.
Impassioned skirmishes were not uncommon among the script
reformers, each invested in his own particular version of the appropri-
ate phonetic script. Thus Lao Naixuan s Combined Tone Simple
Script (Heyin jianzi ) set out to improve upon Wang Zhaos
Mandarin alphabet by including the southern tones of the Wu and
Ningbo dialects. When Wang Zhao began to work on his pho-
netic alphabet, he hastened to distinguish his method from the other
competing paradigms, which variously took cues from the Lindsley and
Pittman shorthand (sujixi ), latinization, traditional seal script,
and archaic divination systems (diagram-numeral ). Wang adapted his
from the Japanese kana system, which comprises two kinds of syllabic
scripts that were originally derived from the calligraphic style and radi-
cals of Chinese logograms. The Mandarin alphabet was eventually
published in 1901 as Mandarin Combined Tone Alphabet (Guanghua hesheng
zimu ). From the very beginning, language reformers
were hesitant to call the phonetic alphabet a system of script, a claim
that would have been met with political persecution. The reason is not
difficult to see. Had it been carried out, a rewriting of the Chinese lan-
guage according to new sound-based notations would, in effect, have
abolished the long-esteemed sinograph.
And the script inventors were almost willing to make this sacrifice
for the sake of literacy. Between 1892 and 1910, more than thirty pro-
posals were put forth (twenty-eight of which are extant).25 Language

reformers treaded the fine line between preserving the integrity of the
Chinese character and implementing a phoneticization scheme that
would pragmatically supersede it. In Xiamen (then Amoy), Fujianese
Christian Lu Zhuangzhang published A Primer at a Glance: Chinese New
Phonetic Script in Amoy Dialect (Yimu liaoran chujie: Zhongguo qieyin xinzi Xia
qiang : ) in 1892, where the phrase
phonetic script (qieyin zi ) first appeared.26 Raised in Xiamen,
where missionary romanizations of the Bible were in circulation as
early as 1852, Lu studied English in Singapore, returning in 1880.
He assisted John MacGowan of the London Missionary Society in
translating the English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect (Amoy:
London Missionary Society, 1883). Lu worked largely with speech
sound script (huayin zi ), which was a transliterated alphabet
that missionaries derived from fifteen tones commonly seen in the local
rhyme books of southeastern Fujian province (Quanzhou and
Zhangzhou ). In the process, he found his own inspiration around
1882 at the age of twenty-eight.
He stated in the preface to A Primer at a Glance that the mission-
ary speech script was wanting, as it required several letters to convey
just one sound, leaving some words physically longer than others. To
eliminate the unevenness, he proposed a simpler system of zimu
(alphabet), where each character takes from the phonetic system
exactly one letter for rhyme vowel and one letter for rhyme ending.
More innovative, however, is his early identification of the importance
of grouping characters according to their most frequent usage in the
absence of punctuation marks. Whereas the Latin alphabet allows
for the separation of words by spacing, he explained, Chinese writ-
ing is composed of discrete characters, traditionally unaccompanied
by visual cues that would help distinguish between semantic units (ci
), which frequently consist of more than one logogram. Recogniz-
ing the need to account for the syntactical subunits, Lu used a dash to
25
See Ni Haishu, Qingmo hanyu pinyin yundong biannianshi
[A Chronological History of the Late Qing Chinese Phoneticization Movement] (Shanghai:
Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1959), 912. Cf. Zhou Youguang, Zhou Youguang yuwen
lunji [Zhou Youguangs Essays on Language] (Shanghai: Shanghai wen-
hua chubanshe, 2002), 6063.
26
Lu Zhuangzhang, Yimu liaoran chujie: Zhongguo qieyin xinzi Xia qiang [A Primer at
a Glance: Chinese New Phonetic Script in Amoy Dialect] (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe,
1956).
108 jing tsu
connect the phonetic characters within the same semantic cluster.

Other script inventors followed suit by alternatively using parentheses
and underlining.
Though his system was incomplete in its logical conception, Lus
attentiveness to syntax and his separation of nominal clusters from
verbs preceded Ma Jianzhongs well-known Mas Universal
Principles of Classical Chinese by six years. It carries even greater signifi-
cance for a number of reasons. The common reading of Mas Universal
Principles leaves the impression that a comparison between Chinese
and European languages hinges on the question of grammardid
Chinese have one, how did it differ from Western grammar, etc.
but the late Qing transition to a modern, Chinese national language
focused on the question of living sounds rather than logical structures.
Ma Jianzhong sought to develop an equivalent of Western grammar
for classical Chinese and thereby entirely avoided addressing the prob-
lem of dialectal tongues and the vernacular. His contemporaries, in
contrast, sought to document regional tongues as much as they could
in order to find a bridge to standardization. It was the sound in speech
and its innumerable changes that preoccupied those concerned with
modernizing the Chinese language. Dialects did not have their own
scripts, a fact that posed an insurmountable challenge to both stan-
dardization and systematic analysis.
Returning language to the ethnographic variations of the everyday,
sounds forced language reformers to think about tongues in terms of
not linguistic systems but social communicability. They envisioned the
continual practice and written phoneticization of regional speech in
a bilingual milieu, at least until the latter was learned. However, a
successful national language, thus narrowly defined, never quite came
to be. In practice, the mutual assimilation between standard language
and dialectal speech makes it difficult to tell where language begins
and dialects end. The two work in close proximity, drawing from each
others resources and learning from each others variability.
The late Qing language reformers had envisioned languages and
dialects interacting with and supplementing each other in a social con-
text that would use multiple linguistic forms for communication. The
project was not, as has been assumed, prompted by the idea of nation-
saving, even though it merged, as did other reformist concerns, with
the nationalistic imperative after the Sino-Japanese War of 189495.
Although the language reformers often professed to share the goal of
national salvation, there was pragmatic value in joining this platform,
especially when they would otherwise win even less support and
audience.
The enormity of the task they undertook can be gauged from its
ultimate failure. By focusing on the primacy of dialectal literacy before
national standardization, the movement came too close to empowering
local tongues over the possibility of a national language. Its variegated
writing systems were also at odds with the increasingly persuasive idea
of national writing. The movement eventually split into different direc-
tions, in large part due to the volatile political climate of the late nine-
teenth century, where progressive reforms were banned as seditious
acts or cut short depending on the revolutionary creed of the day.
Whether conceived as a universal or a transitional system, the pho-
netic script reform posited a number of alternatives to the sinoscript,
any of which would have radically reshaped the idea and practice
of the Chinese national language and national writing today. This
in itself would seem to have tremendous implications. The current
resurgence of the dialect question in discussions of overseas Chinese
literature and culture, almost a century and a half later, speaks to
the persistent relevance of this unresolved issue. The underrepresen-
tation of dialect speech in written Mandarin is used to challenge the
monolingual legacy of the May Fourth era in mainland literature as
well as Chinas cultural dominance in the Sinophone world. Com-
paring the Nationalists propagation of guoyu in Taiwan in the 1950s
to the islands conversion to Japanese under colonial language poli-
cies from two decades before, Taiwanese linguist Ang Uijin ,
for instance, further raises this awareness to a controversial threshold
between nationalization and internal colonization.27
III. From Sinophone to Sinophonics
A national language is neither a common language nor a natural

tongue. Contemporary overseas writers have seized on this suggestion
to contest the equivalence between national allegiance and Chinese-
language writing as grounds for their independent voices. Launching
the multiplicity of tongues against the dominant language of Mandarin,
27
Ang Uijin (Hong Weiren), Taiwan yuyan weiji [The Crisis of Taiwan-
ese Language] (Taibei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1992), 42.
110 jing tsu
novelists like Ng, drawing on Angs work, call for the denationalization
and desinicization of Chinese-language literature.28
At the same time, the strong objection to the dominance of main-
land nationalism is itself creating a new diasporic politics. The idea
of the native speaker has never been so compelling and naturalized
as it is now, exercising a new power of authenticity by reconceptu-
alizing itself according to the negative narrative of exclusion.29 That
dialects and their speakers were wrongfully left behind in the pro-
cess of standardization, in other words, actually installed the native
speaker, however melancholic from exclusion, as a palpable category.
Pitting dialectal speakers against the establishment of a common lan-
guage, contemporary diasporic writers and critics try to insert a wedge
between politics and language in order to preserve, and to create, a
space for the outlaw who speaks in an unregistered tongue but is com-
pelled to write in a language that is detached from it. Such a notion
reinforces the division between natural and institutionalized languages.
Critics such as Tee Kim Tong describe this condition as a product of
the centripetal and centrifugal force of identity cohesion (see Tee, this
volume). Sinophone studies, therefore, moves toward a proliferation of
distinctions among communities of native speakers who are alienated
and politically marginalized by the institution of national language
because it is either not Chinese (Malaysia) or too Chinese (mainland
China). The current controversy is raising, once again, the specter
of sound behind the sinoscript, as it implicitly takes the omission of
dialectal speech in the institutionalization of guoyu as a new rallying
point.
Reference to late Qing phoneticization could easily bolster the his-
toricity of neglected tongues. Yet current discussions show Sinophone
studies is uncertain of its genealogy or whether it can agree on a suit-
able political premise. Malaysian Chinese writers and critics based in
Malaysia look toward the possibility of reintegration into a revised
notion of a national canon, while those currently residing in Taiwan
credit Taiwanese modernism with having shaped their aesthetic iden-
tity. Neither group, however, has been willing to evaluate, for exam-
ple, their relationship to the earlier hybrid language used by settler
28
See Ng Kim Chew, Wen yu hun yu ti: Lun xiandai Zhongguo xing :
[Textuality, Soul, and Body: On Chinese Modernity] (Taibei: Maitian, 2006).
29
I discuss at length the ambiguous capital of linguistic nativity in Sound and Script
in Chinese Diaspora, esp. ch. 1.
immigrants, the Babas, in their literary adaptations of Chinese fiction.

The measure for Sinophone identity, in other words, remains that of
the national, be it China, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia,
China, or the United States.
The contemporary lesson to be learned from the history of late Qing
phoneticization reforms is not a nostalgic gaze toward what might
have been as a linguistic alternative or an indictment of guoyu as it
stands today. The current revival of dialects against the national lan-
guage, unfortunately, neither corrects the structure of linguistic power
nor secures a more compelling position, because it observes the same
line between language and dialects exactly as it has been traditionally
defined. The native speakerof either a dialect or a language
remains a protected notion. It contains the same emotional kernel that
has incited both national and native conceptions of language as iden-
tity, while its own conceptual makeup remains uninterrogated. This
deep-seated privilege has commanded a uniform certitude in modern
and contemporary discussions about the Chinese language, its attached
notions of national allegiance, and related contestations.
This is where the phoneticization movement becomes instructive.
It demonstrates how dialects were grafted onto the necessary national
language at the moment of its founding. It also shows how, para-
doxically, this created an analogical relationship between them that
is greater than their presumed conflict. Rather than disappearing in
the process of standardization, dialects continue to fuel the idea of a
native tongue by transferring the native speaker from one scale of
locality (regional ) to another (national ). The native speaker, contrary
to its common characterization as place-based, is realizable only as an
itinerant carrier of language. Hugo Schuchardt, a romance philolo-
gist whose ethnographical approach toward creolization was largely
eclipsed by Saussures structuralism, astutely observed that mother
tongues are born in transit, re-created through interactions with other
mother tongues.30 The ear, in other words, is never native to any one
place. Whether it is Li and Yangs Opening with Shapes and Sounds or
Shens Universal System, Lu Zhuangzhangs new phonetic script or Cai
Xiyongs quick script, the native earrather than literacyis
30
Hugo Schuchardt, Lingua Franca, in Pidgin and Creole Languages: Selected Essays
by Hugo Schuchardt, ed. and trans. Glenn G. Gilbert (London, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 68.
112 jing tsu
always presumed. All of the late Qing phoneticization proposals

require that an illiterate person has already heard the word, even if
he or she is not able to recognize it in written form. The process of
national language unification does not subordinate tongues, but cre-
ates the much more powerful belief that there is a tongue native to
oneself and one place.
The transition from native dialectal tongue to native national lan-
guage was achieved under the pretext of education. Responding to an
attack on his southern-tone based simple script system, later expanded
to include Min and Yue topolects, Lao Naixuan had originally sepa-
rated the task of literacy from language unification by introducing a
general notion of native tones (tuyin ) in contrast to Mandarin
tone (guanyin ):
If one wants writing to become simpler, one cannot at the same time
ask for language unification. If one desires language unification, one
must first seek to simplify script. . . . If one forced southerners to read the
northern tones of the Mandarin alphabet, the degree of inappropriate-
ness would exceed that of the proponents of the ideogram from former
days. . . . If people can really recognize simple scripts based on native
tones, even if they cannot pronounce the Mandarin tone, the benefit to
be won is already tremendous. As for learning the Mandarin tone, that
requires another level of exertion.31
A distinct line lies between facilitating literacy and implementing stan-
dardization. Lao points out, however, that the same phonetic basis
used to bridge dialects can later be used to learn the Mandarin stan-
dard dialect. Phoneticization is preferable in the meantime due to its
convenience for native speakers. It brings literacy to them, without
requiring them to sacrifice their native habits of the tongue. Once hav-
ing mastered their home dialects as units of phonemic combinations,
speakers can use the same acoustic aid to transition toward a standard
pronunciation that can be quite distant from their linguistic nativ-
ity. Little is said of the fact, however, that native speakers will have
already undergone an acoustic transformation by virtue of having to
relearn their dialects phonically. Instead of relying on an innate access
to language, they must now detach the ear from the speaking organ
and, in short, acoustically reexperience their native speech, transmit-
ted through phonemic units. To recall Huang Zunxians My hand
31
Ni, Zhongguo pinyinzi yundongshi jianbian, 49.
writes my mouth, there is in fact a missing third term, the absent ear
that ensures the return of sound to its enunciator.
The phoneticization of native tones, already a form of standard reg-
istration, needs only a small push to make language unification its final
goal. When the Advisory Council, an early attempt at constitutional
governance, was set up in 1910, member and educator Jiang Qian
recommended reforming primary school education by using Lao
Naixuans simple script in classroom instruction. Though the Minis-
try of Educations stated plan was to promote Mandarin to standard
usage in eight years, there was no explanation how to implement the
system-wide change. While reviewing a Mandarin-based textbook,
Jiang suggests an adaptation use of Laos southern-dialect based sys-
tem in order to accomplish this goal:
As for the use of written language, those predominantly oriented toward
sound are simple, while those oriented toward physical form are com-
plex. Shape exists in myriad forms. Even after the creation of tens of
thousands of characters, there still exist forms yet to be exhausted. Sound
is produced by the mouth and tongue. With tens of created vowels, one
can already fully exhaust all that is hidden in the release of sound. Since
textbooks are taught in the verbal form, it is very different from writing.
If words are made by combining vowels, then they can bear an uncanny
likeness. If shape-words [i.e., ideograms] are used, every province will
continue to read them in its own topolect. . . . Given that the method
is warped, its effectiveness will be null. I wonder whether the Ministry
of Education, in editing this textbook, has in mind the primary use of
simple script for spelling the national language so as to reap the benefits
of unification? Or does it intend to use the character, with the pho-
netic alphabet notated next to it, so as to promote model pronunciation
( fanyin )?32
Both choices offered by Jiang are now in the service of disseminating
a model pronunciation of the national language. They also indubita-
bly formalize the phonetic alphabet as a secondary order of literacy,
physically placed to the side of the characters. Phonetics, no longer
used for the preservation and conveyance of dialects, is adapted as an
instrument of standardization. It is a measure for not diversification
but unity. The phonetic alphabet, first developed to bridge different
communities of native speakers, now serves to replace the notion of
nativity with that of nationality. This thereby removes any effective
32
Ni, Zhongguo pinyinzi yundongshi jianbian, 53.
114 jing tsu
platform that might have been occupied by dialect-based proposals.

Dialects became subsidiary to the Mandarin-based common language,
even though they all began as dialects, or native tones, in the original
considerations. The only importance to be imparted to the phonetic
script is its proximity to the accurate elocution of standard speech.
The national language is henceforth installed as the linguistic habitat
of the native speaker.
That my challenge to the dominance of the national language
returns to a critique of the native speaker may be an unexpected end-
ing. Nativism, after all, has been one of the most powerful notions
deployed against the nationalism narrative. One might do better to
safeguard it than to point out its possible complicity, because it is per-
haps the last conceptual refuge for minority literatures and periph-
eral writings that are seeking to regain footing. However, one might
also recall that nativism has served the pretext of nationalism equally
well throughout the twentieth century. In order to maintain its con-
ceptual freedom, one must locate it in the language one speaks and
writes rather than the amorphous identity one feels. The entangle-
ment between language and tongues, sound and writing, offers a his-
torical witness to the contingency of power, formulated in opposing
terms only to pass into a different guise of standardization. Whether
the Sinophone becomes another Chinese, in both the political and
the linguistic sense, is a question that will perhaps keep us vigilant in
charting out this new terrain.
ALAI AND THE LINGUISTIC POLITICS OF
INTERNAL DIASPORA
Carlos Rojas
There is not one but many silences, and they are

an integral part of the strategies that underlie and
permeate discourses.
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality
Near the beginning of Alais short story Huai hua (Huai
blossoms), there is a description of an interaction between a confident
young Tibetan man and an old hunter who now lives and works in an
urban parking garage. The first time the younger man arrives at the
garage, he engages in friendly banter with the attendant, saying,
Hey, old man, heres my parking fee. I dont need a receipt; why
dont you get yourself a drink?
Hey, old man, do you want me to tell you the latest news?
Hey, old man, do you want a gal?
Hey, old man. . . .1
The attendant, whose name is Xielaban, refuses to be baited and
instead responds with a fatherly tone, calmly directing the young man
where to leave his vehicle. This kind of interaction becomes a habit
for them, and each time after the young man leaves, Xielaban finds
himself remarking in surprise, Heavens, hometown speech! (Tianna,
jiaxiang hua , ).
Xielabans startled and belated recognition of his hometown
speech not only captures one of the central concerns of this story
and of Alais literary project as a whole but also points to a crucial
tension that haunts our understanding of modern literature in general.
Literature is often discussed in national terms, reinforcing the common
assumption that it somehow gives voice to the culture and values of
a national homeland. As an ethnically Tibetan author who writes in
1
Alai , Huai hua (Huai blossoms), in Alai, Chenai feiyang
[Dust Blowing in the Wind] (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2005), 8188, 81.
Subsequent citations of this story will be noted parenthetically in the text.
116 carlos rojas
Chinese about the culturally Tibetan region of western Sichuan he

calls home, however, Alai uses the language of one nation to repre-
sent another, yielding a vision of a homeland positioned at the inter-
stices of the two nations and their respective societies and cultures. In
so doing, he implicitly interrogates the notions of both nation and
national literature, underscoring the potential, and even necessary,
divergence of the homeland featured in a fictional work from the
literary language used to describe it.
There is currently a sizable body of Chinese-language literature
about Tibetincluding works by Tibetan authors like Taishi Dawa,
Yangdon, Geyang, and ser (also known as Woeser), as well as by
ethnically Chinese writers like the avant-garde author Ma Yuan, who
worked as a journalist in Tibet for several years in the 1980s and sub-
sequently featured the region in many of his fictional works. Alai is one
of the most prominent authors writing fiction set in historic Tibet. His
first novel, Chenai luoding (The Dust Has Settled; published in
English under the title Red Poppies), for instance, won both the Junma
Prize for literature by a Chinese ethnic minority writer and
the prestigious Mao Dun Prize for novels written by Chinese
nationals.
One of the distinctive features of Alais fiction is that it not only
translates Tibetan topics into Chinese, but furthermore draws atten-
tion to this process of figurative translation itself. His works occupy
an interstitial space between a (presumptively Tibetan) homeland
and a (presumptively Chinese) representational system, straddling the
boundary between a geocultural hometown and the speech through
which it is represented, while at the same time exploring the produc-
tivity of these geographic, linguistic, cultural, and conceptual borders
themselves.
The disjoint between the language in which Alais fiction is written
and that of the homeland about which he writes is dramatized by the
figure of Xielaban, the protagonist of Huai Blossoms, who is ren-
dered virtually mute by the fact that he only knows
a local dialect ( jiaxiang fangyan ) that very few people under-
stand, while in this city Chinese (Hanyu ) and standard Tibetan
(biaozhun Zangyu ) are the norm. . . . The old man hadnt spoken
his hometown dialect for a long time, and furthermore, apart from this
dialect he only knew a few awkward phrases in Chinese having to do
with parking cars. As a result, he had basically lost all opportunity to
speak. (83)
alai and the linguistic politics of internal diaspora 117
The parking garage where Xielaban lives and works can be seen as a
symbol of his figurative prison house of language, emblematizing his
current linguistic constraints as well as his potential transcendence of
those same constraints. Although the hunters command of Chinese
extends only to a few awkward phrases having to do with parking
cars, for instance, it is precisely his job in the garage that provides
him the opportunity to interact with the occasional customer who
(like the cocky young Tibetan man) happens to speak his hometown
dialect. More abstractly, the garage is a conjunction of mobility and
stasis, a concrete symbol of the general space of translation occupied
by Alais own fiction. Just as the garage represents, for Xielaban, a
linguistic constraint as well as an opportunity, the process of transla-
tion on which Alais fiction is premised is simultaneously restrictive
and productivelinguistically separating his work from the region
that inspired it, yet making the resulting text available to a broader
(Chinese) readership.
The hometown speech scene features not so much language
itself, but rather a moment of communication failure. More specifi-
cally, although the passage appears to revolve around the idle banter
between Xielaban and the young man, the real focus of the scene
is the palpable silence within which that banter is embedded. Part
of the reason the sound of the younger mans voice makes such an
impression on Xielaban, in other words, is that it is preceded by the
virtual silence occupied by the hunter, unable to speak either of the
citys principle languages. Equally important is the pause that fol-
lows these exchanges, as Xielabans surprised recognition always
takes place only after the younger man has departed and the sound
of their voices has faded. The resulting silence, however, provides
the backdrop against which Xielabans nostalgic evocation of his dis-
placed hometown speechand also, by implication, of the doubly
displaced homeland that that speech representsbecomes possible in
the first place.
The sound of silence within which Xielabans recognition of his
hometown speech is embedded also characterizes Alais fictional
project as a whole. Alais work is classified in China under the rubric
of minority literature (shaoshu minzu wenxue )which
is to say, literature written by an author belonging to a Chinese eth-
nic minority. At the same time, his fiction can be seen as an example
of what Deleuze and Guattari call a minor literaturea body of
118 carlos rojas
literature that borrows the written language of an established literary

tradition but positions itself against many of that traditions assump-
tions and implications.2 His works not only are the product of a
translation of local subject matter into written Chinese but also
consistently draw attention to this process of translation itself. The
significance of Alais fiction, accordingly, lies not so much in what his
works say, or even how they say it, but rather precisely in what they
dont say.
An example of these silent traces of the translation process can be
found in the discussion, in the hometown speech story, of the small
white huai blossoms alluded to in the works title. The story opens
with a description of how suddenly, a wave of floral fragrance wafted
in . . . the fragrance of huai blossoms, whereupon Xielaban cocked his
head to listen, like a hunter catching a scent, while flaring his unusu-
ally wide nostrils (81). His concentration, however, is quickly shat-
tered by the rattling of the large windows by which his room in the
garage is encased. His son had redesigned the room so that Xielaban
could watch over the garage without having to get out of bed, and
consequently the windows symbolize both the old hunters confine-
ment as well as his desire to escape that confinement. By the same
logic, the scent of the huai blossoms reminds Alai of his former free-
ranging life as a hunter, even as it underscores his current inability to
return to that life. The blossoms, in other words, symbolize Xielabans
physical translation from his original hometown to his current home
in the parking garage, while also marking the traces that that transla-
tion process has left on his consciousness, as well as on the surface of
Alais fiction itself.
The status of these flowers as a figure of translation is illustrated
particularly clearly when the cocky young man shows up at Xielabans
room in the garage with a fistful of huai blossoms and a bag of flour,
and asks Xielaban to bake a loaf of steamed breadour hometowns
huai blossom steamed bread. When the loaf is ready, the younger
man suggests that before eating it they first examine the pattern of
ridges (wenlu ) that have formed on the breads surface, to see
2
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kakfa: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Danna
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
what they portend (86). By presenting the loaf as a sort of modern-day

oracle bone, the story treats the huai blossoms as a symbol of both the
old mans nostalgic attachment to the past and the younger mans ori-
entation toward the future. To the extent that the baking of the bread
functions as a symbol of (cultural ) translation, the random pattern of
ridges that forms on the loaf s surface can be compared to the subtle
traces, in Alais texts, of the process of translation through which the
texts are implicitly produced.
In this essay I will examine several examples of these sorts of figura-
tive ridges in Alais works, treating these textual ripples as symptoms
of Alais attempt to negotiate between two different hometown spaces
and their respective languages. I argue that they have important impli-
cations, not only for the linguistic and cultural politics underlying Alais
texts but also for more general questions of literatures position at the
interstices of our intuitive notions of what constitutes a hometown
and hometown speech.
I. The Haunting of the Huai
Writing letters is actually an intercourse with

ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the
addressee, but also with ones own ghost, which
secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or
even in a whole series of letters, where one letter
corroborates another and can refer to it as witness.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
If we were to follow Xielabans example and perform an oracle bone-
style analysis of the translational ridges in Alais own fiction, we might
begin with the references to the huai blossoms themselves. These blos-
soms are a central component of the story ( just as they are a crucial
ingredient of Xielabans huai blossom loaf ), and yield a number of
fortuitous linguistic associations that (like the ridges on the surface
of the loaf ) are purely contingent artifacts of the processes of textual
composition and virtual translation through which the story is pro-
duced and made legible (or edible, to preserve the loaf metaphor). The
resulting ridges are positioned at the very margins of the text as a
signifying entity, and can only be rendered intelligible by reading the
text against the grain (or, we might say, against the ridge).
120 carlos rojas
Huai blossoms come from what is known in English as a Chinese

scholar tree, and while Alais story gives no hint of what the plant
is called in Xielabans local dialect, the Chinese name nevertheless
speaks suggestively to some of the storys central concerns. This huai
character, for instance, is precisely homophonous with the first
character, , in the word huaijiu meaning nostalgia or, liter-
ally, cherishing the past. The ideograph used to designate the plant,
furthermore, contains a fortuitous allusion to that same sense of nos-
talgic return. Like many Chinese characters, huai is comprised of
both a semantic and a phonetic element, and in this case the semantic
component is the mu , or tree, radical on the left, while the pho-
netic component is the graph on the right. Although is being
used here strictly for its phonetic value (the graph appears in several
characters pronounced gui or hui , with the latter being
only a diphthong away from huai), the same graph can also be used
as a stand-alone character meaning ghost. If we were to read the
huai ideograph in Alais title against the grain, therefore, we could say
that the title literally has a ghost ( you gui )which in colloquial
Chinese means is haunted.
This allusion to the haunting of the huai is a pun the author pre-
sumably neither intended nor makes any apparent effort to capitalize
on. Merely a by-product of the virtual translation that yielded the story
itself, this inadvertent linguistic association nevertheless aptly and self-
referentially points to the way the process of translation is haunted by
the same sort of exorbitant production of meaning that yielded the
pun. This accidental allusion to haunting in the storys title points to
the significance of these sorts of translational artifacts within Alais
larger oeuvre, suggesting that Alais fiction is itself haunted by the
specter of a hometown speech that is only visible in the linguistic
ripples it leaves behind.
A similar theme of translational haunting is developed in another of
Alais stories that is itself entitled You gui (Haunted). Haunted
is a metafictional description of the quasi-autobiographical narrators
efforts, during a trip back to his hometown, to write about what he
describes as a certain matter: a ghost story that had become popular
while he was away. The narrator, however, is immediately sidetracked
by a helicopter circling outside his windowa startling and incongru-
ous sight that leads him to circle digressively around the ostensible
subject of his own story. Like the hometown speech in Huai Blos-
soms, the significance of this ghost story in Haunted lies primarily
in the storys palpable absence within Alais own text,3 together with the
ripples and distortions that it leaves in its wake.
Haunted opens provocatively, with the narrator questioning
whether the matter in question is even worth writing about in the
first place:
I want to write about a certain matter that is currently circulating in town.
Although I dont know how interesting this matter is, Ive nevertheless
decided to go ahead and write about it, and will decide later whether or
not it actually has any merit. Precisely at this point, however, a helicop-
ter flies by outside my window. (275)
Rather than proceeding directly to the certain matter in question,
the narrator instead devotes several pages to a discussion of these heli-
copters and other issues relating to his own recent return home. He
keeps trying to circle back to the question of the ghost story, but each
time is sidetracked. At one point, he offers a string of three digres-
sive I forgot to mentions in a row, each providing additional details
about his relationship to his hometown, followed by yet another I
should also mention in which he briefly describes the towns histori-
cal background:
I think that at this point I should also mention that this small town was
not founded until the 1950s, on a site where there had once been merely
a field and a grove of white poplars. The towns geographical identity is
rather complicated, since administratively it currently belongs to Sich-
uan, though in terms of its customs it is more closely allied with Tibet.
In the past, it was controlled by various small chieftains.4
The rather complicated geographical and historical identity of
the town lies not only in the shifting political borders and fields of
sovereignty that have characterized the region but also in the way
these earlier identifications and alliances continue to overlap with one
another. The result is a geocultural palimpsest, a politically and cul-
turally hybrid space that provides the setting for Haunted and for
much of the rest of Alais literary project as well.
A similar perspective on this region can be found in Alais first
novel, Red Poppies, which is set against the backdrop of the regions
3
Alai eventually includes a brief discussion of the ghost story, but it is relegated to
the margins of the work as a whole.
4
Alai, Yougui [Haunted], in Chenai feiyang, 27582, 276. Subsequent cita-
tions of this story will be noted parenthetically in the text.
122 carlos rojas
transformation in the 1930s and 1940s from a series of independent

fiefdoms into a more unified economic region increasingly defined by
its relationship with China to the east. The novel describes the process
by which the regions (internal ) borders were contested and reposi-
tioned during this early twentieth-century period as well as the gradual
transformation of the very meaning of those borders.
These descriptions of the complicated identity of the hometown
space in Alais fiction have important implications for our understand-
ing of this town itself. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud famously
compared the human psyche to an idealized image of Rome, an
entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has come into existence
will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development exist
alongside the later ones.5 Whereas for Freud Rome provides a meta-
phor for the psyche, for Alai his hometown region constitutes the fab-
ric out of which psychic identity is constituted. The resulting emphasis
on geography in Alais fiction, meanwhile, is not historical per se, and
in fact could even be seen as antihistorical, in that it suggests that ear-
lier geographical formations are perpetually viewed through the lens
of contemporary concerns.
Writing a quarter of a century after Freud, Jacques Lacan was simi-
larly inspired by the Eternal City to reflect, in his well-known Dis-
cours de Rome, on the recursive layering of historical and personal
identity: What is realized in my history is not the past definite of
what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what had
been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been
for what I am in the process of becoming.6 Building on the themes of
temporal layering and retrospective projection anticipated by Freuds
earlier text, Lacan outlines a future anterior vision of psychic his-
tory, suggesting that the past is shaped not only by the present but
also by an anticipation of how the present and the past will both be
viewed from the perspective of an as-yet-unrealized future. This sense
of future anteriority captures the paradoxical nature of the sociocul-
tural space of Alais fiction, wherein historical representations of the
region are filtered through the political considerations of the present,
5
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Nor-
ton, 1984), 16.
6
Jacques Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language, in Jacques
Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 86.
even as those concerns are themselves inflected by an anticipation of

how the period in question will subsequently be historicized.
The complicated geohistorical setting that provides the backdrop
for many of Alais worksincluding both Haunted and Red Poppies
was inspired by the area in which he himself grew up. As Howard
Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin explain in their translators note at the begin-
ning of Red Poppies, Alai was born in a tiny hamlet in Maerkang
County, in what is now western Sichuan. At the time of the story,
however, his hometown was located in the northeastern part of the
Tibetan autonomous region.7 While it is true that the area of Sichuan
where Alai was born is considered part of historic Tibet and is cur-
rently part of the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture
(Aba Zangzu Qiangzu zizhizhou ), Goldblatts
use of the phrase Tibetan autonomous region to refer to the early
twentieth-century identity of the region is instructively anachronistic,
given that during the period in question the Tibetan Autonomous
Region (TAR) (Xizang zizhiqu )as a formal designation
of the provincial-level administrative unit under the PRCdid not yet
exist.8 When the PRC was founded in 1949, Alais hometown region
was already categorized as part of Sichuan, and in 1952 it was named
the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan. The territory that is
now designated the TAR, meanwhile, was not formally liberated
by the Chinese until 1959, a full decade after the founding of the
PRC itself, and it was not formally designated a minority autono-
mous region until 1965.
What Goldblatt and Lin presumably mean when they say that Red
Poppies is set in the Tibetan autonomous region, therefore, is that
during the period when the novel takes place, the region was under the
jurisdiction of Lhasa and was considered to be part of Tibet. In using
the phrase Tibetan autonomous region, however, Alais translators
are taking a contemporary term with a specific political significance
and projecting it back onto a period and region to which it does not
7
Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Lin, Translators Note, in Alai, Red Poppies (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2002), n.p.
8
In English, Tibet Autonomous Region is typically rendered in capitals, and
while Goldblatts and Lins rendering of autonomous and region in lowercase
distances the latter phrase somewhat from the proper name coined under the PRC,
it nevertheless yields a formulation that is historically meaningless as applied to the
early twentieth century period.
124 carlos rojas
apply, and furthermore never has applied. Although the translators

use of the TAR phrase is historically and geographically inaccurate,
the anachronism nevertheless points to a paradox underlying Alais
literary project as a whole, wherein identity (linguistic, cultural, ethnic,
or otherwise) is never a self-contained category but rather is the prod-
uct of a series of retrospective gestures. For instance, Alai frequently
emphasizes the Tibetan ethnicity of most of his fictional characters, yet
notes that many of them dont speak standard Tibetan, but rather
a comparatively unintelligible local dialect. Given that most of his
fiction is set in his own hometown region of the northern Sichuan
county of Barkam (pronounced maerkang in Chinese), it is
likely that this local dialect is actually not Tibetan but rather the
Barkam subdialect of a regional language called Jiarong . Jiarong
shares a large number of cognates with Tibetan, but is nevertheless
classified as belonging to a separate family (the Tangut-Qiang family,
as opposed to the Himalayish family that includes Tibetan).9 Given
that the mother tongue of many of Alais characters (and also, quite
possibly, of Alai himself ) is actually Jiarong, this would appear to
suggest the Alais frequent emphasis on his characters (and his own)
Tibetan origins may be as misleading as the suggestionby the trans-
lators of Red Poppiesthat the novel was set in the 1930s TAR. That
is to say, he appears to be retrospectively projecting an idealized vision
of a unified Tibetan identity onto a culturally, linguistically, and ethni-
cally diverse region.
In Huai Blossoms, it is only after the younger man leaves the
garage that Xielaban belatedly realizes that they had been speaking
his own hometown dialect. It is as though the old man was men-
tally translating this familiar dialect into something less intimate, and
granting it a sense of nostalgic recognition only in retrospect, after the
young man has already left. This gesture of belated recognition implies
that this hometown speech occupies a space of double translation
having first been translated unconsciously into something familiar, and
then belatedly recognized as Xielabans hometown dialect only after
the fact. Rather than functioning as a symbol of origins and identity,
9
See Raymond G. Gordon, Jr., ed., Ethnologue, 15th ed. (Dallas, Tex.: SIL Inter-
national, 2005), online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?
code=jya.
therefore, this local dialect instead becomes a symbol of its precise

oppositethe processes of displacement and alienation on which the
very recognition of similitude is necessarily predicated.
II. Chinese Encyclopedias
That which does not have a name does not exist.

Unfortunately, everything had a name.
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
A couple of revealing examples of textual traces of the process of vir-
tual translation on which Alais fiction is predicated can be found in
Alais recent novel, Kong shan (Bald Mountain). Conceived as
an informal sequel to Red Poppies and set in the ethnically Tibetan
town of Jicun in western Sichuan, Bald Mountain was published in three
volumes (in 2005, 2007, and 2008, respectively), and consists of six
overlapping novellas, of which I will focus here on the third, Dase
yu Dage (Dase and Dage). Set in the 1960s, Dase and
Dage revolves around the two title characters: Dase , who left
the village to study in the Chinese interior and returned in 1963 with
a cartful of books, and Rejue Huaerdan ()also known
as Dage , Tibetan for idiotwho was a hunter before joining
the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Standing between them is Dages
lover, a local woman by the name of Semei , who joins a Com-
munist propaganda troupe and dreams of becoming a professional
singer. The novella is narrated by a young boy positioned throughout
much of the work as a silent observer, but who occasionally makes an
appearance in his own right.
As he does throughout his fiction, in Dase and Dage Alai silently
translates the hometown speech of the narrative into Chinese while
at the same time drawing attention to these underlying issues of trans-
lation. The first explicit reflection on issues of language in the novella
occurs as Semei is discussing with Dage her plans of becoming a pro-
fessional singer:
Dage, the world has changed. Can a good hunter help me become a
singer?
Semei used the Chinese word gechangjia (singer). After all, the
dialect of Tibetan (Zangyu fangyan ) used in their village didnt
really have this word yet. In this dialect, there were only words and
phrases corresponding to song, to sing, that person is singing a
126 carlos rojas
song, that person singing a song, and similar expressions describing

someone in the act of singing at a specific moment. Those formulations
designate a condition that anyone could provisionally assume, rather
than the glorious profession of singing itself.
Now, however, this technical term referring to a kind of glorious pro-
fession tumbled out of Semeis beautiful throat in Chinese. The word
had a spell-like allure, and as she uttered it her downcast face immedi-
ately lit up with an extraordinary glow.10
It is revealing that gechangjia (singer) is the first word in the novella spo-
ken directly in Mandarin. Not only is singer itself a metalinguistic
term, referring to a practice wherein language itself is endowed with
a spell-like allure, but furthermore it is being used in a way that
underscores an ontological distinction between singing as a discrete
act and the concept of a singer as a fixed identity.
It is also significant that these comments on the nature and limits
of specific languages are made precisely in the context of a broader
discussion of the power of language itself. Semeis face lights up the
instant she mentions the Chinese word for singer, her emotions
becoming infected with the enchanting power of this glorious profes-
sion. Her use of a Chinese term to refer to this profession is fitting,
furthermore, since it becomes clear that the songs she will be singing
are actually Maoist propaganda pieces. She proceeds to sing a couple
of lines from The Brilliance of Chairman Mao (Mao Zhuxi de guan-
ghui ):

(28)
The brilliance of Chairman Mao,
gelaya xi luoruo.
It shines on the snowy mountain tops,
yila qiang ba luoruo.
This song is one of the few instances in the novella where a character
is described as speaking Chinese, and also one of the rare instances
in Alais work where Tibetan is transcribed and directly embedded
10
Alai, Kongshan [Bald Mountain], vol. II (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
2007), 28. Subsequent references to this novella will be noted parenthetically in the
text.
within the fictional text. It is significant, moreover, that this inclusion

of Tibetan occurs in the context of one of the most explicitly Maoist
passages in the novel, and furthermore is wrapped up in and framed
by the unapologetically ideological passage itself.
The lyrics Alai cites here are from an actual song, and this inter-
weaving of Chinese and Tibetan turns out to have a very specific his-
tory (though Alai makes no mention of this history in his novel ). This
tune was adopted in 1951 from a Tibetan folk song and was given
Chinese lyrics by a certain Wang Ronghan . The piece was
modified again in 1964 when the Tibetan singer Caidan Zhuoma
was invited to perform it at Zhou Enlais multiethnic 1964
production of The East Is Red (Dongfang hong ), where she
modified it by reinserting a Tibetan refrain into the Chinese lyrics. In
his own citation of the song, Alai not only leaves Caidan Zhuomas
reinserted lines in the original Tibetan (though transliterated into Chi-
nese) but also emphasizes the fact that other characters in the novel
perceive these inserted lines as being comparatively unintelligible dis-
tant Tibetan ( yuanfang de Zangyu ), and not the towns local
dialect (dangdi fangyan ) (28).
This version of The Brilliance of Chairman Mao replicates in
miniature the gesture of double translation upon which Alais fiction
is premised. Like Wang Ronghan, Alai typically takes local subject
matter and translates it into Mandarin Chinese, and in the process
reinserts, like Caidan Zhuoma, linguistic traces of those same origins.
In this case, these linguistic traces take the form of the same lines of
Tibetan that Caidan Zhuoma reinserted into the Brilliance of Chair-
man Mao song, though here the lines function not so much as a
reminder of the works linguistic origins, but rather as an indication of
the ultimate impossibility of those origins. Alai specifies that even the
locals in the novella dont understand these distant Tibetan phrases,
and he himself makes no attempt to specify the meaning of these lines
for the benefit of his (presumptively Chinese) readers.
The next explicit appearance of Chinese in the novella following
this Chairman Mao song occurs in a scene in which Dase shows the
narrator a Chinese encyclopedia he has brought back with him from
the interior. The young narrator is utterly entranced by the volume
as he gently strokes the embossed title and intones the name of the
work aloud:
128 carlos rojas
I caressed that books thin, brown cloth cover with the embossed dim
gold title, Encyclopedia (Baike quanshu ).
It was necessary for me to use my still not-fluent Chinese (hai bu shulian
de Hanyu ) to read the name of this sacred thing, and
therefore I recited the word very awkwardly. This awkwardness, mean-
while, further increased the sense of novelty and mystery I felt upon first
encountering this encyclopedia. (70)
Dase then opens the volume and asks the narrator if he is able to
recognize any of the ideographs. The boy, who has had studied some
very basic Chinese in school, recognizes only a handful: one , a
couple of s, a , and quite a few s. He suspects that he may
have also seen some of the others before, but cannot state with cer-
tainty whether or not he recognizes them. In any event, he concludes
confidently, the phrases Chairman Mao, Communist Party, and
Long Live! definitely do not appear anywhere in the text.
Dase then shows the narrator the entry for Chinese tulip tree,
complete with an illustration labeled with the Chinese characters
, which the narrator painstakingly sounds out in Mandarin: ezhang
qiu. In the process, the boy experiences a miniature epiphany:
It was at that point that I realized that everything in this world has its
own solemn name. Especially when those names are written down in a
book, and then are read out loud in a foreign language, the world comes
to assume a completely new appearance.
He concludes by asking Dase, Why is it that now that the tree has
a name, it is different from when it didnt have a name? (71). What
impresses the young narrator here is not the specific information con-
tained in the encyclopedia, but rather the system of classification used
to categorize and present that information. He immediately intuits
that this underlying taxonomical system has implications for structures
not only of knowledge but also, as Foucault would argue, of the power
with which that knowledge is inextricably intertwined.
Like Borges famous Chinese encyclopedia, in which animals are
organized into counterintuitive and overlapping categories ranging
from those that belong to the Emperor to those that from a long
way off look like flies, Dases encyclopedia functions not so much as
a vehicle of knowledge per se but rather as a road map of an underly-
ing set of taxonomical and epistemological assumptions. By extension,
we may see the young narrators response to Dases encyclopedia as
a commentary on Alais own practice of writing fiction in Chinese.
Just as an encyclopedia conveys not merely knowledge but also the
taxonomical assumptions upon which that knowledge is structured,

language similarly conveys not merely meaning but also the epistemo-
logical assumptions upon which that meaning is premised. In Alais
case, the very act of writing in Chinese about Tibet inevitably carries
political implications. For instance, he consistently refers to the PRCs
assertion of sovereignty over the region in 1959 as an act of lib-
eration ( jiefang )using the default Chinese term for the event,
which nevertheless carries specific (and highly contested) political con-
notations. Although Alai does not reflect on the political ramifications
of his own language use, passages such as these in Dase and Dege
present an important reminder that language is never transparent, and
language use is never innocent.
III. Journeys of Alienation
I have only one language; it is not mine.

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other
In 2000, the same year that Alai was awarded the Junma and Mao
Dun prizes for Red Poppies, Gao Xingjian became the first
Sinophone author to win the worlds most coveted literary award, the
Nobel Prize in Literature. Although the Nobel is awarded for a life-
time of achievement, one of the works that the prize selection com-
mittee singled out for particular recognition was Gaos 1989 novel
Ling shan (Soul Mountain). Like Bald Mountain (Kong shan ) and
most of Alais other fictional works, Soul Mountain is set in western
Sichuan (albeit the southwest portion of the province, as opposed
to the northwest portion featured in Alais works), and describes the
quasi-autobiographical protagonists journey in search of a spiritual
soul mountain. The novel was inspired by the authors own jour-
ney through the same region following his misdiagnosis of lung can-
cer in 1983although by the time the novel was published six years
later, Gao was in the middle of a rather different sort of journey of
rediscovery, having already moved to France, where he subsequently
became a naturalized citizen. When, in 2000, Gao Xingjian became
the first ethnically Chinese author to win the Nobel Prize, therefore,
the historic significance of long-awaited recognition was complicated,
for many PRC observers, by the fact that he not only was no longer
a Chinese citizen but furthermore had gone to considerable effort to
distance himself from claims of cultural nationalism.
130 carlos rojas
Despite having won, within the space of a year, three of the most
prestigious literary prizes available to Chinese authors, Alai and Gao
Xingjian are both positioned at the margins of Chinese literature as
the category is conventionally understood, and challenge assumptions
of what it means to be a Chinese author in the first place. With Alai
being an ethnically Tibetan Chinese citizen and Gao Xingjian (cur-
rently) an ethnically Chinese (Han) French citizen, they each have a
very different relationship to the ethno-national nexus conventionally
associated with China. Both authors are recognized for works set in
the Chinese border region of western Sichuan, though Gao Xingjian
positions himself as a diasporic writer and attempts to distance himself
from claims of cultural nationalism while Alai positions himself as an
internally diasporic author and emphasizes his position at the sociocul-
tural interstices of China itself. Neither Alai nor Gao Xingjian identi-
fies himself as being straightforwardly Chinese, and yet it is precisely
this ambivalence about their respective Chineseness that is a central
concern of their respective literary projects.
Gao Xingjian famously gives voice to the tensions between the dif-
ferent dimensions of his identity by splitting his fictional narrators
into several different, overlapping pronominal voicesprimarily you
and he, and occasionally we and even I. A similar pronominal
splitting can be found in some of Alais works, perhaps nowhere more
clearly than in Huai Blossoms, where each of Xielabans final three
utterances is characterized by a variation of he heard himself say . . .
(ta tingjian ziji shuo ), suggesting that the old man is hear-
ing his voice as from the perspective of an outsider. Xielabans shift
from recognizing his own speech in the voice of another near the
beginning of the story to his eventual disassociation from his own voice
at the end, meanwhile, illustrates the paradoxical double postulate that
Jacques Derrida proposes in Monolingualism of the Other: I have only
one language; it is not mine.11
Derrida explains this postulate by citing, first, his own background as
an Algerian Jew whose natal language is French, but who was stripped
of his French citizenship for several years during World War II, when
the Vichy regime revoked the citizenships of all Algerian Jews. As a
result, French was, in a real sense, no longer his, though it nevertheless
11
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick
Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
remained the only language he could claim as his own. Derrida uses
his personal background to illustrate his more general postulate that
we all speak a language that is not our own, yet which is all that we
have. Language, in other words, is necessarily predicated on the exis-
tence of a set of communal rules and conventions that render it intel-
ligible to others. To imagine a truly private language over which
one exercises exclusive control is, as Wittgenstein famously argued, a
contradiction in terms, a repudiation of the very notion of a language.
Conversely, when Derrida postulates that he has only one language,
he is not claiming that he doesnt know any foreign languages (in fact,
he was fluent in several European languages), but rather that we can
never step out of the space of language itself.
To the extent that authors like Alai and Gao Xingjian illustrate the
difficulties of appealing to an essentialized vision of Chinese identity
as a basis for literary categorization, Derridas argument that ones
language is never really ones own similarly complicates an attempt to
use language as a basis of literary categorization. Just as Sinophone
authors like Alai and Gao Xingjian may have a rather alienated rela-
tionship to the Chinese language, it is also easy to think of other Chi-
nese authors writing in other languages (from which they are similarly
alienated), including expatriate authors like Ha Jin, who writes pri-
marily in English, or early twentieth-century Taiwan authors like Wu
Zhuoliu, who wrote in Japanese. By extension, one might even wish
to use the category of Chinese author to describe a figure like the
Nobel laureate Pearl Buck, who was neither ethnically Chinese nor
a Chinese citizen, and who didnt write in Chinese, though she lived
most of her life in China and wrote primarily about Chinese topics.
Rather than attempting to define Chinese or Sinophone literature
by appealing to strict national, ethnic, or linguistic criteria, I suggest
instead that it would be more productive to view them as being char-
acterized by what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances of multiple
mutually intersecting factors. Chinese, in English, may be under-
stood in national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or even geographical
terms, and many authors (such as Alai) produce works that feature
only some of these Chinese characteristics, and not others. What
is needed, therefore, is a taxonomical system that eschews attempts
to draw strict borders around the category of Chinese literature, and
instead takes seriously the possibility that all literature is potentially
alienated from its own defining characteristics (I have only one lan-
guage; it is not mine).
132 carlos rojas
The resulting messiness of these taxonomical categories, however,

should be regarded not as a problem to be addressed, but rather as
one of the constitutive conditions of literary production itself. A sug-
gestive metaphor for the political, linguistic, and conceptual border
zone within which Alais fiction (and, indeed, all literature) is posi-
tioned, for instance, can be found in Huai Blossoms. The work opens
with a description of how Xielabans glass room in the parking garage
reminds him of a cross between a bird cage and a wine bottle. As Xie-
laban lies in bed gazing up at the ceiling, he mixes his metaphors as
he compares his room, not to a wine bottle, but rather to an inverted
wine cup. He imagines that this cup is filled not with old wine but
with a fragrance of the past (wangshi qiwei ). When he figu-
ratively tries to sip from the metaphorical cup, however, he is careful
not to let his lips touch the edge of the cup, in order to avoid the taste
of the steel that has been painted, rusted, and corroded by oil (81).
This oddly florid description of the edge of the metaphorical wine cup
underscores the general significance of linguistic, geographic, histori-
cal, and conceptual borders within Alais fiction, not to mention lit-
erature in general. Despite traditional attempts to assign literary works
to discrete categories, the interest of those works often lies precisely in
the way they productively explore the underlying indeterminacies of
those same categories.
THINKING WITH FOOD, WRITING OFF CENTER:
NOTES ON TWO HONG KONG AUTHORS1
Rey Chow
The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in

which the weak make use of the strong . . . lend a
political dimension to everyday practices.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
It is one thing to write from within a culture that
deems itself central and another thing to write from
the boundaries of eccentricity.
Carlos Fuentes, Central and Eccentric Writing
This essay was first conceived independently of the current debates about the division
between Chinese and Sinophone. Insofar as the two authors discussed focus on
the issues of oral consumption and cultural eccentricity as they relate to a predomi-
nantly Chinese-speaking population, my arguments resonate with the concerns of the
present volume and take it beyond its predominant focus. The questions pertaining to
being ChineseWho? Where? When? Why? How? For whom?are approached
here obliquely, not so much in the sense of geographical movements between the moth-
erland and the diaspora as in the sense of an ongoing historical scene of writing. The
unevenness between script and sound and the hierarchy between what is visible and
what is invisible in an urban landscape serve both as reminders of the intractable
power politics at play and, paradoxically, as stimulants for alternative thinking.
Sustained practices of minoritization within the major language of Chinese and of
deterritorialization within the monumental atlases of Chinesenessthese remain
some of the most refreshing lessons from the globalized cultural time-space of post-
British Hong Kong.
1
An earlier version of this essay was published under the title Consumption and
Eccentric Writing: Notes on Two Hong Kong Authors, Communal/Plural 7, no. 1
(1999): 4558; this early version has been substantially modified and updated. Except
where specified, all translations from the Chinese language are mine. For reasons of
space, I will provide the original Chinese characters selectively rather than compre-
hensively.
134 rey chow
I. Lyricism of an Orality Other Than Speech
During an interview conducted in 1997, the well-known Hong Kong

author Leung Ping Kwan (pen name Ye Si ) expressed
admiration for certain non-Chinese poets whose work he once trans-
lated, in the following manner:
What I appreciate in their work is usually not a felicitous phrase or
an appropriate comparison but rather the manner in which an entire
horizon, an attitude so to speak, reveals itself amid the most quotidian
observation and the most ordinary use of language. Their poetic works are
like delicious food, which, after digestion, gives me nourishment.2
Even the most casual reader of Leungs poetry will notice that this
considered reference to food is a characteristic feature of his writing.
The more obvious culinary examples are, of course, in the poems that
deal explicitly with food, such as the ones gathered in the subcollection
Foodscape/, with tempting titles such as Pun Choi on
New Years Eve/, Breakfast in Soho/,
Salted Shrimp Paste/, Soup with Dried Chinese Cab-
bage/, and so forth.3 In Leungs universe, one made up of
external as well as internal journeys, the most common comestibles,
such as tea and coffee, are often juxtaposed with exotic items such as
those mentioned in the concluding lines of At Bela Vista/
: bean stew Brazilian style, squids Mozambique in coconut
juice,/, , followed by a
simple drink made from sugar cane/.4
A closer look at Leungs other works reveals that he has been consis-
tently drawing on what can be eaten for his imaginative, multigeneric
musings over the decadesin the form of vegetables, fruits, meat, fish,
soft drinks, tea, wine, soups, snacks, and much more. This repeated
2
Shi, yuejie, wenhua [ Poetry, Boundary-Crossing, Culture], interview with Ji
Hun, Shi Bi-Monthly 36 (October 1, 1997): 3651; emphasis added.
3
These poems and many others can be found in Leungs collection Travelling with
a Bitter Melon: Selected Poems (19731998)/, ed. Martha P. Y. Cheung,
foreword by Rey Chow (Hong Kong: Asia 2000 Limited, 2002). For a few examples
of Leungs numerous other works, see the collections Kunming de chuxi/New Years Eve
in Kunming (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ye Si de xianggang [Ye Sis Hong
Kong] (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 2005); Islands and Continents: Short Stories by Leung
Ping-kwan, ed. John Minford with Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-chong Chan (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007).
4
Translated by Martha Cheung; Travelling with a Bitter Melon, 26465.
thinking with food, writing off center 135
turn to food suggests that food is something Leung thinks with, but what
exactly does that mean? How might the semiotics of food and, by
implication, of consumption be understood in Leungs writing?
Eating is, of course, among the most frequently used allegories in
modern and contemporary Chinese literary culture. In a tradition that
is conventionally said to begin with Lu Xun, modern Chinese litera-
ture since the early twentieth century has held typically ambivalent
attitudes about it. Despite the gusto that accompanies gluttony and the
pride many Chinese people take in Chinese cuisine, eating has, in the
radical intellectual critique of Chinese culture since the May Fourth
period, been metaphorized as terror, as the cannibalism of a stagnant
feudal civilization with its chi ren de li jiao , man-eating
rituals and conventions.5 Alternatively, because of the regular peri-
ods of famine and starvation in Chinas long history, eating has also,
more commonly than is the case in May Fourth practice, occupied
a privileged, perhaps even fetishized, status in the literary depictions
of hunger, scarcity, and necessities that are hard to come by. Among
the popular Tang dynasty poems Chinese children are often taught to
recite, for instance, is Li Shens Min Nong Shi :
, ; , ? (The farmers are
working hard in the fields under the midday sun, with drops of their
sweat falling onto the earth. Who understands that each and every
grain in our bowl of rice has come from such strenuous labor?) Closer
to our time, when depicting what she considered to be the calamity
of the early period of Communist rule, Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing)
also chose the widespread shortage of food as her theme in the novel
Yangge (The Rice Sprout Song).6 The complex, collective emotional
investments in food and its feared lack mean that, decades of attempts
by the Chinese Communist government to steer cultural work in the
Marxist conceptual direction of production notwithstanding, it is con-
sumption and the neuroses surrounding consumption that retain the
fascinating hold on writers and readers imagination.
5
For an in-depth analysis of this literary and cultural tradition, see Gang Yue, The
Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999).
6
Eileen Chang Ai-ling, Yangge (1954; reprint, Taipei: Crown, 1968); The Rice Sprout
Song (New York: Scribners, 1955); reissued in paper with an introduction by David
Der-wei Wang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
136 rey chow
To mention just a few examples, contemporary films and novels

from the Peoples Republic of China such as Chen Kaiges Huangtudi
(Yellow Earth), Su Tongs Mi (Rice), and Yu Huas Huo zhe
(To Live), and a memoir such as Guanlong Caos The Attic, among
numerous others, participate in the post-Cultural Revolution obsession
with what it means to eat or not to eat in China.7 Recurrent politi-
cal turmoil, sparseness of material resources, and surveillance by the
authorities and other peopletypical features of mainland Chinese life
during an extended period in the mid-twentieth centuryconverge
to produce in fiction (including film) a rugged, masculinist approach
to food, whereby ingestion is habitually portrayed as cognate with
aggression and conquest. To eat, from this approach, is to wage a
successful warto be able to find food when none seems to exist, to
attack with impetuosity and devour without remorse because it is often
uncertain when and from where the next meal will come. Eating, in
other words, is regarded unabashedly as a form of violence, a power
struggle between man and the hostile world. Whatever yields food,
such as nature, is also what demands taming by force: if you dont
eat it, it will eat you.
From a corresponding feminine perspective, eating has often been
handled with familial sentimentality (or passive aggression). A casual
perusal of Chinese cookbooks, a popular genre whose authors and
readers tend to be women rather than men, indicates that the seem-
ingly factographic recipe writing about food readily aligns with the
mainstream sociological division of labor between men and women.
Cooking, especially domestic cooking usually performed by mothers,
wives, and daughters, is thus rhetorically constructed around motifs
of health (usually linked to the mysterious essences of the foodstuffs
being used), economics (in terms of time as well as money), entertain-
ment (as a necessary feature of socialization), consideration of age and
sexual differences among consumers (especially in extended families),
and so forth. All in all, it is implied, such factors of physical and mental
well-being are what a shrewd and capable woman should take into
account in her responsibility and operational strategy as the nurturing
household manager.
7
Chen Kaige, Huangtudi (Guangxi Film Studio, 1984); Su Tong, Mi (Hong Kong:
Cosmos Books, 1991); Yu Hua, Huo zhe (Hong Kong: Publications [Holdings] Lim-
ited, 1994); Guanlong Cao, The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlords Son, trans. Guanlong
Cao and Nancy Moskin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
This feminization of consumption continuesand often intensifies

when Chinese families move overseas. A film such as Wayne Wangs
The Joy Luck Club (based on Amy Tans novel of the same name), for
instance, makes full use of eating and eating festivities to convey the
traumas of being branded ethnic (that is, Chinese American) in vari-
ous moments of historical and/or psychic dislocation. Although the
story is supposedly about four sets of mother-daughter relationships in
diasporic Chinese families in the United States, almost every episode
revolves around food, and food quickly becomes a code for sexual
and ethnic crises, be they over filial piety, female chastity, marriage,
betrayal, suicide, cross-generational misunderstanding, vengeance, or
memory.
Many other examples may be drawn on to illustrate the centrality
of food and consumption in relation to modern and contemporary
Chinese culture around the world. For instance, consider also block-
buster film comedies with cosmopolitan settings such as Ang Lees
Yinshi nann (Eat Drink Man Woman) and Johnnie To Kei-
fung and Wai Ka-fais Shoushen nann (Love on a Diet). The
point of this digression, though, is to foreground what I consider to
be Leung Ping Kwans distinctive approach to food and consumption.
Not only does he refuse the arrogant attitude that food cannot be the
stuff that poetry is made of, but his contemplations on food also serve,
ultimately, to pose a refreshing question: what does it mean to eat and
consume, especially in relation to the postcolonial, postmodern scene
(of language) that is Hong Kong?
Unlike the masculinist violence and the domestic sentimental-
ity found in the two major rhetorical styles of commodifying food
(in stories, films, memoirs, and cookbooks) described above, Leungs
approach to eating is of a quite different order. Not that he holds
himself aloof from commodification; rather, for him, food is always
an occasion for being aware of something other, for constructing rela-
tions and connections among singular phenomena. Even in the most
vivid, concrete descriptions of ingredients, of colors, smells, and tastes,
food is in Leungs writing food for thought, a manner of exploring
the secret dimensions and possibilities lurking in what appear to be
ordinary, banal contacts among people and things.
Here, Leungs status as a Cantonese-speaking poet writing in the
standard Chinese language carries special import. In Hong Kong,
where Cantonese speakers writing and reading habits have been built
for generations on formal written Chinese, locals who try to write in
138 rey chow
their own tongue/speech often find themselves handicapped by what

Koon-chung Chan perceptively suggests is a discursive stuttering.8 As
though to underscore the fact that the speech he and his fellow Hong
Kong citizens use on a daily basis will never be recognized (except as
an incomprehensible stutter or speech defect) by those attuned only to
the sounds of Chinese proper, Leung has repeatedly focused on a
function of the mouth that is proximate but not identical to the voice.
By substituting, in poetry, the orality of eating for the orality that is the
poets expressive voice, he breaks up the continuum that is all too con-
veniently posited between a particular native speech/mother tongue
(in this context, Mandarin) and the unwieldy, ever-evolving event of
cultural identification (in this context, Chineseness). Rather than cor-
roborating that continuum and the illusory natural linkage between
speech and identity it projects, Leungs lyricism specializes in creating
lines of flight, through food, that lead not to a neat correspondence
between a particular voice/speech and its presumed, predictable cul-
tural circuit but rather to encounters with the foreign.9
The foreign, meanwhile, is not necessarily just exotic; it can also
be the instance of a renewed discovery of and emphasis on ones own
history. Mussels in Brussels, for instance, are not only an exotic gastro-
nomical delight but also an unexpected means of marking the ineluc-
tability of historical differences, in contrast to untenable universalist
claims, which are on this occasion associated with the speech of a
mainland Chinese director. Beginning with the light-hearted lines

?

,
All say mussels have no identity problems
Perhaps . . . after all, here in Brussels,
8
Koon-chung Chan, Hong Kong Viscera, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (December
2007) (Special Issue: Hong Kong: Ten Years After Colonialism, guest edited by
Kwai-cheung Lo and Laikwan Pang): 383.
9
For Leungs extended autobiographical comments on language usage in Hong
Kong, see his interview with Deng Xiaohua, Lishi de geren, yuhui haishi huilai: yu
Liang Bingjun de yici sanman fangtan [Historys Individual, Tortuous or Returning:
A Leisurely Interview Conversation with Leung Ping Kwan], Jintian/Today 77, no. 2
(Summer 2007) (Special Issue: Xianggang shinian [Hong Kong Ten Years], ed. Ye
Hui): 834; see in particular 20.
we still eat Canadian mussels

The sixth-generation director from China goes on and on
Art is pure! Art is universal!
the poem ends on a somber note, an unambiguous stance on a messy
issue:

,

,

And yet in the universe
there are different kinds of mussels, always will be . . .
. . . Chinese mussels strayed from home,
thousands of miles away, still taste of
the ponds and lakes that bred them. All mussels have their own history
There isnt a mussel thoroughly metaphysical
/Mussels in Brussels10
On a related note, when far away from home, it is often the taste of
something familiar that reminds us not only of what we have eaten
before but also of who we are. There is, to be sure, nothing extraor-
dinary about such a revelation, but what is unusual is that consump-
tion, normally considered a passive, unproductive act,11 serves as the
agent of producing cultural difference, at a time when such difference
is thought to be lost or in the process of disappearing. Such, then,
are the thoughts, mindful both of kin relations and of the company
of strangers, triggered by the taste of cooked eggplant in a diasporic
setting

,
,

10
Translated by Martha Cheung, in Travelling with a Bitter Melon, 23235.
11
For a sustained critique of the assumption that consumption is essentially passive,
see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
140 rey chow

,
:
With what mixed feelings, I wonder, your parents
had followed the flux of emigrants and crossed the wide seas
in time, hybrid fruit and new vegetables slipped into their vocabulary
their tongues slowly got used to foreign seasonings
Like many of their generation, people began to drift away
from a centre, their appearance changed
But now and then from shreds of something here and bits of
something elsewhere we discovered a vaguely familiar taste
like meat and skin cooked to a mush, gone apart
back together again: that taste of ourselves, extinct, distinct
/Eggplants12
or by an attempt to make Hainanese chicken rice among new
neighbors:

?

?

?
Do I have the best recipe
to cook chicken in steaming water
remake tenderness in a foreign land
console parents who drifted over the oceans?
to make the best sauce and chili-lime dip
reconcile the taboos of food and language
readjust to the rules of the new dinner table?
to cook rice in chicken broth with the right texture
12
Translated by Martha Cheung, in Travelling with a Bitter Melon, 24447.
make it less oily to please new neighbors

accommodate to the citys diverse appetite?
/Hainanese Chicken Rice (Singapore version)13
If taste may be described as a kind of nativismthe nativism of the
palate, a connection at once private and collectiveit is important to
note that taste itself is not exactly being sentimentalized. Indeed, what
seems so physically intimate as to have become an inalienable part of
us may also, Leung writes, turn alien and dubious, and even confusing
with the change of political climates. In a place such as Poland, where
ordinary life has been torn asunder by political crises for sustained
periods, the availability of food, indeed the corporeally nativistthe
taste of what ought to have been utterly familiareasily becomes in-
accessible, ephemeral:
,
,
,
,
,

?
Having seen swans and magnificent churches, we found
a small charming restaurant over at the square, it served
authentic goulash soup and fried potato pancakes that tasted so good,
but the next time we could not find it. In the government-owned
restaurant
with its stately architecture, behind the heavy curtain that was about
to fall, it seemed the evil shadows of history were there
Can a change of government alter a soups taste?
/A Restaurant in Poland14
The manner in which consumption becomes an event to think with
can perhaps be generalized to include all the material objects in
Leungs poetry, which are often occasions for surprising illuminations.
Leungs tenacious curiosity about these objects is especially compelling
given his hometowns stereotypical reception by an uncomprehending
international public.15 Against the oft-repeated moralistic indictment
13
Leung, Tasting Asia (12 Poems), Modern Chinese Literature and Cul-
ture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 9.
14
Translated by Glen Steinman, in Travelling with a Bitter Melon, 19697.
15
Martha Cheung: In all of his explorations, it is curiositydeepening at times
into a preoccupation with issues of more serious importrather than a pious politics
142 rey chow
that Hong Kong is a place driven exclusively by materialism and

consumerism,16 Leungs work, through cohesively nuanced self-re-
flections, forges an alternative path to the materialist and consumer-
ist world that the poet, like any other person, must inhabit. It is as
if, by holding onto the theme of material consumption and refusing
to overlook even the most lowly things in his environment, Leung
is unwittingly returning the gaze of the indicting international pub-
lic with one that is not only distinctive in kind but also distinctive
in quality. Rather than modalities of glamour, excess, extravagance,
and wastenormally associated with (Hong Kongs) materialism and
consumerismhe teaches us ways of finding treasures in the plain, the
modest, and the prosaic.
Leungs unconventional thing-oriented preoccupation alerts us to
the fact that Hong Kong, as it seized worldwide media attention in the
final decade of the twentieth century because of its official handover
from Britain to China in 1997, has itself been turned into an object
of consumption, especially by the West, which is ready as ever to play
nostalgic Orientalist, self-righteous missionary, and eager savior all at
once. In this light, Leungs work over the decades can be seen as
an ongoing intervention in the demeaning transcultural consumerism
inherent in the grand narratives of global geopolitical as well as com-
mercial transactions, which have alternately understood the former
British colony simply as a part of China, lost and regained, or as a
corrupt society irredeemably delivered into the evil hands of capital-
ism. Between the forces of British imperialism and global economism,
and between the forces of mainland Chinese nationalism and Western
democratic moralism, it would not be an exaggeration to say that
Hong Kong is often being discursively swallowed: slighted, brushed
aside, anddespite its lived historymade to disappear without a
trace down the hegemonic alimentary canals of the worlds media.17
of achieved models and meanings . . . that sets the dynamics of Leungs travel into
motion (Introduction, Travelling with a Bitter Melon, 29).
16
For a more elaborate critique of this type of indictment of Hong Kong, see
another discussion of mine of Leungs work, Things, Common/Places, Passages of
the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping-kwan, in Ethics
After Idealism: TheoryCultureEthnicityReading (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indi-
ana University Press, 1998), 16888. An early version of this essay was published in
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 179204.
17
For an informed discussion of the stereotypical treatment of Hong Kong culture,
see Martha Cheungs introduction to Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing,
ed. Martha P. Y. Cheung (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998), ixxiii.
To this habitual ravenous custom of eating Hong Kong alive was

added, around 1997, a slew of opportunistic writings, journalistic and
academic, whose authors resorted to sensationalism as a way to dis-
guise a profound ignorance of and indifference to Hong Kongs own
cultural productions, especially when such productions happen to be
in the Chinese language.18 Against this cynical and frequently conde-
scending ambience of what by the late 1990s had become the global-
ized fad of consuming Hong Kong as object, Leungs work strikes a
firm and dissonant chord.
From the dazzling array of objects in Leungs poems, it is possible
to trace, steadily, the contours of a certain method of consumerism,
an unusual kind of consumption at work. At the same time, these lyri-
cal and at times cryptic writings bear clues as to how they themselves
could be consumed. Consumption thus takes on the significance of a
liminal phenomenon, one in which reading crosses over to become
writing (and vice versa), while the Cantonese-speaking poets muted
speech reconstitutes itself as the lyricism of an other (form of ) orality.
As Leung often mentions, he has little enthusiasm for the grand-
sounding heroic tales, words, and phrases that aim at monumentaliz-
ing history by leaving out precisely the kinds of details and fragments
in which he is interested. He typically begins, then, with passing men-
tion of the trivial things of daily life, be it an onion, a papaya, a pot-
ted plant, a rainy day, an old touristy street on which shops are being
torn down and rebuilt, or a patch of color in the sky at sunset. In
this sensuous attentiveness (involving sights, sounds, touch, smells, and
tastes) is another quality, a tenderness that connects the things being
described with the poets language itself. It is as if the act of consuming
18
The best cases in point were the sensationalist reports on Hong Kongs han-
dover, found throughout the Western print media around 1997, in publications such
as The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, The New Republic, semiacademic
journals such as Film Comment and Public Culture, and numerous others. Despite the
fact that a multitude of debates have long existed in Chinese by authors who speak
knowledgeably from the historical perspectives of the majority, Cantonese-speaking
population residing in Hong Kong, many of the writers who composed these reports
relied exclusively on English sources. Had their topics been French, German, Eng-
lish, or American, such a failing in basic research competency would certainly have
disqualified these writers from their tasks and cast serious doubt on their credibility.
In the case of Hong Kong, however, such incompetence was readily overlooked and
considered acceptable by the international public. For a related discussion of the ori-
entalist and racial prejudices inherent in this fashionably consumerist manner of rep-
resenting Hong Kong, see my King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the Handover
from the USA, Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 93108.
144 rey chow
has brought forth a special partnership, characterized above all by

the mutual transformation between the inside and the outside of the
poets consciousness. Remarkably, this mutual transformation does not
lead exactly to a fusion between poet and thing, consumer and con-
sumed. Instead, the poet remains ever in proximity, tending toward but
never completely overshadowing or devouring his objects. The effect
of attentiveness and tenderness working together is a resilient tendency,
a movement toward intimacy that nonetheless does not seek to destroy
or annihilate the other.
If consumption is an inevitable relationship with our environ-
ment (who among us is not a consumer?),19 then what Leung offers is
undoubtedly a set of tactics, indeed an ethics, of how to consume. He
follows this ethics in the precise sense of an ethos, a mode of living
that is also a mode of living with others, of letting others live. Thus,
for him, even that which is merely something to be consumed, such
as vegetables, has a language worth listening to:
There is a politics in vegetables also. For the sake of taste, some peo-
ple confer an identity upon green leaves, and divide snow pea leaves
from bok choy by a class difference; [by the same logic,] those that have
ornately rolled shapes are considered elegant and classy, while those
that are plain and bland become vulgar. For the nationalists, everything
except the roots must be chopped away; for the artistically avant-garde,
only the tip of a leaf is visible. . . . Those who are immersed in a par-
ticular cultural tradition love to point to other peoples cooking and say:
Can this be eaten? How can this kind of cooking be said to have any
culture? Food from Latin American countries is often made with corn
or by pureeing beans; some cultures in Africa use peanuts for soups; in
19
Fredric Jameson has described the current global consumerism as North Ameri-
can in origin and a result of the unchallenged primacy of the United States today
and thus the American way of life and American mass media culture. This is
consumerism as such, he writes, the very linchpin of our economic system, and also
the mode of daily life in which all our mass culture and entertainment industries train
us ceaselessly day after day, in an image and media barrage quite unparalleled in his-
tory. Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue, in The Cultures of Globalization,
ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 64;
emphasis in the original. Jamesons point is undoubtedly valid, but it is equally impor-
tant to insist on the historically specific circumstances under which a place such as
Hong Kong partakes of and complicates global consumerism as such. This is precisely
the critical juncture at which an acquaintance with some of Hong Kongs authors and
cultural workers would be crucial.
our own daily life, the simplest greens and tofu too [must be seen to]
have their significance.20
And the point of writinga sacred and inviolable activity for some
may thus also be understood good-humoredly through the mundane
manners of dealing with an egg or a piece of bread:
On the table is an egg or a piece of bread. Some touch the egg for just
a second and withdraw their hands, or they pick it up, take a look, and
say: Hmm, this is an egg, I know. Others, however, will caress it,
touch it, feel its warmth, toss it around a bit and catch it again, draw a
face on it and then erase it, punch a small hole to look inside it, and then
crack it, fry it, and eat it. Similarly, when given a piece of bread, some
people will take a small bite and put it down; others will feel its softness
and fragrance, appreciate it, and eat even the crumbs; they will even lick
their lips, pat their bellies, and praise how good it tastes.
I admire those who have a good appetite for life . . . those who care-
fully savor all and every feeling [experience], treating each as something
delicious.21
II. Cartography of the Urban Invisible
If Leung uses consumption primarily as a way to foreground rela-

tionships among things and people, and among people and people,
John Ma Kwok Ming , a cultural critic, offers a fascinatingly
dissimilar approach to what food and consumption may reveal about
Hong Kong. Like Leungs poems, Mas writings, critical essays of a
scholarly and autobiographical nature,22 are full of flavorful references
to food, in particular the kinds that are unique to Hong Kongs hybrid
20
Ye Si (Leung Ping Kwan), Houji: shucai de yanyu [Postscript: The Language
of Vegetables], in Chengshi biji [City Notebook] (Taipei: Dongda tushu, 1987), 245; my
translation.
21
Leung, Yuanquan he suo de waimian [Outside the Circle and the Lock], in
Chengshi biji, 211; my translation.
22
See the essays in Lubian zhengzhi jingjixue [A Political Economy of the Street] (Hong
Kong: Twilight Books, 1998) (page references to this book are hereafter included
in parentheses in the text); see also Mas autobiographical essay Tsuen Wan de
tongnian/ [My Childhood in Tsuen Wan], Jintian (Today) 1, no. 28
(1995): 211229. In addition, Ma is the author of Cong ziyouzhuyi dao shehuizhuyi [From
Liberalism to Socialism] (Hong Kong: Youth Literary Bookstore, 1983) and Ma Guoming
zai du shenme/What Ma Is Reading (Hong Kong: Jinyibu duomeiti/Stepforward Multi-
media, 2004).
146 rey chow
everyday culture, such as milk tea, lemon tea, red bean ice, smelly
bean curd, toast buttered with sweetened condensed milk, pineapple
buns, cream buns, and other delights. Mas universe is one in which
the sights, smells, and memories of eating serve as an essential legend
for orientation. Like Leung also, Ma is interested in using marginal
objects and details to articulate lived experiences that are as a rule
neglected or omitted from the politically and economically dominant
versions of history making. The latter, he writes, are usually enemies
of memory.23 Describing attempts in recent years by the Hong Kong
government to preserve historic landmarks, for instance, Ma reminds
us of the difference between official campaigns and the memories that
elude and exceed progressivist bureaucratic efforts: An old post office
building is preserved by the mere issuing of an order from above, but
what about an entire generations childhood experienceshow can
these be preserved? (13).24 Unlike Leungs lyrical approach, Mas style
of writing about food and consumption is marked by a sense of antag-
onism and emergency, bringing attention not so much to relations
and connections as to the violence inherent in them. This violence is
not exactly the aggressiveness triggered by physical hunger or by the
fierce competition for food (as in the case of some mainland Chinese
writings mentioned above). Instead, it is the violence of culture, and
specifically of globalized, capitalist urban culture. The consequence
not of lack but of material abundance and affluence, it may be called
the violence of being well-fed, of having too much to eat.
Unlike those who are moralistically inclined, Ma does not deal
with such violence by rhetorically condemning consumerism as such
and urging frugality and self-restraint as countervirtues. Rather, he
23
Ma, Tsuen Wan de tongnian, 219.
24
Ma is, of course, not the only critic of Hong Kongs urban geography in the
global age. For other informed discussions, including those of mass events triggered
by the governments closing and relocation of the Star Ferry Pier and the demoli-
tion of the Queens Pier, see Zhou Sizhong, Zai jiezhi de jietou [On the Streets
Where Decolonization Is Happening] and Tang Zhenzhao, Shinian shangchang
liangwangwang [Ten Years in a Shopping Mall, Feeling Lost], both in the special
issue Xianggang shinian [Hong Kong Ten Years], Jintian/Today 77, no. 2: 91100;
16777. See also David Clarke, Contested Sites: Hong Kongs Built Environment
in the Postcolonial Era/A Photo Essay; Helen Grace, Monuments and the Face
of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong; Yeung
Yang, In the Name of the Star: A Visual-Textual Diary on the Civil Movements in
Pursuit of Preserving the Hong Kong Star Ferry Pier and Clock Tower in situ, all in
the special issue Hong Kong: Ten Years After Colonialism, Postcolonial Studies 10,
no. 4: 35777; 46783; 48598.
delineates the violence dialectically, by capturing with his critical lens

a series of marginalized figureshawkers, Filipino maids, homeless
beggars, and so forthwho become emblems of the dehumanization
that accompanies modernizations progress like a wayward sideshow,
an insistent metacommentary. In the spirit of Walter Benjamins mem-
orable phrase, and foreshadowing the plight of migrant workers and
underprivileged masses in contemporary mainland Chinas prosperous
cities, Mas work demonstrates how there is no document of civiliza-
tion which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.25 The
title of Mas essay collection Lubian zhengzhi jingjixue
is ingeniously evocative in this regard. While the phrase could mean,
straightforwardly, a political economy of the street, it is equally pos-
sible to translate it as a marginal/improper political economy or a
political economy conducted along the side of the street. This alterna-
tive meaning makes sense especially in Hong Kong because the local
expression lubian she (literally, streetside press) has for a long
time been used as a parody of the Chinese translation of Reuters (Lutou
she ). The comical suggestion is that whereas news from Lutou
she is serious world news from a reliable source, news from lubian she is
usually trivial gossip of the tabloid variety.
It is perhaps not by accident that Ma chooses as his site of mate-
rialist reading not the more glittery and flamboyant locales of Hong
Kong but Wanchai , the urban district that once made Hong
Kong famous with the figure of Suzie Wong and the seedy quarters
frequented by American GIs for sexual and alcoholic gratification dur-
ing the 1950s and 1960s. Even when it is not referred to by its actual
name, Wanchai has long existed as part of that age-old Orientalist fan-
tasy in which the Far East holds the alluring, debased appeal of a non-
white female prostitute. In Jietou leying (Fleeting Images
from the Streets), a long essay (collected in Lubian zhengzhi jingjixue) that
in the course of time will have to be recognized as one of the most
remarkable critical commentaries ever written on Hong Kong, Ma
dissects the dissymmetry between those who have and those who have
not by guiding his readers through some of the main thoroughfares
in Wanchai. Kennedy Road , Johnston Road ,
25
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and with an intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256. Ma is the author of the first book-
length introduction to the work of Benjamin in Chinese; see his Ban ya ming (Taipei:
Dongda tushu, 1998).
148 rey chow
Hennessy Road , Gloucester Road , Thomson

Road , Jaffe Road , Lockhart Road : these clas-
sic British street names constitute the mnemonics of a century and a
halfs colonial territory marking, even as their Cantonese translitera-
tions strike the Mandarin speaker, reading by retranslating them into
their own standard Chinese, as hilariously, perplexingly nonsensical.
For Ma, to read Hong Kong through the streets of Wanchai is, to bor-
row the words of Michel de Certeau, to wander through an imposed
system like a poacher, inventing in the process a plurality of mean-
ings that were not originally intended.26 In his reading, Wanchai takes
on the significance of an allegory that yokes together Hong Kongs
extreme material opposites. At once a space and a history, Wanchai
unveils Hong Kongs human poverty and refuse as much as it show-
cases its high-tech architectural shapes and surfaces. In this district,
reminders of a bygone era of material deprivation linger, coexisting
with the ostentatious architectural performance of a hyperreal, futur-
istic nonspace (which is devoid of dirt, lower classes, and the visceral
signs of human presence, and whose main audience is the tourist).27
In the midst of Wanchais schizophrenic landscape emerges the poi-
gnant figure of the hawker (xiaofan ), the small vendor of cheap
food and other merchandise whom Ma calls the nomad of the city.
It goes without saying that hawkers are not the stuff proper history is
made of, and that few experts who write about Hong Kong would
care to give them the kind of enthusiastic regard that Ma has. Equally
important is the point that Ma does not inflate his object by mak-
ing it nice- or respectable-looking. In his analysis, hawkers are not
simply pitiful underdogs who have been trampled upon. Between the
brutal class hierarchy of a society where they are, obviously, invisible
and the humanitarianism of charity providers to whom they can be
visible only as victims, Ma forges a third dimension in which hawk-
ers appear as innovative contributors to Hong Kongs culture, and in
26
De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 169.
27
In his book Quanmian dushihua de shehui [Completely Urbanized
Society] (Hong Kong: Jinyibu duomeiti/Stepforward Multimedia, 2007), Ma further
elaborates these observations in a critique of Hong Kongs transformation, in the
post-1997 period, into a completely urbanized society, a concept he adopts from
Henri Lefebvre. According to Ma, this is a society that bases its identity on looking
smooth, superefficient, and up-to-date; hence the incessant demolition of old buildings
and big-scale urban facelifts and the devaluation of ordinary (that is, unspectacular)
livelihoods, experiences, and memories.
which their opportunism and adaptability are as much a reflection

of their exploitative environment as they are evidence of their own
survivalist cunning. Among the tactics hawkers have developed for
their ever-makeshift livelihood are, Ma writes, a craftsmanlike attitude
toward their carts, which must serve both as a display window and as a
means of transport; a practice of minimalism in the stockpiling of mer-
chandise, so as to be able to run from the police at a moments notice;
verbal skills in promoting their items in a marketplace where there
is tough competition from those selling designer brands; and a cost-
effective selection of goods that will keep over time, such as preserved
vegetables, salted eggs, mung bean vermicelli, dried shrimp (9).
Apart from captivating details about hawkers migratory livelihood,
the strength of Mas descriptions lies in his understanding of the
mutually implicated yet permanently inequitable relationship between
these lawbreakers and Hong Kongs law enforcers. An example of his
nuanced critical method can be seen in the following extended com-
ments on the irony posed by hawkers to the concept of free trade:
Hawkers are, originally, embodiments of the free market, yet in Hong
Kong, where the free market is often proclaimed as sacred and invio-
lable, hawkers are being controlled in a multitude of ways until they are
entirely wiped out. Should the history of hawkers enter Hong Kongs
history one day, it could only be thanks to Foucault. The Hong Kong
governments strategy for wiping out hawkers is precisely along the lines
of the micropolitics Foucault has analyzed. In a society that claims it is
following the laws of the free market, the measures enforcing hawkers
registration and licensing nonetheless never meet with criticism from
the public. For the hawkers, being licensed does not mean that they can
from then on engage in free trade. What it means is that it is now
illegal to sell outside the areas officially allocated for hawkers. . . . As most
hawkers are illiterate, they have all heardare well acquainted with
their societys leading ideology, the free market. Every time the police
carry out their holy duty (of arresting a hawker), a hawker can for sure
proclaim the sacred rule that is so often heardIts a free market!
If we can record and edit these proclamations by the hawkers, Hong
Kong might be able to preserve some local versions of the free market
arguments. As for the cops (that is, the registered monopoly holders of
the use of force), they of course do not give in to the talk about the free
market so easily. . . . Between the tasks of catching thieves and catching
hawkers, they have chosen the latter. (45)
Notably, Mas descriptions do not stop at the level of objectifying
his main characters but consistently integrate what appears to be a
transitory category of human existence into the larger social fabric of
150 rey chow
Hong Kongs urban culture. The ruthlessbecause highly efficient

workings of this culture are most evident when, as Ma argues, hawkers
are being eliminated precisely at a time when their skills and products
have taken on market currencythat is, when such skills and products
have been adopted by large, stationary business enterprises such as
restaurants and supermarkets.
Restaurants, on their part, are quick to copy: whenever some food
items sold by hawkers have gained popularity, restaurants will mimic
and duplicate them on their own menus. Such acts of plagiarism do
not exactly amount to a formal recognition of those who are being
plagiarized, however. On the contrary, the asymmetrical intercourse
between the economically powerful and the economically powerless
typically runs in this manner:
On the surface, the fact that hawkers food items have become dim sum
dishes sold in big restaurants seems to suggest that the special profes-
sional skills of the hawkers have finally received recognition. But this
kind of recognition is only along the lines of keeping the baby but not
the mother as is characteristic of patriarchal society. In the manner of
the CIAs strategy for investigating guerrilla warfare, the consequence of
streetside snacks entering restaurants offerings is that not only has hawk-
ers status not been raised, but the laws targeting hawkers have become
all the more stringent. (8)
Hawker culture is also a vestige of the time before the arrival of super-
markets, when the demands of urban consumerism, though clearly
present, were not yet standardized and regularized by large-scale cor-
poratism. Once upon a time in Hong Kong, Ma reminds us (in the
manner of a storyteller of local folklore), it was a perfectly accept-
able practice to purchase basic cooking ingredients such as salt, soy
sauce, cane sugar, and corn starch in accordance with the amounts
one needed and with ones own household containers such as a teacup
or a rice bowl (which served as tools of measurement). Commercial
transactions then were not yet conducted with the concept of the mini-
mum purchase amount or minimum charge, and one could literally
go to an old-style grocery store at, say, dinner time and buy what one
needed to cook with, at the price one wanted to pay (a dollars worth
of peanut oil, fifty cents worth of broad-bean paste, etc.) (10). In the
age of supermarkets (the Wellcomes and Park-n-Shops, and their more
recent upscale competitors such as City Super, Olivers, Three-Sixty,
Taste, etc.), not only has this older, personal transaction system van-
ished, but the goods themselves, together with their relationship with
consumers, have undergone such an extreme makeover as to become,

sensorially, aseptic:
In the supermarket [today], mung bean vermicelli, dried shrimp, dried
vegetables are all prepackaged and cannot be sold loose. Quietly, then,
supermarkets have been performing the same function as Qin Shi Huang
and Napoleon, in that they are radicalizing the very means of measuring
lengths, volumes, and weights. . . .
. . . All the goods [on the shelves] look like they are participating in
some high-class social activity. Their clothes are bright and new; at times
they are dressed weirdly as if at a costume party. Even dried vegetables,
dried seafood, and their likefood that traditionally required no pack-
agingare now wrapped in airtight new clothes.
. . . In the supermarket, there is no need to use ones mouth, ear, or
nose. What ones hand touches is paper, plastic, or tin cans. Even what
one can see is merely the description and image of the goods rather
than the goods themselves. . . . People are surrounded by goods, yet the
distance between people and goods has actually become much greater.
(12)28
Mas observant analysis of hawkers is but a small part of the much
larger and more complex work he has done on the politics of Hong
Kongs urban geography, which contains myriad other unforgettable
portraits, such as the Filipino maids who turn Central (one of Hong
Kongs key business districts) into an expatriate playground on Sun-
days; the old women pushing loads of cardboard along the side streets
of Wanchai; the homeless folks who prefer unofficial spaces of rest to
the official, government-built shelters, and so forth.29 His eye-opening
accounts can only be the results of an utmost familiarity with the locus
28
At this point in his argument, Ma makes a comparative reference to Georg
Simmels descriptions of how the modes of public transport in modern metropolises
have altered human relations in a physical and fundamental manner. Mas analysis of
hawkers also calls to mind Pierre Bourdieus work on the Kabyle merchants in (post)
colonial Algeria, whose traditional methods of business transactions were subordinated
to or gradually eliminated by the arrival of capitalism under French colonialism. For
reasons of space, a more extended comparative study will have to wait until another
occasion.
29
Mas more recent writings on hawkers and other related topics can be found in
the following unpublished essays: Gaobie chenqiang landiao [Farewell to Hackneyed
and Stereotyped Expressions]; Meishi tiantang: lubian yinshi de zhengzhi jingjixue
[Gourmet Paradise: The Political Economy of Roadside Food and Drink]; Bushi
jingjiqiji de xianggang gushi: baowei tianxing, huanghou matou de lishi yiyi [A Hong
Kong Story That Is Not an Economic Miracle: The Historical Significance of Safe-
guarding the Star Ferry and Queens Piers]. I am indebted to Ma for sharing these
works with me.
152 rey chow
of his interest, which, once again, returns us to the question of food

consumption.
In the Chinese language, the state of being familiar with something,
of knowing something very well, is often designated by the character
shu , which is found in expressions such as shulian , shushi ,
shuxi , shuxi , and xianshu . Interestingly, shu is also the
adjective meaning ripe or cooked. The flexibility of the Chinese
lexicon in this instance, whereby shu can simultaneously refer to sub-
jectivity (the condition of being knowledgeable and experienced) and
objectivity (the condition of being ripe or cooked), suggests an ongoing
ideological conflation between cognition and food consumption. The
conceptual definition of what it means to know is, accordingly, premised
on culinary attitudes, on the specifics of food preparation. To be famil-
iar with or skilled at something is akin to cooking or ripening it. In a
typical domestic scenario, hence, a school child may be reprimanded
by her elders for having her studies in a condition that is still raw
(sheng )rather than ripe or cookedafter an evening of revi-
sion: such rawness is usually taken as a sign that she has been absent-
minded and not paying full attention to her work.
This conflation of knowing and cooking has significant historio-
graphic implications. To be knowledgeable and experienced (shu)
about something is to be in the commanding position of a master chef
or connoisseur, whose distinction comes from being able to prepare
and/or consume his food properly, in a condition that is, shall we say,
well-done (shu).30 (Among the pieces of wisdom offered by the ancient
Taoist philosophers, for instance, are paoding jieniu ,
which analogizes solving worldly problems to finding the precise points
at which to cut up an ox, and zhi daguo ruo peng xiaoxian
, which compares governing a big state to cooking a
small fish.) The writing of history, it follows, is not unlike the pro-
cess of expert cooking, whereby even the toughest and most resistant
ingredient can be skillfully broken down and made part of a care-
fully assembled course. As rationalist forms of acquiring and accu-
mulating information, mainstream historical methods are thus always
intent on showing themselves as capable of comprehendingthat is,
30
Obviously, the Western custom of serving meat rare as opposed to well-done,
which belongs in the category of expert knowledge and experience about proper
ways of eating, complicates things here, but I believe my general point about the
conflation between knowing and cooking remains valid.
of absorbing and containingeven the most minor and marginal, or

irregular, ingredients. It is in the disappearance of these ingredients
into that ultimate repast/compendium called knowledge that many
historians find affirmation of their discipline and mission.31
In the face of this widely condoned culinary-cum-epistemically pro-
prietary attitude toward history, which views acquiring knowledge as a
process of steadily incorporating (that is, assimilating and eliminating)
the minor, marginal, and irregular, and the result as accrued cultural
capital, Mas familiarity with the streets of Hong Kong offers a qualita-
tively distinct method of history writing. His is a kind of knowing that
takes the cognates of cooking and ripening to their logical extremes,
by showing how culture at its heights of perfection, of being well-done,
is also in close proximity to rottenness and decomposition. To know
Hong Kongs urban culture well, for Ma, is also tantamount to turn-
ing it over and exposing its corrupt underside. By reading eccentrically
along edges, by tracking doggedly the forgotten experiences of dispos-
sessed classes, Mas way of cooking and consuming Hong Kong does
not lead to yet another masterful historiographic feast. Paradoxically,
it restores the city to a state of rareness, a state in which blood can
still be seen dripping.
Unlike conventional historiography, which, even when it is sympa-
thetic to subaltern classes, tends to give legitimacy exclusively to the
agency of the historian (and his act of producing rationalist knowledge),
Mas method of reading specializes in revealing the underprivileged
figures as agents of their fraught existence, however self-contradictory,
precarious, or inconsequential their agency might appear to be. In
the cartography he provides, these shadowy figures, instead of simply
vanishing into the account of a historian in command or in possession
of his knowledge of Hong Kong, stand illuminated as constellations
of heterologous life forms. The thousands of Filipinas who make their
living by doing other peoples housework during the week transform
the open spaces of Central into their own domestic spaces on Sun-
days by enjoying precisely what their masters and mistresses enjoy
at homeputting on nice-looking clothes, doing their hair at leisure,
sharing food, resting, chatting, socializing. The homeless wanderers,
31
For an interesting critique of the rationalistic tendencies of historiography, includ-
ing those of subaltern historians, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Minority Histories, Subal-
tern Pasts, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy 1, no. 1 (April 1998): 1529.
154 rey chow
having no real place to rest their tired bodies even at night, cleverly
find moments of quiet in a corner of a football stadium when it is not
in use during the day. The barbers, locksmiths, cobblers, fruit sellers,
watch repairmen, tropical fish merchants, and their like, who can only
run their small, lowly businesses in tucked-away back alleys, nonethe-
less provide some of the most essential services to the urban masses
day in and day out.
Readers will have to turn to the texts of Leung and Ma to discover
the sumptuous offerings of their entirely independent, yet mutually
resonant reflections. As Cantonese speakers writing from the perspec-
tive of urban Hong Kong in the era of the citys repatriation to China,
these two authors ultimately compel us to ask: what does it mean to
write in standard Chinese rather than English when national culture
in Hong Kong used to be, officially, British and is now aligned with
the Peoples Republic of China;32 and to write about minor activities
and classes of human beings, when Hong Kongs story is in the process
of being renovated and repackaged as part of the grand narratives of
Chinese nationalism and global capitalism?33 Centers of established
knowledge always devour: the act of writing off center, by necessity,
carries the peril of its own destruction in the entrails of the powers
that be. As Ma has remarked, Those who hold onto the histories of
losers usually must risk their own lives.34 At the same time, like the
32
For Mas (non-nativist and non-nationalist) views on the politics of language in
Hong Kong, see his essay Guojihua yu yuwen zhengce [Globalization and Language
Policy], in Ling daxue touteng de zhongwen [The Chinese Language That Gives the University
Headaches], ed. Chinese University Alumni Concerned with the Universitys Develop-
ment (http://www.cuhkalumniconcern.com, 2007), 99106.
33
In contrast to Hong Kongs best-selling cultural productions (such as action
films, popular novellas, pop music, television dramas, and tabloids), Leung and Ma
belong to the group of cultural workers who have a relatively small following, usu-
ally among well-educated readers of literature, criticism, and Western theory. In the
intellectual circles in which they are being read, though, both authors works have
received informed reviews and critical discussions (e.g., in newspaper columns, literary
periodicals, and critical anthologies). Both also make their cultural impact in other
ways. Leungs poetry has been translated into various languages besides English and
Chinese. In 1998, for instance, he became the first Hong Kong author invited by
the German government to be a visiting poet in residence in Berlin. Ma, who used
to comanage one of the finest academic bookstores in Hong Kong (Twilight/Youth
Literary Bookstore, located in Wanchai), has for years been helping to keep readers
there abreast of interesting scholarly publications from various parts of the English-
speaking world. His writings continue to appear regularly in the local Chinese-
language media.
34
Ma, Tsuen Wan de tongnian, 217.
fugitive figures it momentarily sketches, his cartography of the urban

invisible also stands as a reminder of the fundamental incompleteness
of the writing of history, which, however it is executed, must implic-
itly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the
present with itself.35
35
Chakrabarty, Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts, 25.
IN SEARCH OF A GENUINE CHINESE SOUND:
JIANG WENYE AND MODERN CHINESE MUSIC
David Der-wei Wang
Jiang Wenye (191083) was one of the most talented composers

of modern China and Japan.1 Born in Taiwan and educated in China
and Japan, Jiang belonged to the generation of Taiwanese artists who
struggled to negotiate their identities and respond to multiple chal-
lenges, from colonialism to imperialism, nationalism to cosmopolitan-
ism. Although he was inspired by such modernists as Debussy, Bartk,
and Stravinsky, it was in the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin
that Jiang found a true kindred spirit, and when Tcherepnin called for
sonic representations of national style, Jiang began a lifelong endeavor
to modernize Chinese music.
This essay discusses the acoustic choices Jiang Wenye made at defin-
ing moments of his career in the 1930s and 1940s, and the aesthetic
and political consequences he had to deal with. I ask how Jiangs sonic
sensibility reflected colonial, national, and cosmopolitan bearings; how
his wartime engagement with Confucian musicology brought about
an unlikely dialogue between Chinese cultural ontology and Japa-
nese pan-Asianism; and most important, how his lyrical vision was
both occasioned by and confined to historical contingency. Because
of the contested forces his works and life brought into play, Jiang
Wenye embodies the composition of Chinese modernity at its most
treacherous.
1
Jiangs original name was Jiang Wenbin . He adopted a Japanese-sound-
ing name sometime after 1932, and spelled it Bunya Koh. This spelling was used
as late as 193637, as seen in his works included in the Cherepunin sensh
[Tcherepnin Collection]. At Tcherepnins suggestion, Jiang changed this spell-
ing to the more Chinese-sounding Chiang Wen-yeah around 1938. For the sake
of consistency with other names and titles, this essay will use Jiang Wenye. For
more information about Jiangs various names, see Wu Lingyi , Jiang Wenye
shengping yu zuopin [The Life and Works of Jiang Wenye], in
Jiang Wenye jinian yantaohui lunwenji [A Conference Volume in
Memory of Jiang Wenye], ed. Zhang Jiren (Chang Chi-jen) (Taibei: Taibei xianli wenhua
zhongxin, 1992), 155.
158 david der-wei wang
Jiang Wenye was born in Taibei county in 1910 to a Hakka merchants

family, and sent to study at a Japanese school in Amoy, China in 1917.
He moved to Japan in 1923 and was later enrolled in a vocational
school, majoring in electrical engineering. But this young Taiwanese
harbored more enthusiasm about music. Between 1932 and 1936 he
won four prizes in the vocal programs of the Japanese National Music
Competitions. In 1933 he was offered a job as baritone in the opera
company Fujiwara Yoshie Kageki Dan , and took
supporting roles in productions such as Puccinis La Bohme and Tosca.
Meanwhile, he studied composition with Yamada Kosaku
(18861965), a leading figure in early modern Japanese music, con-
ductor of the Japanese New Symphony Orchestra, and an advocate of
German romanticism from Wagner to Strauss.2
Like many of his colleagues, Jiang was immersed in the European
inclinations of Taish culture. But as his foreign learning became
increasingly sophisticated, he realized that not everything imported
could be labeled modern. Instead of the masters of classicism and
romanticism, he was fascinated with the music of Stravinsky, Debussy,
Prokofiev, and especially Bartk. The Hungarian composers creative
interpretation of folk music and his bold departures from nineteenth-
century romantic and realist formulas inspired Jiang to search for a
music of his own. Although he avoided Bartks bold, dissonant sonor-
ity, the way Jiang employed the rhythmic concepts found in Bartks
percussive music suggests that both were influenced by folk dance and
folk music.3
2
For an overview of the musical circles of Japan from the late Meiji era to the
time of Jiang Wenye, see Lin Yingqi , Jiafeng zhong de wenhuaren: Rizhi shiqi Jiang
Wenye jiqi shidai yanjiu : [A Literatus
Trapped by Political Dilemma: Jiang Wenye During the Time of Japanese Colonial Rule] (Ph.D.
diss., National Cheng-kung University, Taiwan, 2005), chapter 4.
3
Jiang Wenyes reception of Western modernist trends has been discussed by crit-
ics from various angles. See, for example, Zhang Jiren , Jiang Wenye: jingji
zhong de gutinghua : [ Jiang Wenye: A Lonely Flower Amid the
Thorns] (Taibei: Shibao wenhua, 2002), 6266; and Kuo Tzong-kai, Jiang Wenye: The
Style of His Selected Piano Works and a Study of Music Modernization in Japan and China
(DMA thesis, The Ohio State University, 1987). For Bartks influence on Chiang,
see Takaj Shigemi , Wo suo liaojie de Jiang Wenye
[The Jiang Wenye I Knew], trans. Jiang Xiaoyun , Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan
xuebao 3 (2000): 62.
in search of a genuine chinese sound 159
One of Jiangs approaches during this period was to keep chang-

ing the direction of the melody, as if he were impatient to follow a
diatonic theme. As has been observed, the leaps in his melodic line
may result from his extensive use of pentachords; thus even a stepwise
moving line encounters a skip in a diatonic scale. But these leaps may
also have something to do with Jiangs employment of modernist tech-
nique, with the aim of interrupting the stepwise melodic movement.4
To compromise his experiment, Jiang constantly uses the reverse curve,
which changes the unpredictable range to the predictable destinations
of dominant and tonic.
Jiangs career had so far appeared emblematic of East Asian mod-
ernists response to their Western antecedents. While acknowledging
the powerful influence of imported European music, Jiang and other
like-minded composers were eager to bring a vernacular sound to bear
on the universal acclaim of this new melody. They tried to transform
a belated modernity into an alternative, and alter/native, modernity.
But Jiangs case is complicated by his identity: he was a native of Tai-
wan, a colony of Japan since 1895. By the time he was born, the island
was well on its way to assimilation into Japans political, cultural, and
economic structure. Despite its discriminatory ethnic policies, the colo-
nial power was actually to be credited for modernizing Taiwan, which
under Chinese rule had been a little-developed area. Becoming Japa-
nese was therefore an ambivalent fact for most Taiwanese, pointing to
their dilemma between colonial modernity and ethnic identification.5
Jiang Wenye was not spared this dilemma, though he immigrated to
Japan in his teenage years. The colonial specter must always have
haunted him: years later, he would still cite race as the reason he never
won a first prize in Japan, however outstanding his works.6
4
Kuo Tzong-kai, Jiang Wenye, 88.
5
See Leo Chings succinct analysis in Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the
Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Ping-
hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule: History,
Memory, Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
6
Jiang Wenye was obviously conscious of the impact of his colonial status on his
career in both Japan and wartime China. In commenting on the departmental politics
in favor of a Japanese colleague in 1945, he said, I suffered from discrimination when
studying in Japan. Even after I became an established musician, having participated in
four national music contests, I always received second prizes, while the grand prizes
unfailingly went to Japanese composers. Wu Yunzhen , Xianfu Jiang Wenye
[My Late Husband Jiang Wenye], in Zhang Jiren, Jiang Wenye jinian
yantaohui lunwenji, 14243.
Whereas nationalism may have served as a means for Japanese com-

posers to redefine their modern identity, did a colonial Taiwanese like
Jiang Wenye qualify to interpret authentic Japanese nationality? But
if nationalism is no more the spontaneous overflow of an innate con-
sciousness than it is an imported ideology in the European vein, some-
thing cultivatable via pedagogical means, wasnt Jiang Wenye equally
entitled to compose on behalf of Japan? By corollary, in spite of his
Taiwanese ethnic roots, can Jiang Wenye be regarded as a natural
candidate to represent the island, which he left at the age of seven
and to which he did not return until the early 1930s? Did Japanese
colonial power direct Jiangs desire into a discourse of Japanese local
color rather than that of Taiwanese regionalism?
Such questions are highlighted by Jiang Wenyes orchestral piece
from 1934, Minami no shima ni yoru kkyteki sketchi
(A Symphonic Sketch of South Island), which includes
four movements: Bokkaf zenskyoku (Prelude in
Madrigal Style), Shirasagi e no gens (Fantasy for a
White Egret), Aru seihan no kataru no wo kikeba
(Listening to the Story of a High Mountain Man), and
Jnai no yoru (A Night in the City). Fantasy for a White
Egret and A Night in the City won Jiang a prize in the Third
Japanese Music Competition. Based on A Night in the City, Jiang
completed Formosan Dance Op. 1, which won him the Berlin Olympic
Music Prize in 1936.7
A Symphonic Sketch of South Island is written in a late-romantic style,
decorated with melodies drawn from Japanese folk music, a testimony
to the influence of Jiangs first teacher, Yamada Kosaku. But there is
something else: whereas its mysterious, hypnotic color is reminiscent
of Debussys impressionist sensibility, the way it changes meters and
rhythms, adding and embellishing notes to create variations, is sugges-
tive of Bartks style. In particular, Listening to the Story of a High
Mountain Man, a piece that recapitulates the primitive vitality of
Taiwan aborigines by means of irregular and rhythmic arrangement,
7
Kuo Tzong-kai, Jiang Wenye, 18. The music contest was part of the Art Competi-
tion of the Olympic Games, with other categories including painting, architecture,
sculpture, etc. Initiated during the 1912 Stockholm Games, it took on strong pro-
pagandist hues in the 1936 Berlin edition. Jiang was not among the top three prize
winners but obtained an honorary mention. For more information, see, for example,
http://olympic-museum.de/art/1936.htm (accessed January 19, 2009).
bears imprints of Bartks percussive movement and Prokofievs

machinelike toccatas.
Notably, these five pieces were conceived in 1934, during Jiangs
first tour to Taiwan, seventeen years after he left the island. On tour,
he performed together with other Japan-based Taiwanese musicians
and received warm welcomes.8 What impressed him most, however,
was the rural serenity of the island, and its gorgeous landscapes. The
homecoming trip brought out an emotive exuberance in Jiang; per-
haps this served as a pretext for magnifying his imaginary subjectivity.
Nor should one overlook the exotic motif in Jiangs music, and in his
writing. However strong his feelings for Taiwan, Jiang had remained
distant from the island since his childhood, and therefore he could not
express his nostalgia without betraying a sense of estrangement.
In Jiang Wenyes 1934 musical and literary compositions, exoticism
gave a new intensity to his nostalgia. Although he had obvious ethnic
ties to Taiwan, Jiang was a product of Japanese and (indirectly) Euro-
pean culture more than anything else; he could articulate his feelings
only through musical notes and linguistic signs that were anything
but homegrown. Meanwhile, in view of the discourse of exoticism in
Taish Japan, one wonders if Jiangs nostalgia was not equally driven
by self-exoticization, that is, by a dramatization of his Taiwanese ori-
gin so as to assert his difference from his Japanese fellow composers
on one hand, and cater to a Japanese audience eager to embrace an
island just recently integrated into the national territory on the other.
Vacillating between the roles of alienated insider and informed out-
sider, in the music and poetry he wrote in Taiwan, Jiang called forth
the effect of imaginary nostalgia.
II
Alexander Tcherepnin (18991977) was a Russian composer who

toured East Asia during the 1930s in quest of pure, Oriental musi-
cal sounds. Tcherepnin lived in China from 1934 to 1937. During
8
For Jiangs visit to Taiwan, see Zhou Wanyao , Xiangxiang de minzu
feng: shilun Jiang Wenye wenzi zuopin zhong de Taiwan yu Zhongguo
: [Imaginary Nationalist Style: A Prelim-
inary Study of Taiwan and China in Jiang Wenyes Textual Works], Taiwan daxue
lishi xuebao 35 (2005): 13742.
this period he taught at the National Conservatory and several other

institutions, promoting and composing his Eurasian-style music, and
fell in love with a talented Chinese pianist whom he eventually mar-
ried. One thing Tcherepnin found disturbing during his teaching in
China was that almost all composers had succumbed to the impact of
Western classicism and romanticism. Instead of mimicking Handel or
Beethoven, Tcherepnin believed that Chinese should start right where
modernism then was, at its climax: For China, Debussy, Stravinsky,
De Falla, could be regarded as classicspost-war modern production
will give the stuff to accomplish the full musical education of a Chi-
nese musical student.9 Tcherepnin based his argument on the fact
that China had nothing in common with the culture that produced
a Schumann, a Chopin, a Schubert and therefore was not obliged
to repeat the Western classical tradition so as to reach the modern
age. The modernist task, nevertheless, could not be carried out until a
national style was established. Tcherepnin considered the pentatonic
scale the basic tonal element in the organization of Chinese native
music, and believed that composition based on that scale would high-
light the Chinese national character.
At a time when the discourse of music was dominated by names
such as Huang Zi and Xiao Youmei , Tcherepnins
theory unsurprisingly drew skepticism from his Chinese peers. To
them, the Russian composers campaign for modernism and nation-
alism appeared to be an odd mixture of causes. The dialogueor
lack thereofbetween Tcherepnin and his Chinese fellow musicians,
however, leads one to rethink the conditions of Chinese modernism in
a broader sense. Given the May Fourth cry for catching up with mod-
ern culture on all fronts, Tcherepnin wryly observed that his Chinese
colleagues were transplanting Western models in a wholesale man-
ner without realizing the many problems this created, ranging from
mimicry to anachronism. For him the most efficient way to modernize
was to engage in the latest Western trend while remolding it in light
of a national style. But Tcherepnins critics had a point when asking
whether he was not taking a privileged position even when debunking
9
Alexander Tcherepnin, letter to Walter Koons, quoted from Chang Chi-jen, Alex-
ander Tcherepnin: His Influence on Modern Chinese Music (Ed.D. diss., Columbia University
Teachers College, 1983), 71.
the European tradition, because after all, he was European himself 10

and had access to knowledge he now found unsuitable for Chinese
composers. To his critics, even his promotion of a distinctive Chinese
pentatonic scale reeked of what would now be called Orientalism. As
Chao Mei-po pointed out, Mr. Tcherepnin forgets that in working
the Pentatonic Scale Study he has Bach and others behind him, and pos-
sesses their techniques.11
This context may explain why Jiang Wenye became so crucial
to Tcherepnins project. The two met in Tokyo in early 1935 and
became friends immediately. Their shared penchant for modernism
aside, Tcherepnin appeared to be an artist deprived by politics of his
national affiliation who had managed to make the world his home,
a cosmopolitan who was willing to embrace things new and foreign.
More important, such a worldly attitude enabled him to appreciate
his own cultural heritage all the more rather than do away with it, as
evinced by his promotion of Slavic and Eurasian styles of music. On
Jiang Wenyes part, having won himself fame as an interpreter of his
homeland Taiwan in Japan and Europe, he was now ready to explore
China, the home of Taiwan. However, if Taiwan was already a
dreamland in service of both Jiangs nostalgia and his exotic mood,
wouldnt China appear even more like a site of desire, inspiring his
exotic fantasies in the name of nostalgia, or vice versa?
The result was a fascinating conflation of desires and musical sounds,
a case in point being Jiangs piano concerto Jroku no bagateru
Op. 8 (Sixteen Bagatelles, Op. 8), composed between 1935
and 1936, enveloping the period of his first China trip. Of the sixteen
pieces, No. 1 is a toccata in march style la Prokofiev, while No. 3,
written on the eve of his departure for China, was inspired by a Japa-
nese lullaby. Nos. 12 and 16 and Nos. 11, 14, and 15 were written
in Beijing and Shanghai respectively. These five pieces clearly reflect
Jiangs effort to inscribe the new sound effects he heard on Chinese
streets; references to Chinese instruments such as the erhu or
two-string fiddle and pipa or lute create a cadence of festivity and
excitement. By contrast, No. 2 conveys a meditative mood by adopting
the type of atonality associated with Arnold Schnberg (18741951)
10
Chao Mei-po, The Trend of Modern Chinese Music, Tien-hsia Monthly IV
(1937): 283; quoted from Chang Chi-jen, Alexander Tcherepnin, 80.
11
Ibid.
and his followers, something deemed extremely avant-garde in 1930s

Japan. The last piece (No. 16), as noticed by critics, illustrates the
influence of Mussorgskys Pictures at an Exhibition.12
But for Jiang Sixteen Bagatelles was only his first encounter with China,
beyond which there must be something more Chinese worthy of his
pursuit. This echoed Tcherepnins suggestion that Chinese compos-
ers should not occupy their time merely imitating European music;
they should try to interpret Chinese national music using modern
notation and writing for instruments of an international character.13
For Jiang, to heed Tcherepnins advice meant to recognize a Chinese
identity more than anything else. An exiled Russian composer and his
Taiwanese disciple from Japan were ready to create a new music they
believed to be representative of China.
III
In early 1936 Jiang Wenye won a prize in the Berlin Olympics Musi-
cal Competition for his symphony Taiwan no Bukyoku (For-
mosan Dance), an honor that solidified his status as a rising star in the
musical circles of Japan. Instead of traveling to Europe to receive the
prize in person, however, Jiang chose to visit China. His 1936 trip
there was a dream come true. The young musician was overwhelmed
by everything he saw and heard in Beijing, so much so that he felt he
was flattened by the awesomeness of the ancient city.
In 1938 Jiang accepted an offer from Beijing Normal College and
moved to China, where he would spend the rest of his life. Between
1938 and the mid-1940s he proved how a new vision of Chinese
music could take his career to a climax in both creativity and pro-
ductivity. He produced at least six orchestral pieces, four piano sona-
tas, more than one hundred and fifty art songs for solo voice and
piano, five musicals (two unfinished), theme music for two movies, and
three poetry volumes. Almost all these works were centered on the
theme of lyricizing China. Citation of a few titles will suffice: Koto soby
(Sketches of the Old Capital ), Kby taisei gakush
12
Motohide Katayama, introduction to the CD album Jiang Wen-ye Piano Works in
Japan, performed by J. Y. Song (New York: Pro-Piano, 2001), 4.
13
Chang Chi-jen, Alexander Tcherepnin, 73.
(The Music of the Confucian Temple), Khi den (Princess

Xiangfei), Shunk kagetsu no yoru (Night by the River with
Flower and Moon). Notably, Jiang also composed music for classical
Chinese poems by Li Bai (701762) and Du Fu (712770).
He held at least three concerts to perform his works.
All this time, of course, there was war between China and Japan,
and Beijing was under a Japanese-controlled puppet regime. While
millions of Chinese were being killed, incarcerated, forced into exile,
or ruled under surveillance, Jiang Wenyes career thrived, leading one
to ask what kind of dreams he dreamed while in occupied Beijing:
Chinese or Japanese, or none at all? Jiang could carry on a relatively
comfortable life during the war because as a Taiwanese from Japan,
he was treated as an overseas Japanese citizen. He was commissioned
to compose the theme song for the New Citizen Society (Xinmin hui
), an organization for Chinese collaborators, but he did not
join the society. Meanwhile, his determination to compose music with
a distinct Chinese character became stronger than ever.
Thus in 1939 there appeared The Music of the Confucian Temple,
the centerpiece of Jiang Wenyes wartime works. On all counts, this
orchestral piece represented a breakthrough not only for Jiangs career
but also for the history of modern Chinese music. Its relinquishing of
Western orchestral conventions, inquiry into the conceptual nuances
of classical Chinese music, and play with the cultural connotations of
Confucian musicology were a far cry from the mainstream of Chinese
music up to 1937. It also was Jiangs final answer to Tcherepnins call
for modern music in a national style. Jiang allegedly found his inspira-
tion when attending the annual ceremony in memory of Confucius at
the Confucius Temple in Beijing. He was, he claimed, so moved by
the solemnity of the ritual as well as by the rich conceptual elements
behind its songs and dances that he wanted to compose a piece of
music to present Confucian philosophy at its most exquisite. After all,
what could be more authentic than Confucianism for symbolizing the
essence of Chinese civilization?
The Music of the Confucian Temple comprises six movements, each
referring to one of the six stages of the memorial rite in its traditional
form. The first movement, Yingshen (The Welcome of the
Spirits), andante quasi adagio, conveys the solemn and stately mood of
the ritual. Amid the string and percussion instruments, a Buddhist
chant-like melody starts in the seventh measure; this recurs in varia-
tions throughout the rest of the composition. In correspondence to the
chanting melody, a second motif arises in the thirty-first measure, a

hymnlike chord in praise of Confucius the Great Master. Amid brass
and woodwind instruments, the fifty-seventh measure introduces the
third motif, which articulates the procession of the ritual participants.
The three motifs interplay to create a rhythmic harmony in welcom-
ing the spirits. The following three movements, entitled Chuxian
(The First Sacrifice), Yaxian (The Second Sacrifice),
and Zhongxian (The Final Sacrifice), constitute the central
part of the piece. The First Sacrifice, lento tranquillo, moves in a tran-
quil rhythm, underscoring the elegant literary dance (wenwu ) at
the ritual; The Second Sacrifice, largo misterioso, appears to be more
active in approximating the tempo of the military dance (wuwu );
The Final Sacrifice, andante tranquillo con tristezza, which culminates
with the human dance (renwu ), is grand but pensive in tonality,
as it brings the full sacrifice to a close. The fifth movement, Chezhuan
(The Removal of the Sacrificial Feast), con modo composto, rep-
resents a relaxed appreciation of the sacrifice just accomplished. The
music concludes with Songshen (Bidding the Spirits Farewell ),
andante quasi adagio sostenuto, which features a combination of piano
and brass instruments in unison, followed by a return to the mood of
solemnity from the beginning of the music.14
If Jiangs works before 1938 were characterized by vital rhythmic
organization, chromatic and skipping melodic lines, clear texture and
bold harmony, and strong tonal clarity, The Music of the Confucian Temple
points to the opposite: it appears to be reductionist in its arrangement
of sounds and highly restrained in mood, almost to the point of being
monotonous. This effect, however, was purposefully conceived. The
greatest music is that which sounds the easiest and simplest (dayue
biyi bijian ), as the ancient teaching goes.15 To restore
Confucian ritual music to what he believed was its original form,
Jiang had taken on an archaeological task, plowing through ancient
documents. In 1942 he even published a book, Jdai Shina ongaku k:
14
See Su Xias analysis in Jiang Wenye bufen yuedui yinyue jianjie
[An Introduction to Select Orchestra Music Pieces by Jiang
Wenye], conference paper presented at Jiang Wenye xiansheng shishi ershi zhounian
jinian xueshu yantaohui [Academic Con-
ference in Memory of the Twentieth Anniversary of Jiang Wenyes Passing], Institute
of Taiwanese History, Academia Sinica, October 24, 2003, 46.
15
From Xu Fuguan , Zhongguo yishu jingshen [The Spirit of Chi-
nese Art] (Taibei: Xuesheng shuju, 1965), 24.
Kshi no ongaku ron : (A Study of Music in

Ancient China: Confucius Treatise on Music) to substantiate his discoveries.16
Behind Jiangs analysis lies Tcherepnins theory that the native tune
of Chinese music is characterized by the pentatonic chord . . . its tune
consists in perpetual variation of the same melody and the melody
always progresses . . . when toward the end of the piece . . . the melody
adapts itself to the new rhythm.17 As Jiang proudly claims, only pen-
tatonic scales were used in this piece, but it will not make the audience
feel that its simple or boring.18
But what truly makes Jiang Wenyes new project interesting is that
The Music of the Confucian Temple is a piece created in a modernist spirit.
It may not be a coincidence that where he arranges Confucian penta-
tonic chords in the simplest modes, they echo modernist compositions,
especially those in line with Schnbergs system of atonality;19 critics
have pointed out Jiangs resemblance to the Austrian composer.20 Both
deplored the regression of listening of their times and both invested
a visionary claim in their compositional strategy. Whereas Schn-
berg employed atonal arrangement and chromatic chords as a way to
deconstruct the sonorous philistinism of European modernity,21 Jiang
experimented with Confucian chords in the hope of retrieving the
sacrosanct simplicity that was missing in the Chinese (and Japanese)
status quo. Nevertheless, compared with Schnberg and his follow-
ers agenda, Jiang Wenye made one more twist: not only did he have
to understand the European avant-garde spirit and the compositional
16
Jiang Wenye, Shangdai zhina zhengyue kao: Kongzi yinyue lun :
[A Study of Music in Ancient China: Confucius Treatise on Music], trans. Chen
Guanghui , in Jiang Wenye wenzi zuopinji [Textual Works by
Jiang Wenye] (Taibei: Cultural Center of Taibei County, 1992).
17
Quoted from Chang Chi-jen, Alexander Tcherepnin, 56.
18
Jiang Wenyes reply to Guo Zhiyuans question; see Guo, Jiang Wenye
de huixiang [Reminiscences About Jiang Wenye], in Zhang Jiren,
Jiang Wenye jinian yantaohui lunwenji, 90.
19
Jiang Wenyes reception of Schnberg and other avant-garde musicians was
noticed by Kuo Tzong-kai (Guo Zongkai ) , in Jiang Wenye zaoqi gangqin
zuopin yinyue fengge zhi yuanqi yu tuibian
[The Rise and Metamorphosis of Piano Works by the Early Jiang Wenye],
in Lun Jiang Wenye: Jiang Wenye jinian yantaohui lunwenji, ed. Liang Maochun and Jiang
Xiaoyun (Beijing: Zhongyang yinyue xueyan xuebaoshe, 2000), 192.
20
Kuo Tzong-kai, Jiang Wenye, 45.
21
See Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and
Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 1560; Adorno, On the Fetish-
Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, in The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 298.
skills it required, he also had to apply them in the service of a goal

the restoration of Confucian musicthat people would have repudi-
ated at first listening as anything but avant-garde. In other words, if
Schnbergs tonality struck his audience as something unprecedented,
Jiang paradoxically had to derive iconoclastic power from reclaim-
ing a lost tonality, out of a past whose rules were no longer or had
never been available. When critics complained about Jiang Wenye
being too far away from the needs of the time . . . lingering amid the
ruins of traditional forms of Chinese music, therefore losing his criti-
cal capacity,22 they may have overlooked the fact that he might just
have arrived at the ruins of Chinese music by way of his study of
Western modernism.
That Jiang Wenye was able to make The Music of the Confucian Tem-
ple both an antiquarian tour de force and an avant-garde experiment
merits attention, as it concerns an obscure part of Chinese modernist
discourse. Insofar as it intends to reconstruct the quintessential mel-
ody of (traditional ) Chinese music, The Music of the Confucian Temple
shows Jiangs desire for contact with the ancients. However, Jiang was
keenly aware that the music of Confucian times was long lost, and
that despite his painstaking research, he had to reinvent that tradition
by putting together bits and pieces from various sources and periods,
re-creating them with recourse to his command of the modern. Hav-
ing done so, Jiang may well be aligned with the reformist tradition of
classical Chinese literature and scholarship that Stephen Owen has
called reactionary reform, in that the past is valued more than the
present or future, and the antiquity proposed to be restored could not
be a revival of the past, as it was at least partly an imaginary construct
projected from the present.23
I would argue nevertheless that Jiangs effort brought about more
than reactionary reform. Besides his limited primary school experience
22
Liang Maochun , Jiang Wenye de gangqin zuopin
[Piano Works by Jiang Wenye], in Zhang Jiren, Jiang Wenye jinian yantaohui lunwenji,
115.
23
Zhao Jianzhang , Tongcheng pai wenxue sixiang yanjiu
[A Study of the Literary Thought of the Tongcheng School] (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan
chubanshe, 2003), 17273. For an example of reactionary reform in an earlier period,
see Stephen Owen, The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Y (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1975), 9. See also Theodore Huters discussion in From Writing to Literature:
The Development of Late Qing Theories of Prose, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
47, no. 1 (1987): 93.
in Amoy, Jiang Wenye had hardly been exposed to Chinese antiq-

uity; his knowledge of Chinese music and history was acquired mostly
through Japanese connections. Hence, it is hard to see how, when he
strove to regenerate Confucian music, he would have engaged in reac-
tionary reform in the way that this notion applies to Chinese scholars
working from what we might call their native legacy. For Jiang, the
Confucian tradition was more likely something he had never previ-
ously inhabited, as he was protected by his doubly colonial status from
the intuitive certainties of all who mature inside the object of recon-
struction. To call on Confucius through ritual and music, therefore,
was an adventure of reconstructing a lost identity and rehabilitating a
truncated lineagea task that someone in diaspora may be uniquely
capable of taking on. Instead of reactionary reform, The Music of the
Confucius Temple meant for Jiang Wenye an imaginary re-formation, a
bold invention of the past for the sake of the present.
IV
We now turn to Jiangs theoretical treatise on the ideal form of Confu-

cian music. Jiang writes in the preface to his album of The Music of the
Confucian Temple (1940) that he hoped to compose music reflecting the
state of divine bliss ( fayue jing ):
There is neither happiness nor sadness in this music, which is suggestive
only of the Oriental state of celestial elation. In other words, this music
seems to exist nowhere, or perhaps somewhere in the cosmos, containing
a volume of air. This air congeals into music all of a sudden, only to turn
into a flash of light in no time, and disappear in the ether.24
The term fayue , like the more commonly used faxi , is
derived from the Buddhist Huayan jing (Avatamsaka Sutra), mean-
ing the pleasure of epiphany one experiences at hearing the teachings
of Buddha.25 Jiang Wenye saw Confucian music as an art form that
relies no longer on stimulated sensory excitements. With its simple
24
Jiang Wenye, Kongmiao de yinyue, dacheng yuezhang
[The Music of the Confucian Temple], trans. Jiang Xiaoyun , in Minzu yinyue
yanjiu , ed. Liu Jingzhi, 3:301.
25
For a more detailed study of fayue, see Foguang dacidian bianxiu weiyuanhui
, Foguang dacidian [Foguang Edition of Dictionary of
Buddhist Terminology] (Gaoxiong: Foguang chubanshe, 1995), 4:3379.
orchestration, it touches instead the deepest niches of the mind and

evokes immense quietude and fullness.
Based on this theme of divine bliss, Jiang Wenye wrote the afore-
mentioned Study of Music in Ancient China: Confucius Treatise on Music,
an analysis of ancient Chinese music and its conceptual framework in
light of Confucianism. Jiang begins by calling attention to the close ties
between music and the state in ancient China; he holds that politics
was always already inherent in the conceptualization and production
of music. But here politics is to be understood in terms of Confucian
sage-kingship rather than power maneuvering.26 Jiang observes that
music ( yue ) and ritual (li ) constituted the two pillars of the ideal
state in ancient times. Whereas ritual served to prescribe the rules of
propriety, music helped orchestrate human and cosmic movements
into a systematic whole. He cites the Li ji (The Records of Ritual ):
music is that which unites heaven and earth in harmony; ritual is
that which places heaven and earth in order. Because of harmony,
things can be cultured; because of order, things can be differentiated.27
Music, accordingly, takes precedence over ritual in forming the uni-
versal order.
But let us return to to Jiang Wenyes famous declaration that his
music renders neither happiness nor sadness, existing nowhere and
everywhere like air, and that as such it transmits a state of celestial
elation. Although Jiang regarded the divine bliss thus generated as
the key to Chinese music at its most subtle, recent scholarship has
found that this notion may not come from Confucian musicological
discourse so much as from foreign sources. As Lin Yingqi
points out, Jiang owes the concept divine bliss to his teacher
Yamada, who as early as 1922 was using it to describe the sensation
he obtained in listening to music by the Russian composer Alexan-
der Scriabin (18721919). Scriabins music is concerned with compel-
ling and otherworldly visions; symphonies such as The Divine Poem and
The Poem of Ecstasy were composed to evoke a mystical feeling that
transcends life and death, and to foster a collective joy.28 At the
26
Confucius regards politics as something like music, which is an extremely clear
and pristine entity. Jiang Wenye, Kongzi yinyue lun [Confucius Treatise on
Music], 148.
27
Ibid., 21.
28
Yamada, Yinyue zhi fayuejing [The State of Bliss in Music];
quoted from Lin Yingqi, Jiafeng zhong de wenhuaren, 52.
time that The Poem of Ecstasy was introduced to Japan as Hetsu no shi
(Poem of Divine Bliss), Yamada was commissioned to compose
music for modern poetry by poets such as Kitahara Hakush
(18851942), and found that Wagners method of integrating text
into music could no longer satisfy him. Instead, he was enlightened
by Scriabins works and regained the courage to strive toward the
goal of ecstasy and divine bliss.29
Something of an artistic genealogy suggests itself here: through
Yamada, Jiang Wenye managed to transform a Russian composers
mystical belief into something quintessential to Confucian music. As
he claims, this music is like a light air, flying gently into heaven,
conveying the wishes and prayers of those on earth. Through this
music, the worshipers acquire a certain inspiration, thereby creating
an atmosphere that unites heaven and earth harmoniously.30 One
thus again comes to the intriguing interchange of sounds and thoughts
between Jiang Wenye and his contemporaries. The aura of Jiangs
ideal music could not have arisen exclusively from his imaginary com-
munication with Confucius, any more than from his dialogue with the
Japanese and European masters from Yamada Kosaku to Scriabin
and Tcherenpin. The divine bliss he is professing, accordingly, may
not merely give rise to the sonorous revelation of Confucian benevo-
lence but also be a reverberation of the modernist call for undoing the
world as it was.
Finally, what are the the political implications of Jiang Wenyes Con-
fucian project? The early 1940s was a time when Chinese compos-
ers were creating music in support of the anti-Japanese aggression
campaign. One senses a high-strung patriotic tone from the titles of
musical pieces such as Zheng Zhishengs (190341) Manjiang
hong (So Red Is the River), Xian Xinghais (190545)
Manzhou qiutu jinxingqu (March of the Manchurian Prison-
ers), and He Ltings (190397) Keng chunni (Plowing the
Spring Soil ). Jiang, however, turned his career in a different direction.
29
Ibid.
30
Jiang Wenye, Kongzi yinyue lun, 52.
Besides The Music of the Confucian Temple, he produced several other

symphonic pieces, such as Seiki no shinwa ni yoru shka
(Song for the Myth of the Century [1942]), Ichiu dk
(Symphonia Universalis [1943]), and scores for musicals such as the
aforementioned Princess Xiangfei (1942). Whereas Symphonia Universalis
celebrates universal peace and harmony, Princess Xiangfei deals with the
legendary life and death of the Qianlong emperors Muslim consort.
These works could all be interpreted as promoting racial harmony and
solidarity among East Asian countries, and they resonated with the
emerging discourse of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
(Dai-t-a Kyeiken ).31
However aloof Jiang Wenye managed to remain from the war,
it was hard for him to steer clear of the political implications of his
Confucian projects. When he talked about a music that harmonizes
all differences, the tenor of the Royal Way rang audibly; when he
celebrated Confucian benevolence, this inevitably included echoes of
Japanese imperialist coprosperity. In 1940 Jiang Wenye turned 30,
and The Music of the Confucian Temple was premiered in Tokyo, con-
ducted by Jiang himself and broadcast nationwide. Record production
followed that summer, performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orches-
tra. The same year saw the announcement of the Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere as well as the celebration of the 2,600th anni-
versary of the Japanese nation. Jiang took part by composing Ta no
uta (The Song of East Asia) for the dance production Nippon
( Japan). The aforementioned Symphonia Universalis was composed
as late as 1943, a piece inspired by All Regions United as One Uni-
verse, the slogan of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
One recalls yet again Jiangs opening remarks in The Music of the Con-
fucian Temple that Chinese music invariably emerged in tandem with
31
As an ideology, Greater East Asia was traceable as far back as Sat Nobuhiro
(17691850), who suggested that the Japanese government embark on colo-
nial and agricultural undertakings on uninhabited islands in the South China Sea,
ultimately spreading its military might to Southeast Asia. By the 1930s, the notion that
Japan should be the leader promoting Asia for the Asians had become prevalent
among military forces and imperialists. In 1940, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Ysuke
(18801946) announced Japans role as liberator of Asian countries from
imperialist powers so as to form a new solidarity. What ensued was the brutality of
war and occupation that led to the Japanese being regarded as no better, and in some
cases much worse, than Western colonists. For a comprehensive study of Greater East
Asia as an intellectual discourse, a political campaign, and a military movement, see
Wang Ping , Jindai Riben de Yaxiya zhuyi [Asianism in Early
Modern Japan] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2004), particularly chapters 512.
politics. In an uncanny way, this statement became a bitter footnote

to Jiangs own musical activities during the war. Although he was tan-
gentially involved in the Co-Prosperity Sphere campaign, Jiang Wenye
showed neither interest in nor commitment to Japanese military impe-
rialism. He yearned for a music that would transcend all human strife
and worldly attachments, and for a short while he seemed to have
accomplished this goal thanks to an unlikely environment. Still, his
desired Confucian harmony had to succumb to the sound and fury of
the times, and the state of divine bliss was no sooner attained than
it was contaminated by ideological gospels.
Thus Jiang Wenyes dilemma exemplifies the entangled relationship
between imperialist politics and artistic creativity. Vacillating between
opposite attractionsthe mandate of Greater East Asia and an indi-
vidualistic visionhis re-creation of the Confucian melody of drum
and bell, simple as it was, opened multiple possibilities of listening.
His music suggests a radical play with anachronism so as to decon-
struct the sanctioned temporality of progress, while also representing
a modernist critique of the vulgar trend based on mechanical repro-
duction and commercial interest. For some it may be a cosmopolitan
interpretation of the Chinese musical legacy via foreign mediation, for
others a colonial gesture trying to reconcile imaginary nostalgia and an
escapade into the exotic. Most ambiguously, it may demonstrate both
imperialist propaganda and personal, eccentric interpretation of pro-
paganda; both complicity and a desire to transcend this complicity.
VI
Jiang decided to stay in Beijing after the defeat of Japan. He believed

his Chinese identity had been finally authenticated as a result of the
war. And perhaps with a Confucian desire to find a ruler who would
truly appreciate the significance of his music, he presented The Music of
the Confucius Temple to Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese govern-
ment. Instead of being honored for his contribution, however, Jiang
found himself charged as a collaborator, and he was sentenced to jail.32
32
The piece was forwarded to Chiang Kai-shek by Li Zongren (18911969),
one of the most important wartime military leaders. Li was made commander-in-chief
of the Beijing area after the end of the war, and it was in this capacity that he accepted
Jiang Wenyes music piece on behalf of the government. Wang Zhenya ,
Zuoqujia Jiang Wenye [ Jiang Wenye the Composer], Zhongyang
In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over mainland China and

founded a new republic. Despite the options of going to Hong Kong,
Rome, or Taiwan, Jiang decided to stay, out of a deep love for Beijing.
In 1950 he was assigned to teach composition at the newly founded
Central Music Conservatory in Tianjin, and in the next seven years he
was able to produce quite a number of piano and symphony pieces.
This was an epic phase of modern Chinese history when all artists
were organized to sing and dance to the same tunes celebrating the
new nation. Jiangs wish to create a great music that harmonizes
heaven and earth had to be redefined: the peoples music was sup-
posed to change heaven and earth so obviously and completely as to
generate one great hymn.
Even then Jiang was able to compose symphonic pieces that bore
his individual mark, such as Miluo chenliu (Drowned in the
Miluo River). This piece was created in commemoration of the 2,230th
anniversary of the death of Qu Yuan (4th3rd centuries B.C.E.),
the great poet of Chu who drowned himself after having been slan-
dered and exiled by his prince. It shows Jiangs retreat to his early
romantic traits, with an impressionist interpretation of the poets mel-
ancholy and fantasy. In addition to the standard orchestral arrange-
ment, Jiang highlights woodwind and percussive instruments to bring
out the traces of his reception of Bartk and Prokofiev, as well as
Chinese religious music.
Then came disastrous years. In 1957, Jiang was labeled a rightist for
his criticism of the party and his wartime collaboration. His Taiwanese
identity again became suspect as he liked to talk about the Taiwan
issue.33 He lost his job, and horribly, more than one thousand origi-
nal compositions were confiscated and forever lost. Jiang, however,
continued to compose against all odds. After the Cultural Revolution
broke out in 1966, like many other intellectuals and artists he went
through a series of ordeals, from public humiliation to incarceration,
forced confessions, self-critique, and reeducation at a cadre school.
yinyue xuebao, no. 5 (1985); quoted from Wu Lingyao, Jiang Wenye shengping yu
zuopin, 164.
33
Xie Lifa , The Old Vines Under a Fault, quoted from Kuo Tzong-kai,
Jiang Wenye, 26. For a detailed description of Jiang Wenyes life from the 1950s to his
death, see Wu Yunzhen, Xianfu Jiang Wenye, 14753; Kuo Tzong-kai, Jiang Wenye,
2531; Chang Chi-jen, Jiang Wenye, 4758.
When he returned to Beijing in 1973 after four years of labor reform,

Jiang was a frail old man tormented by disease.
In early 1978, twenty-one years after he was labeled a rightist,
Jiang was rehabilitated. He started to compose anew, working on a
new project called Ali shan zhisheng (The Voice of Mount
Ali), about Taiwans foremost scenic landmark. But he collapsed into
paralysis one night in May, and for the next five years he was bedrid-
den with apoplexy. Jiang died on October 24, 1983; the Voice of Mount
Ali was left unfinished.
VII
Throughout his life Jiang Wenye sought a sound that might resonate
with both the aboriginal melodies of Mount Ali and the ritual music of
the Confucius Temple, both the fantastic cadences of natural Taiwan
and the avant-garde rhythms playing in the metropolises of Japan and
China. Jiangs music project also points to a sonic negotiation between
the islands and the mainland. In 1934, he first won recognition with a
musical inscription of pastoral Taiwan. Forty-five years later, he ended
his career with an imaginary encounter with Mount Ali. When the
dream of eternal China as embodied by Confucian drums and bells
faded, it was the sound of the erstwhile colony, with its aboriginal
melodies and romantic legends, that returned to the composers ear.
But wasnt his nostalgia about Taiwan as imaginary and exotic as his
nostalgia about China? In his final years, Jiang jotted down a series of
poems in Japanese. The last one reads:
The memory of the island
Day and night caressing
Good or bad
Island: thank you.
Thus, Jiang recapitulates the leitmotifs of his lifelong quest: a colonial
sons desire to sound his way home, and a modernists attempt to
create a space, an isle of lyrical tonality, amid the epic torrents of
history.
REINVENTING CHINESE WRITING:
ZHANG GUIXINGS SINOGRAPHIC TRANSLATIONS
Andrea Bachner
I. Writing Lessons
Strongly influenced by paradigms of cultural studies, reflections on

global Chinese culture or the Chinese diaspora highlight a variety
of cultural expressions, frequently reaching beyond the written text.
These Sinophone articulationsto borrow a term from Shih Shu-
meis (2007) book Visuality and Identityrefocus academic attention on
a variety of practices that profoundly complicate generic terms like
Chinese or Han. They also push the question of mediality to the
forefront: what are the media through which Sinophone cultures artic-
ulate themselves? Even though nontextual media might underline the
hybridity of the Sinophone in especially forceful ways, Chinese writ-
ing, the sinograph as a medium, has to be included in these reflec-
tions. Otherwise, one of the strongholds of Sinocentrism will remain
unchallenged, since it is the Chinese written character that most often
becomes the symbol of Chinese culture, constructed as a monolithic,
unchanging tradition.1
Through an analysis of two novels by the Malaysian-Chinese writer
Zhang Guixing ,(Elephant Tropes, 1998) and
(Monkey Cup, 2000), I will explore ways Chinese writing can become
a medium for resisting essentialist fantasies of and about Chinese cul-
ture. For diasporic Chinese writers like Zhang, the Chinese writing
system is both the inevitable basis for signification and something they
cannot completely claim. The resulting in-between position fuels texts
that recuperate a hybrid, changing, and multimedial sinograph against
both Sinocentric discourses and Western theories of signification. If
the Southern Ocean has been designated as the space where language
1
I see the emphasis on the sinograph that I am advocating in this essay through an
analysis of texts by Zhang Guixing as a complementary perspective that draws on as
well as supplements work on the Sinophonic (see Jing Tsus essay in this volume) and
other Sinophone medialities (see Shih Shu-meis essay in this volume).
178 andrea bachner
(i.e., the Chinese language) is lost in a multitude of cultural codes and

scripts in constant,2 at times violent friction with one another, Zhang
harnesses this hybridity to the goal of redefining Chinese writing.
Zhang critiques both Sino- and signocentrism by invoking the perme-
ability of Chinese writing vis--vis other scripts and by staging different
theories of the sinograph. Zhangs sinographic translations thus refor-
mulate the stakes of modern Chinese literature as a globalized expres-
sion: the frictions between Chinese and other languages and cultural
discourses, the differences among varying Sinophone expressions, but
also the question of Chinese writing and its basis, the sinograph.
Imagine a writing lesson. The year is 1973, the place Sarawak, at
the northwestern tip of the island of Borneo, the largest district in
the then newly created nation-state of Malaysia. The ethnic Chinese
Shi Shicai , the young protagonist of Zhang Guixings novel
Elephant Tropes, uses his high school holidays for a somewhat peculiar
journey: accompanied by his school friend Zhu Dezhong , a
member of the indigenous Iban tribe, he travels upstream, into the
wild heart of Borneos jungle. As he passes the rainy season in the
longhouse of his friends family, he develops an interest in Dezhongs
sister Fadiya , to whom he gives a Chinese writing lesson:
,
, ,
,

. . . . . . . . . . . .
(Zhang 1998, 99)3
Female [], the first character in woman. Three strokes. Most Chi-
nese characters are pictograms. This character represents a bowing and
scraping woman. These are her knees, these her arms. Female. You.
Woman. I. Man. Male []. Seven strokes. Man labors, cultivates the
field. On top, the character for field [], and below that for strength
[]. I will teach you how to write your Chinese name: FaDiYa.
Di. This is difficult to write, said Fadiya, knitting her dense brows.
2
This is a common phrase in Malaysian-Chinese critical writing that is taken up,
for instance, by Huang Jinshu (1998) in his book[Malaysian-
Chinese Literature and Chineseness], especially in the chapter /:
[Sinophone/Chinese: The South Where Language Is Lost and the Recraft-
ing of :anguage].
3
Where not indicated otherwise, translations are my own.
reinventing chinese writing 179
You can also write it without the upper part, the grass radical [ would
then become ]. Or you can change it to another sign []. They are
homophones. Which one do you like better? Come, write with me. I
will guide your hand while you write. Lets write a sentence. Lets make
a sentence. Fadiyais abeautifulwoman. . . .Beautiful . . . this is
difficult to write.These two characters [] belong to you.
This scene is emblematic of the way Zhang Guixing, one of the
best-known Malaysian-Chinese writers currently residing in Taiwan,
rehearses Sarawaks conflicted intercultural and interethnic context in
his work. More important, I would claim, this scene is also a crucial
starting point for the reflection on Chinese writing that marks the
authors work. In one and the same scene, through the mouthpiece
of his young protagonist Shicai, Zhang stages cameo appearances of
two complementary and equally biased perspectives on Chinese writ-
ing: the fascination with the sinographs pictographic potential and the
critique of its so-called phonetic deficiencies.
The explanation of treats Chinese characters as pictograms, as
the sign is mapped onto and read as a direct representation of the ref-
erents Gestalt. Strokes become female knees and arms; or rather they
iconically symbolize them, since the pictographically biased reading
of Chinese writing that Zhang puts into the mouth of his Malaysian-
Chinese protagonist tends to erase just this moment of becoming, as
well as evade the question of how the written sign resembles the ref-
erent, or why their relation is perceived as a resemblance. With the
introduction of the character pictogram becomes ideogram, not
a direct representationhowever stylizedof a referent, but a com-
bination of one pictogram, that for field, , and another ideogram,
that for strength, .4 Whereas the transition from a pictographic
to an ideographic reading of Chinese writing increases its complex-
ity, the relation between referent and written sign is not essentially
altered. Representation gives way to metonymic associationas when
the character is read as representing a bent arm, and thus desig-
nates the concept strength by extension. In both cases, the written
sign is invested with a natural, nonarbitrary relation to its referent.
Zhang highlights this graphical cratylism through the imagined decou-
pling of written sign and sound: in Zhangs Chinese text, the scene
4
Both the pictographic fetishism of Shicais explanation and this example are remi-
niscent of Ernest Fenollosas (1919) famous, often-critiqued reflections on the sino-
graph in The Chinese Written Character as a Means of Poetry.
180 andrea bachner
between Shicai and Fadiya is supposed to take place in English. The

Chinese writing lesson so beautifully described in Chinese by Zhang
in his novel is consequently to be imagined as the production of sino-
graphs without their corresponding sounds. As a Sinophone pronun-
ciation is replaced by rudimentary English, writing becomes divorced
from sound.5
The second part of the writing scene marks a turn from written
signs to sounds. Instead of writing signs that are connected to their
meaning without being pronounced, Chinese characters now become
emptied of signification, in order to express sound, and nothing but
sound. This happens when Shicai transcribes Fadiyas name into Chi-
nese charactersnaming being one of the fields in which some non-
Chinese critics particularly claim the Chinese language to be deficient
in comparison with phonetically oriented, especially alphabetic scripts.
Written signs such as the sinographic script express meaning and
sound simultaneously, and to some degree independently, in contrast
to phonetic writing systems, where letters, as groupings of lines such as
a or k, represent sounds whose combination expresses meaning.6
One could claim that in the case of proper names, logographic writ-
ing signifies too much in that it always assigns meaning in addition to
performing the indexical function of naming. In conjunction with the
abundance of homophones in Chinese, this excess of signification is
further underlined in Zhangs writing lesson by the arbitrariness of the
written sign when it comes to transcribing Fadiyas name into Chinese:
5
The strange coupling of Chinese writing and spoken English that Zhang evokes in
this scene points to further complex questions of writing and sound: what Sinophone
would have been used, had this scene taken place in Chinese? The standard Mandarin
that Shicai learns in Chinese school, or the Sinophone his family is likely to speak? What
are the cultural and economic politics that predetermine English and standard Chi-
nese (in its written form) as precarious linguae francae of an intercultural and interethnic
encounter in the Malaysian jungle? Why does the only official language of Malaysia,
Bahasa Malaysia or Malay, not play a more prominent role? The extent of Zhangs
complex reflections on language (and script) politics is also visible in his earlier writ-
ings. The short story [Machete, Orchid, Revolver] from
Zhangs second collection of stories,[Children of Keshan (1988)], hinges
upon miscommunication, the inability of the Malaysian-Chinese protagonist to make
himself understood in Malay, which leads to his death at the hands of the police, since
the Malay family he talked into giving him a ride take his toy weapons, gifts for his
family, for real and think him a kidnapper.
6
The difference between phonetic and logographic scripts, however, is much more
difficult to establish. To some extent, phonetic scripts also work as logographs, since a
reader usually recognizes entire words, rather than single letters and their individual
sounds.
when she complains about the difficulty of the character , assigned

by Shicai as the written form for the second syllable in her name, he
is quick to propose or as easier alternatives.7
This phonic twist in Zhangs writing scene obliquely echoes debates
about the Chinese script as an insufficient tool for transliterating
speech, as discussed in Jing Tsus essay in this volume. As Tsu shows,
under the aegis of the Sinophone, the question of sound and writ-
ing, and their respective role in a linguistic politics that cements the
notion of a national language by excluding other linguistic expres-
sions and relegating them to the secondary status of dialects, has
become once again of crucial importance. Much like other Sinophone
writers who question a China-centric linguistic politics, Zhang also
reflects, at times, on the question of the Sinophonic and its notation,
for instance in his 1995 novel Rogue Clan
( ), by beginning
each chapter with a short text in the form of a school essay, in which
the Chinese script is accompanied by phonetic transcriptions in the
Zhuyin system used in Taiwan, almost as if to underline, and critique,
the hegemonic sway of the standard Mandarin pronunciation. How-
ever, Zhangs unique contribution to Sinophone literature lies in his
focus on the Chinese writing system, the sinograph. His work targets
the very core of China-centrism by showing the Chinese script, the
archival tool par excellence, to be other to itself.
Zhangs writing scene goes beyond a mere juxtaposition of differ-
ent potentials of the sinograph, a slightly ironic critique of divergent
perspectives on Chinese writing, and the dismissal of any single view
on what the sinograph is supposed to be. The scene is invested with
special force because it reflects upon Chinese writing in a context of
intercultural, interethnic, and interlingual conflict. In Zhangs text, the
writing of a single sentence in Chinese, Fadiya is a beautiful woman,
is rife with meaning. The graphical cratylism of a pictographic bias is
reinforced through the decoupling of written sign and sound in a situ-
ation of translation: in Zhangs Chinese text, the scene between Shicai
and Fadiya is supposed to take place in English, the only language in
which a rudimentary communication between the two is possible. Like-
wise, the concrete cultural context of the indigenous Iban disqualifies
7
In terms of the meaning of the individual characters, the second syllable of Fadi-
yas name evolves thus from (fruit stem) to (emperor or Supreme Being)
or (an archaic term for a female relative, a sister-in-law, or a womans younger
sister).
182 andrea bachner
a reading of Chinese pictograms as natural and universally valid

representations: what the novel tells us about Iban life makes it highly
improbable that Fadiya would identify her own existence according to
the concepts of field or woman from Shicais writing lesson; she
lives in a culture where women forage and work islands of variegated
crops in the jungle, not bow to their men as they return from cultivat-
ing neatly subdivided fields. Furthermore, the scenes phonetic turn
arises through another process of translation: phonetic transcription.
In other words, Zhangs inclusive and variegated definition of the sino-
graph arises in a force field of different cultures and languages. Even
though Zhangs reflections on Chinese writing spring from the con-
crete situation of the Chinese in Malaysia, he ultimately reworks the
sinograph as such, challenging Sinocentric views of its immutability in
splendid isolation.
II. Logographic Indifference
But where does Zhang go from here? After considering the writing
scene in Elephant Tropes with its deconstructivist tendency, we would
probably expect him to underline the sinographs character as an arbi-
trary sign system. Indeed, this is a promising way of redefining Chi-
nese writing beyond either ideographic fetishism or phonocentric bias,
as it is proposed by Haun Saussy (2001) in Great Walls of Discourse. Sau-
ssy pits a radical combinatorial reading of the sinograph against the
Gestalt-oriented pictographic bias vis--vis Chinese writing, suggest-
ing we regard the sinograph as composed of strokes that in different
combinations express meaning arbitrarily. The Chinese script, read as
logographic in this way, would thus not be dissimilar from alphabetic
writing. This approach is the outcome of a consequent application of
Jacques Derridas definition of writing, or criture, as he gives it most
prominently in Of Grammatology (1967): contrary to the phonocentric
fantasy of presence, signified and signifier exist only in and as dif-
ference. Saussys reading of the sinograph insists on the necessity of
difference also between the written sign and its referent in order to
counter the fantasy of the resemblance or association between the
two as projected by pictographically obsessed readings. In this sense,
Saussy both follows in Derridas footsteps and applies the principle of
difference in more radical as well as more culturally informed ways.
Chinese writing, for Derrida, serves as a positive counter-example to
the phonocentric bias of European thought, and therefore has to con-

serve at least a modicum of difference over and above diffrance. Para-
doxically, for Saussy, in order to counter this remnant of exoticism,
the sinograph cannot be more than an example of the workings of
signification in general.
A similar tendency is at work when Lin Jianguo (Lim Kien Ket)
grapples with the linguistic concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure
in the context of Chinese writing in the Southern Ocean. In one of
the groundbreaking texts of the discourse on Malaysian-Chinese litera-
ture,(Why Malaysian-Chinese Literature?), he
draws attention to the importance of the (sino)graphic:
(Ferdinand de Saussure)

(sound image) (graphic
image) [. . .]

(Lin 2004, 10)
I have already excessively extended the meaning of Ferdinand de Sau-
ssures concept of semiology in swaying the balance; Saussures sugges-
tion does not completely conform to the situation of Chinese writing.
Of course, Saussures whole concept is based on the alphabetic system
of Indo-European languages, and this is also why he defines the signifier
as a sound image and not as a graphic image as I argue it. . . . And yet,
my aim is certainly not to construct a semiological discourse for Chinese
pictographsit cannot be done for reasons of competence and scope. I
merely want to use Saussure to explain that Chinese characters are just
like any written sign: for the sign to really have expressive power, logical
prerequisites and conditions have to exist.
The prerequisites Lin sees as vital for the functioning of a sign sys-
tem lie in a differentiation of levels between signified and signifier.
Only if the signifiers are not exclusively connected to a certain kind
of signifieds can the sign system as such avoid stagnation, survive and
evolve. Even though Lins reasoning refutes Sinocentric essentialism in
its desire to frame Chinese writing as always only able to express the
essence of Chinese culturewhatever that might behis differential
claim is also an acute caveat against pictographic essentialisms.
Whereas critics such as Saussy or Lin highlight the fact that
Chinese characters are just like any written sign, Zhang suggests
a different approach. Rather than capitalizing upon the logographic
184 andrea bachner
as yet another example of an arbitrary and conventional sign system,

where difference, as that which rules signification, has a tendency of
becoming indifferent to cultural, linguistic, and scriptural difference,
Zhang chooses to emphasize the specificity of the sinographic script
by bringing it into close vicinity with the image. His aim is to reflect
upon linguistic friction in the context of Malaysia, where the phonetic
and the graphic form part of a discriminatory politics tied to writing.
A whole array of different inscriptions vies for space in Sarawak: from
the savage trope of the Malaysian rain forest and the bodily marks
of Dayak tattoos; the inscriptive tradition of Islam and the Arabic
language, which is highly regulative and iconoclastic; and the Chinese
system of writing and its different oral realizations to the inscriptions
of Western colonialism, mainly the Dutch and the British; Japanese
imperialism during the Second World War; the secularized nation-
state of Malaysia with its ethnic bias and its modernized, alphabetic
writing system; and the marks incessantly left by global neocolonialism
and exploitation of natural resources. In this multiply inscribed and
marked space, historical trauma is often directly related to the friction
between different inscriptive systems. Here, not only the representa-
tion or interpretation in terms of content but also the very use of one
or another writing system marks a crucial, potentially conflicting, and
possibly violent difference. Where a choice of writing system is at least
a factor in cultural survival, writing and its materiality no longer play a
merely instrumental role but acquire a vital centrality. For Malaysian-
Chinese writers such as Zhang this background transforms their texts
into an exploration of the very basis of writing, an urgent rethinking
that is inevitably tied to the culturally specific. Writing also becomes,
foremost, a way of claiming, redefining, and displacing different cul-
tural systems. When Zhang reflects on the sinographin the face of
the local Malaysian situation that conjugates the iconoclastic tradition
of Islam with the alphabetic script of the national language, but also in
the face of a validation of signifying difference that a Western theoreti-
cal tradition of signocentrism highlightsthe image, the iconic, and
resemblance become important references also beyond Sinocentric or
Western pictographic biases.
III. Savage Inscriptions
In his novel Monkey Cup, far from distancing the sinograph from the
pictogram, Zhang goes one step further (or, some would say, takes
one step back) by reflecting on Chinese writing through mapping it
onto the tattoo art of the indigenous Dayak tribe. Apparently, the
focus on tattoo patterns marks a regression to prewriting or nonwrit-
ing. Ultimately, however, it allows Zhang to reflect on the dichotomy
of image and writing as it is present in much of Western theory, where
the image is theorized in two opposite ways, famously sketched in
W. J. T. Mitchells (1987) Iconology: either the image is already a sign,
and therefore akin to writing, or it is framed as a kind of antiwriting,
as a direct communion with reality apparently free of the trammels of
signification. In Iconology, Mitchell throws a thinking of difference into
high relief by imagining Derridas answer to the question What is an
image? as follows: Nothing but another kind of writing, a kind of
graphic sign that dissembles itself as a direct transcript of that which
it represents, or of the way things look, or of what they essentially
are (30).
But even when Western theory insists on a generalized difference
that aligns the image with written signification, the specter of writing
as above and beyond mere signification haunts signocentrism. If one
of the fetishes of a remnant of motivated signification has been the
pictographic bias, another can be located in theorys fascination with
tattooing, with a marked body that can be compared and contrasted
with civilized forms of inscription. Whereas the appeal of halluci-
nating about a pictographic writing system lies in a naturalized con-
nection between the referent and the written sign, tattooing acquires
its countersignificatory force through its writing surface, where marks
in live flesh can be easily connected to such nonsignifying realms as
pain and pleasure. Whereas tattooing served as a marker of cultural
differenceor, more poignantly, of a lack of culturein the colonial-
ist anthropological discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, more recent Western theory capitalizes upon the primitivist
charm of tattooing for different purposes.8
8
One interesting example is Wilhelm Joests compendium Ttowiren [Tattooing
(1898)]: Der Gebrauch, die Oberflche des Krpers, wie sie die Natur dem Menschen
verliehen hat, durch Bemalung, durch Narbenzeichnung oder durch farbige Tto-
wirung zu verndern, findet sich bei den verschiedensten ber den ganzen Erdkreis
186 andrea bachner
Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guat-

tari, and Alphonso Lingis read bodily inscriptions of the premodern
era or the so-called savages as a kind of antiwriting, in which the
body, framed in a spectacle of pain and jouissance, exists beyond soci-
etal signification and codes. In his book Excesses (1983), in the chapter
aptly titled Savages, Lingis evokes images of a marking that counters
Western theories of inscription. If inscription, for the Michel Foucault
(1975) of Discipline and Punish and a whole tradition of Western theory,9
involves the creation of a subject through a discursive marking of the
bodily surface, its very proponents are also most obsessed with script-
ing a way out. In this context, Lingis translates the difference between
signification and nonsignifying jouissance onto the old binary of civiliza-
tion and savagery by nourishing savage inscriptions with the violence
and cruelty of an exotic Other:
Of all that is savage about savages, the most savage is what they do to
themselves. They paint, puncture, tattoo, scarify, cicatrize, circumcise,
subincise themselves. They use their own flesh as so much material at
hand forwhat? We hardly know how to characterize itArt? Inscrip-
tion? Sign-language? Or isnt all that more like hex signs? Arent they
treating themselves like the pieces of dikdik fur, bats penis, warthogs
tooth, hornbill birds skull they attach to themselves? All that excites
some dark dregs of lechery and cruelty in us, holding our eyes fixed with
repugnance and lust. (22)
While Lingis reflection on our civilized eye pleasure vis--vis the
savage bodily inscriptions reads, at first, like a mockery of the West-
ern gaze, this is quickly transmuted into a theoretical exoticism. The
vertheilten Vlkern. Diese Hautverzierungen bezw. Verletzungen, sowie die Art und
Weise, wie sie beigebracht werden, entsprechen naturgemss, abgesehen von geo-
graphischen und anthropologischen Modificationen, dem Culturstandpunct, den die
betreffenden Menschen selbst einnehmen: bei rohen, wilden Naturvlkern wird auch
die Operation grausam, blutig sein, whrend bei zivilisirteren Vlkern zur Ausfhrung
derselben schon ein gewisser, oft sogar ein hoher Grad von Kunstsinn und Geschmack
erforderlich ist (1). (The custom of changing the surface of the body as nature has
given it to man through painting, through scarring, or through colored tattooing, is
found among the most different peoples distributed all over the globe. These orna-
ments or mutilations of the skin, as well as the ways they are being inflicted, corre-
spond naturally, apart from geographical and anthropological modifications, with the
state of culture that said peoples occupy: among uncouth, savage men of nature the
operation will be cruel and bloody, whereas more civilized peoples already require
some, in certain cases even a high, degree of aesthetic sensitivity and taste.)
9
Most of these theorists draw, directly or indirectly, on one of the ur-texts of
inscription, Friedrich Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals.
natives scar-covered body no longer elicits a reaction of repugnance

and lust, but rather is made useful for Western theory. Its use,
however, lies exactly in the discovery of its uselessness, at least in the
context of a signifying system. Lingis finds his inscriptive examples
elsewhere, in Africa. Even though the savage is inevitably linked by
Western thought with a synchronicity of the past in the present, as in
Nietzsches or Foucaults accounts, it is the savage body, not the past,
that bears the burden of embodying an alternative to the paradigm of
inscriptive subjectification. Although Lingiss savage inscription also
signifies social status or belonging to a specific group or tribe, unlike
civilized inscription, it is not related to signifying depth; rather, it
redistributes pleasure all over the body.
From a Eurocentric perspective, the relation between tattooing and
writing as well as that between image and text is conceived in paradoxi-
cal terms: the image and the marked body are always writings Other,
even as they can also be treated, at wish, as part of writing proper. In
contrast, Monkey Cup does not stage the art of Dayak tattooing as the
Other of writing, but reflects on what writing can mean. In Zhangs
novel, Dayak tattooing, based on both decorative patterns and images,
is writing in the context of another theory of signification tied to the
Chinese term wen . This Chinese graph that signifies writing also
carries a whole flock of meanings subject to change throughout the
long history of Chinese culture: from civilized or sophisticated
to literature or writing in general, to specific literary forms or
genres.10 James J. Y. Lius attempt at an etymological reconstruction of
wen in Chinese Theories of Literature is especially interesting here, because
of its connection to decorative patterns:11
10
Haun Saussy provides a much more exhaustive list of acceptations of wen: Wen
is (to cite several dictionaries at once) markings; patterns; stripes, streaks, lines, veins;
whorls; bands; writing, graph, expression, composition; ceremony, culture, refinement,
education, ornament, elegance, civility; civil as opposed to military; literature (specifi-
cally belletristic prose in its distinction from poetry). The coexistence of these various
meanings is suggestive; to say wen is wen is never just a tautology (36).
11
In a footnote Liu explains why he disallows the reading of wen as a tattooed
body. Interestingly, he stakes his counterargument on the distinction between civi-
lized and barbarian. Since the references to tattooed bodies, according to Liu, are
related to a Sinocentric dismissal of barbarian practices, it is unlikely that this practice
should have existed in the very heart of Chinese culture: It is hard to believe that
the northern Chinese, after having practiced tattooing for an unknown period of time,
stopped doing so and began to consider the custom barbaric when they found other
people practicing it (1975, 142). Irrespective of the theorys truth value, the even
speculative connection between wen and tattooing fascinates me, especially in the
188 andrea bachner
The original meaning of the word is not known for certain. The theory
held by some modern scholars that the graph originally represented a
tattooed human figure impersonating the dead king and receiving sacri-
ficial offerings is not supported by adequate evidence and does not fit all
the variant forms, only some of the more elaborate ones. The traditional
interpretation, as given in the first Chinese etymological dictionary, Hs
Shens Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuo-wen chieh-tsu, ca.
A.D. 100), seems more plausible: Wen [consists of ] intersecting strokes,
representing a criss-cross pattern. This interpretation is corroborated by
various ancient texts. For example, in a section of the Book of Documents
(Shu-ching, the earliest historical work in Chinese) generally accepted as
authentic and probably belonging to the eleventh century B.C., there
is mention of wen-pei or striped cowrie, and a poem which has been
dated 778 B.C. in the Book of Poetry (Shih-ching, the first anthology of Chi-
nese poetry) contains the phrase wen-yin or patterned mat, explained
by commentators as a mat made of tiger skin. In some texts ranging in
date from the fifth century to the first century B.C., wen is used to refer to
various kinds of physical markings or patterns, such as birthmarks on the
palm of the hand, patterns on colored woven silk, and painted designs
on carriages. However, from very early times the word was already used
in figurative and abstract senses too. (1975, 7)
From the outset, the field of writing, abstract and concrete at the
same time, is not quite as restricted or as limited as in many Western
languages. Where Western concepts draw a strict line between signifi-
cation and decoration, the almost interchangeable use of and its
homophone , or patternalso in Monkey Cupmarks as
just one special case of .12 This interchangeability of the signifiers
for writing and ornamentation evidences the fact that in a context
of Chinese culture and language, the fault line does not fall between
writing on the one hand and decorative art on the other, while imag-
istic representation occupies an uneasy in-between position.
But Zhangs reflections probe further. Not only does he think in
terms of the blurring of boundaries between sign, image, and decora-
tive pattern. He also rethinks the distinction between mark and non-
mark, between inscription and inscriptive surface. Badou, the Dayak
guide who accompanies the novels protagonist, Zhi, into the rain for-
est, has turned his body into art. With the help of innumerable tattoos
context of Zhang Guixings reflections on linkages between ancient China and the
indigenous South Seas Dayak.
12
This is also pointed out in David Wangs reading of Zhangs novels (2001,
2122).
that form a complex web of patterns and images, the Dayak youth
desires to erase the birthmarks that are profusely distributed all over
his body. He uses body art to overwrite his corporeal marks, yet only
succeeds in erasing the difference between both:
, , ,
, ,
[. . .] , ,
. . . . . . , , (2000,
104105).
He decorated his body so densely with patterns, because he wanted
to cover the birthmarks all over his body. However, in the end, even
he himself was unable to distinguish which ones were tattoos, which
ones were birthmarks. Finally, nobody remembered that his body had
originally been covered with birthmarks. . . . Even his face and his neck
were full of tattoos . . . or birthmarks, although they were so beautifully
arranged that it was difficult to imagine that there could be birthmarks
among them.
The writing of culture (tattooing) and the writing of nature (birthmarks)
are both pictograms in a broader sense, not merely pictorial but also
pigmental:13 since they occur through an accumulation of pigment
(natural or artificially inserted) in the skin, they seem indistinguishable
here. Hence, we might conclude that they are (almost) the same. From
this perspective, the texts logic would go something like this: tattooing
is part of writing; the tattoos bodily inscription is equivalent to natures
mark; in conclusion, there is no difference between nature and culture,
or, nature as we apprehend it is always already marked, written, or
acculturated. I would claim, however, that Zhang does not simply
repeat the conventional truth of the pervasiveness of criture. Instead,
his significant conflationsof writing, image, and pattern, of China
and the Southern Ocean, of mark and inscriptive surfacehighlight
the constructed nature of same and Other. In Zhangs text, the dif-
ference inherent in the temporal gap between one mark and another
gives way to a resemblance between the marked and the unmarked.
The sign and the material surface of its inscription become indistin-
guishable. This can be read as a critique of theories of difference (or
diffrance) that risk generalizing difference into indifference.
13
Both pigment and picto- are derived from Latin pingere, to color, to paint.
190 andrea bachner
In Monkey Cup, Zhangs equation of tattooing and Chinese writing

has further ramifications. The protagonists former teacher Luo
attempts to prove the connection between prehistoric China and the
Southern Ocean:

. . . . . . . . .

. . . (2000, 209)14
It is said that the people of Yin steamed and ate the brains of their
prisoners of war. Once steamed, the brain would congeal, and one
could discern beautiful brain patterns. If one used a very fine blade and
cut them into slices, the brain patterns were even more gorgeous and
varied. The people of Yin carved the brain patterns onto bone, stone,
and bronze objects. According to legend, this was a kind of worship of
intelligence. There are some who think that these were the beginnings
of the taotie design [the taotie is a ferocious mythical animal] . . . When
King Wu of the Zhou attacked the east, the people of Yin in Shandong
province fled the country. One part fled to the Southern Ocean. Is it not
true that Yin bronze objects have been found here? I suspect that the
Yin somehow influenced Borneos indigenous decorative art.
This interpretation markedly reverses notions of civilization and so-
called savagery by equating the emergence of writing with a can-
nibalistic ritualeven though the raw has already given way to the
cooked. As a theory, this also casts new light on the origin of writing,
irrespective of its historical truth value. Again, as in pictographic views
of the sinograph, writing seems disconnected from its phonetic real-
ization. The intricate patterns copied from the cross-sections of the
folded brain tissue evolve into writing, according to the conjectures
Luo relates. The shapes of the graphs are mimetic, copies of the traces
to be found in a real object: the human brain. And yet, the mimesis
does not coincide with the pictograph: the copied lines do not outline
the shape of an object so that it would be legible. Or, to put it differ-
ently, at first, the traced figures represent nothing beyond a complex
pattern of lines. Only after people have differentiated, abstracted, and
assigned conventional meanings to specific traces can writing emerge.
14
The people of Yin refers to the later part of the Shang dynasty, also called
the Yin dynasty after 1401 B.C. King Wu of the Zhou established his reign in 1122
B.C., after defeating the Yin.
This is an important reminder of the arbitrary and conventional nature

of any system of signs. However, within the difference of arbitrariness
still lurks a resemblance, however slanted.
IV. Elephant Tropology
Monkey Cup carries the discussion of resemblance and difference around

the sinograph to surprising levels, but it is Zhangs 1998 novel Elephant
Tropes that proposes a logic of resemblance most forcefully. The nov-
els title,, references one of the recurrent topics of the text,
the quest for elephants and ivorytransposed here from a colonial
desire la Marlowe in Heart of Darkness to the leader of a group of
guerrilla communists. So we could translate the title as Elephant Herd
or Elephant Troops. However, it also actualizes another use of the char-
acter xiang (), that of resemblance. The title brings us squarely back
to the problem of the referent, as Elephant Tropes signifies a doubling
of reference in its very title: on the one hand, the novels content,
the incessant search for a herd of elephants and its ivory by Yu Jia-
tongs communist guerrilla forces who come to be known as elephant
troops; on the other, on its very title page, the novel also refers to
its own textual strategy of a differential gliding between comparable
signifiers. When I am translating the novels titleas Elephant
Tropes, my rendering captures only part of a complex prism of mean-
ing, even if, as I would like to suggest, we read an echo of troops
in the word tropes. With meaning herd or group and
signifying elephant, the novels title could be translated sloppily
as herd of elephants or elephant troops. For this reading to be cor-
rect, however, the two characters of the title would have to be reversed,
strictly speaking: . A certain flexibility in terms of the typo-
graphic order of titles in Chinese, however, as well as the repetition of
the word in the text ensures that the reader certainly also con-
siders this reading, while also identifying it as insufficient. At a second
glance, therefore, , has to be read differently, according to its sec-
ond meaningas an equivalent to and interchangeable with as
resemblance, shape, or image.15 A more literal translation,
15
Additionally, is also lexicalized as group portrait, which makes sense,
since the novel presents a kind of twisted portrait of the protagonists family. I thank
Eileen Chow for pointing this out to me.
192 andrea bachner
at the risk of omitting the titles beautiful ambiguity, would thus be

mass resemblances.16 Its paratext thus marks Zhangs novel as, above
all, a reflection on language, and more specifically, on writing.
On a metalevel, xiang also designates the resemblance operating
in the pictograph, which, called in Chinese, is literally a
graph that resembles a shape. In other words, Zhangs text and its
title hinge upon the gliding not only between different signifieds but
also between different levels of signification. One productive associa-
tion that the titles play with the graph calls to mind is a pas-
sage from(Han Feizi: Explanations of Antiquity):
, ,
, (As it was extremely rare to see a live elephant,
but people had obtained an elephants skeleton, they used its shape
to imagine a live one. This is why people call whatever they imag-
ine elephant/imagination).17 This passage provides an
explanation for the polysemic nature of . A translation from the
elephants skeleton to the elephants live form induces another trans-
position: the pictograph for elephant comes to stand in for the very
act of translation, also known as imagination. becomes a kind
of master signifier which, not unlike Jacques Lacans concept of the
phallus, operates its own gliding and displacement.
cannot ever create a stable link between referent, signified, and
signifier, not even in the form of a pictograph. The differential thrust
of , of a resemblance, is always at work. The myth concerning the
transposition of the graph to signify imagination also suggests
that the pictograph itself is an imagination-laden transcription parallel-
ing that of imagining a live elephant from its bones. The pictographic
connection between referent and written signifier is not direct and
automatic but also ruled by the arbitrariness of convention. Far from
a special case, the pictograph partakes of a differential, supplemental,
and excessive logic. Only if the pictograph is not exclusively tied to its
16
In her English translation of Zhangs most recent novel, the 2001
[In Memory of my South-Seas Sleeping Beauty (2001)], Valerie Jaf-
fee translates the novels title as Mass Appearances in her introduction. Though this is
another possible choice, I would prefer Mass Resemblances as a more literal transla-
tion for obvious interpretive reasons, even as I have opted for the slightly less literal
Elephant Tropes.
17
As quoted as the seventh signification under the entry , that is equivalent to
, imagination in the Hanyu da cidian (2003).
referent but is a written signifier motivated by convention can it signify

as a sign for, rather than an image of, something.
However, the very ideographic nature of Chinese writing and the
necessary process of relinking pictographs to different signifieds and
referents allows for a complex system of homographs, and thus for a
gliding of signifieds under, around, and with one graph as opposed
to a gliding chain of phonetic signifiers. In other words, while a pic-
tographic substratum denotes nothing less than a seamless mimesis
between referent and graph, it is also not of the order of pure differ-
ence. Rather, a graph turns out to be a linguistic site haunted equally
by different signifieds. Its supplemental life resembles Derridean
notions of criture, and yet its economy is not one of a lineareven
if recursivechain of marks, pre-marks, and re-marks. A multiplicity
of inscriptions marks the sinograph. When it signifies, it is always an
ambiguous poly-script.
V. Sinographic Translations
What kind of lessons do Zhangs two novels finally teach us readers

about the sinograph? I would claim that the learning experience is
staked upon an intricate interweaving of the levels of aesthetics and
intercultural politics. Both texts critically perform translationanother
meaning that resonates in the character and rewrite its power
matrix.18 Translation, as a broader concept of carrying across, of both
dis- and replacing, though always mediated by language, lies at the
heart of the different reflections on Chinese writing: the translation
involved in connecting a referent and a signifier, which is closely con-
nected to the analogy between the constellation referent/signifier and
the binary of nature/culture, unmarked ground/inscription; transla-
tion as a communication of cultural and ideological discourses from
the center (China) to the margins (Borneo); and as a metadiscourse
about other languages and scripts from the center (the West) to the
margins (the rest).
18
The authoritative dictionary of Chinese, the Hanyu da cidian(2003)
lists translation as the sixteenth acceptation of the character . From the outset
the dictionary entry references the[Book of Rites]translation is connected to
an officially sanctioned system of interstate communication. Fittingly for our context,
is more specifically connected to acts of translation with the south.
194 andrea bachner
Zhangs sinographic translations hinge upon challenging the bound-

aries between different media of representationssuch as writing, the
image, ornamentation, tattooingas well as the boundaries between
different cultural systems. In his texts, the sinograph thus partakes of
the realm of the uncanny, in which difference and similarity cease to
be distinct categories and object level and metalevel can no longer
be distinguished. The positioning of this reinvention of the sinograph
as uncanny in the Southern Ocean diaspora is especially apt, since,
for diasporic Chinese writers, the Chinese writing system is both the
inevitable basis for signification and something not totally theirs. The
in-between position of Malaysian-Chinese writers like Zhang Gui-
xing enables them to grasp their specific situation of desire and dispos-
session vis--vis the sinograph as its fundamental operational energy,
suppressed by both Sinocentric discourses of the scripts expression
of Chinese essence and Western theories of signification. That this
uncanny investment of the sinograph happens through a transposition
onto cultural Otherness is intriguing, but only since the Otherness of
that which is used as a cipher for the sinograph is staged in complex
terms:19 Dayak tattooing is traced back to the (equally alien) ritual of
Chinese prehistory; the Chinese archivein the form of Han Feiziis
connected to the exotic reality of Southern Ocean fauna. Between
difference and resemblance, the sinograph is translated, traduced, and
transformed.
References
(Hanyu da cidian). Beijing: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 2003.

Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound.
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1969.
Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Huang Jinshu (Kim Ng Chew).(Malaysian-Chinese Lit-
erature and Chineseness). Taibei: Yuanzun Wenhua, 1998.
19
Carlos Rojas essay in this volume analyzes a similar process of cultural transla-
tion through a discussion of Tibetan author Alai. Even though the diasporic position-
ality of Zhang Guixing is different from the internal diaspora of Alai, even though
the status of Chinese (in its complex constellation of sinograph, normative sinophone,
and other sinophones) is different in each specific context, both authors develop a
translational use of Chinese in different contexts of interlingual friction.
Joest, Wilhelm. Ttowiren: Narbenzeichen und Krperbemalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden
Ethnologie. Berlin: A. Asher, 1887.
Lin Jianguo . [Why Malaysian-Chinese Literature?]
InII: [A Sourcebook of Malaysian-Chinese Literature II: The
Tropics Response], ed. Chen Dawei, Zhong Yiwen, and Hu Jinlun. Taibei: Wanjuan
Lou, 2004, 332.
Lingis, Alphonso. Excesses: Eros and Culture. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1983.
Liu, James J. Y. Chinese Theories of Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1975.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987.
Saussy, Haun. Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China. Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press/Harvard University Asia Center, 2001.
Shih Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2007.
Wang, David Der-wei .[At
Home with Elephant Tropes and Simian Gangs: Zhang Guixings Malaysian-
Chinese Stories]. In Zhang Guixing, In Memory of My South-Seas Sleeping Beauty. Tai-
bei: Maitian, 2001, 938.
Zhang Guixing .[Elephant Tropes]. Taibei: Shibao Wenhua, 1998.
.[Monkey Cup]. Taibei: Lianhe Wenxue, 2000.
.[ Machete, Orchid, Revolver]. In[Child-
ren of Keshan], 175223. Taibei: Yuanliu, 1988.
.[Rogue Clan]. Taibei: Lianhe Wenxue, 1996.
CHINESE LITERATURE IN THE GLOBAL CANON:
THE QUEST FOR RECOGNITION
Julia Lovell
It seems logical that a global Chinese literature cannot exist without

reference to a global audience. The quest for recognition by a global
audience, it could further be argued, is central to the whole enter-
priseindeed, to the very inceptionof a modern Chinese literature.
The idea of constructing a modern Chinese culture grew in substan-
tial part out of a new sense (by intellectual elites of the late Qing and
early Republican period) of a world defined by Western nation-states
in which members of these same elites energetically sought a way
for China and Chinese national culture to stand up and be counted
internationally.1 In many of the manifestoes of key figures of modern
Chinese writing, a preoccupation with appealing to international
(in reality, Western) genres and readers stands out: in Liang Qichaos
influential writings about the need for Chinese writers to
emulate the Western political novel; in Chen Duxius 1917
plea, Pray, where is our Chinese Hugo, Zola, Goethe, Hauptmann,
Dickens or Wilde?; in Lu Xuns anxiety to import Western
influences into modern Chinese texts.2
But this nation-building impulseso key to the development of mod-
ern Sinophone writinghas often been implicitly contradicted by this
same literatures essentially international orientation. As Jing Tsu and
David Wang point out in their introduction to this volume, a modern,
1
For a detailed exploration of this idea, see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Poli-
tics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996).
2
For these references, see, for example, Liang Qichao, Foreword to the Pub-
lication of Political Novels, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature,
18931945, ed. Kirk Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 7173;
Chen Duxiu, Wenxue geming lun [On Literary Revolution], in Zhong-
guo xin wenxue daxi , ed. Zhao Jiabi (Shanghai: Liangyou,
19351936), 1:47; T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Movement in China
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 148. See also Lydia Lius comments
on this phenomenon in Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated
Modernity; China, 19001937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 188.
198 julia lovell
global Sinophone literature must be defined by its diasporic qualities:

by the mass of sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping, often very
flexible cultural identities that ethnically Chinese and Sinophone writ-
ers have established over the past century or so, with increasing num-
bers of contemporary writers (Hong Ying , Yang Lian , Gao
Xingjian , and Yan Geling , to name but four) moving
between different literary and cultural centers in both the West and the
Sinophone world. The diversity of the foregoing essays suggests that
perhaps the one tenable generalization we can make about a modern
Sinophone literature concerns its plurality.3
It is the built-in conflict between these two features of a global Sino-
phone literature that I would like to explore here. Frequently, the
inquiring cosmopolitanism that lies at the heart of modern Chinese
writing has morphed into an anxiety about who and what can claim
to speak for China to the international world. For many modern
mainland Chinese intellectuals, achieving international recognition
and parity with Western nations has been key for China to measure
up; representation of China on the modern global stage has there-
fore emerged as a highly sensitive issue. Even as Chinese diasporic cul-
tures have proliferated and flourished beyond the Chinese languages
locus of origin on the mainland, the close historical links between the
creation of a modern Chinese literature and the construction of a
Chinese nation have meant that the idea of Chinese-language litera-
ture somehow representing geographical China (to both Sinophone
and Western audiences) has continued, through the twentieth century
and beyond, to exercise a significant hold over Chinese writers and
critics, especially those based on the mainland.4
In short, the past and present variety of Sinophone literature has
existed in a state of tension with an ongoing anxiety among certain
literary intellectuals about how modern, globalized Sinophone voices
3
Parts of this essay are adapted from my earlier work, Gao Xingjian, the Nobel
Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000,
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002) and The Politics of Cultural Capi-
tal: Chinas Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2006). I am grateful to the publishers of both these works for permission to make use
of this material.
4
For further discussion of this enormous topic, see, for example, Fitzgerald, Awak-
ening China; Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Literary System (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000); Liu, Translingual Practice; Denton. ed., Modern Chinese
Literary Thought.
chinese literature in the global canon 199
relate back to China (the physical entity) and its inhabitants. This is a
concern that in some parts of the mainland literary scene particularly
intensified during the 1990s, following the emergence in the West of
a group of prominent dissident exiles who threatened a new rivalry
to the claim of mainland writers to represent China internationally,
thanks to their mainland background, their residence in the West, and
the media spotlight that focused on them after the political events of
1989.5
In this essay, I sketch out the course of post-Mao Chinas quest for
international literary recognition and how it has periodically clashed
with the vision of China popularized by books successful in the West,
by discussing one case study that seems to express many of the tensions
at the heart of Chinese literatures search for a place in the modern
world canon: the preoccupation in the post-Mao literary world with a
Chinese writer securing a Nobel Prize in Literature, and responses to
the first Sinophone winner of the prize (in 2000), Gao Xingjian. Since
the aim is to highlight the contradiction between a broad Sinophone
literary identity and a narrower anxiety among literary figures in post-
Mao China about the links between a global Sinophone literature and
China, I will particularly focus my discussion on mainland reactions
to Gaos prize.
On October 12, 2000, Gao Xingjian, a novelist and playwright born

in China, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Chinese
literatures century-long quest for this glory seemed finally to reach
an end. For years, mainland Chinese intellectuals and politicians had
expressed concern over when a Nobel would come to China, par-
ticularly since the mid-1980s, when its pursuit began to approximate
an official policy issue and Nobel anxiety evolved into a complex
(Nuobeier qingjie ) among writers, critics, and academics.
Post-Mao discussion of Chinas lack of a Nobel has far exceeded the
actual exchange value of the prize (a handshake with Swedish roy-
alty, a million dollars, and increased book sales, all for one individual
writer). The prize has been reinvented as a token whose authority as
imagined in China has been inflated out of all proportion to its real
international importance: in the minds of Chinese intellectuals, the
lack of a Nobel Prize has been conflated with the perception of larger
5
See Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital, especially 14452 for further discussion.
200 julia lovell
shortcomings in modern Chinese culture. The inferiority complex tied

up with Chinas Nobel syndrome is one symptom of modern Chinese
nation building, a function of intellectual desire across the past century
for international, particularly Western, recognition.
However, a Chinese writer had now been acclaimed for an oeuvre
of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has
opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama. Gaos work,
the Swedish Academy explained, was in touch with both Western
modernism and popular Chinese dramaa reassuring confluence of
the international influences that help define the novelty of twentieth-
century Chinese literature, and of the cultural longevities on which
Chinas national pride substantially rests.6 In theory, this was a perfect
recognition of the cosmopolitan, diasporic nature of modern, global
Sinophone writing: an award to an ethnically Chinese author who
writes in both Chinese and French, and is naturalized as a French
citizen.
Reactions to Gaos prize, however, immediately dispelled hopes of
a harmonious resolution to Chinese literatures international aspira-
tions. Rumors and imputations of politicization began to circulate in
both mainland China and the West, and throughout the global Chi-
nese community. The government in Beijing responded by denounc-
ing the political purposes of the Nobel, declaring the prize had lost
authority and calling Gao a French writer.7 Although pleased by
this recognition for writing in Chinese, many mainland authors were
ambivalent about the political significance of honoring an exile who,
at the time, was little known in China. Chinese people resident outside
the mainland, meanwhile, were delighted that Gao as a Chinese had
won, even though he had for some time wanted to disassociate himself
from China as a national concept and shown little interest in being
published or reaching readers there.
In Goethes ideal of World Literature, Gao Xingjians commen-
dation would have been feted as an award to an individual writer,
who happened to be born in China, for his achievements in both
6
Swedish Academy, Press Release: the Nobel Prize for Literature, October 12,
2000, at http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2000/press.html (accessed October
12, 2000).
7
See, for example, Xinhua, Nuobeier wenxuejiang bei yong yu zhengzhi mudi
shiqu quanweixing [The Nobel Litera-
ture Prize Has Been Used for Political Purposes and Has Lost Its Authority], Renmin
ribao, October 14, 2000, 2.
Chinese and French. Yet the context of recent Chinese history and
the marginal position occupied by modern Chinese literature in the
world literary economywhich is the contemporary approximation
of Goethes visionmade his prize an inevitably contentious political
issue.
I. Modern Chinese Writing in World Literature
Despite strenuous efforts on the part of Chinese politicians, critics, and

writers, along with Western translators (especially through the post-
Mao period), modern Sinophone literature has for decades struggled
to achieve mainstream recognition in the global canon as defined by
the publishing markets and institutions (such as literary review organs,
prizes, academic curricula) of the culturally dominant West. This can
be partly explained by an imperviousness among certain (especially
Anglophone) national audiences to translations: as of 2007, for exam-
ple, 27 percent and 13 percent respectively of books annually published
in France and Germany were translated; for Great Britain and the
United States, the figure was around 2 percent.8 The market share of
Chinese literature in English translation has long been dwarfed by that
of books about China by ethnically Chinese authors writing directly
in English.9 Aversion to reading translations, however, does not fully
explain the low status of Chinese literature. Translated fiction from
Japan (whose language and culture are historically as remote from the
West as those of China) has carved out a place for itself in literary pub-
lishing in the West. A number of modern Japanese authorsYukio
Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, Haruki Murakami,
and Banana Yoshimotohave become names recognizable to general
Western, and even Anglophone, readers.
It could additionally be argued that for much of the past half century
politicized assumptions lay at the base of lukewarm interest in modern
Chinese literature. At the start of the Cold War, as part of the broader
8
Richard Lea, Lost: Translation, The Guardian, November 16, 2007, http://
books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2212304,00.html (accessed
April 30, 2008).
9
Notable examples are Jung Changs best-selling Wild Swans (London: HarperCol-
lins, 1991) and Ha Jins Waiting (New York: Random House, 1999). This observation
holds significantly true also for French, bearing in mind the enormous, prize-winning
success of Dai Sijies Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress in France.
202 julia lovell
U.S. project of reinventing Japan as an unthreatening regional ally

against Communist China, the American publisher Knopf set about
marketing a picture of Japanthrough carefully selected and trans-
lated works of its modern fictionas a nonbellicose land of exotic
aestheticism, the very opposite of the countrys aggressive, jingoistic
prewar image.10 At around the same time, Maos bamboo curtain clat-
tered down around China, shutting off direct Western access to many
of its most interesting writers and tainting its modern literaturein
the eyes of the general Western publicwith the stigma of commu-
nism.11 To an Anglophone reading community, for example, already
timidly selective about reading translations, these two publishing and
teaching trends seem to have promoted a time-saving shorthand for
stereotyping both literatures: Chinese as at best a source of political
(preferably dissident) information on China, at worst as dully propa-
gandistic; Japanese as aesthetically humanist. As a result of this 1950s
initiative by big business publishing, modern and contemporary Japa-
nese fiction has acquired an audience in a country like Britain, while
for years Chinese literature played to a largely empty house. On one
instructive page of a major British review journal back in 2000, a
work of Japanese fiction was praised as a hymn to the resilience of
the human spirit, while the reviewer of a Chinese author, a couple
of column inches higher up, dismissed all mainland Chinas fiction as
socialist realisma style that ceased to represent the mainstream in
the countrys literary production around the mid-1980s.12
Sinophone fiction has, therefore, had to fight hard for a place in
Western, especially Anglophone, reading markets. In the past, liter-
ary translations were seldom published by prestigious commercial
houses in Britain or the United States able to afford generous public-
ity budgets. Translations have more often been picked up by academic
presses, ensuring that Chinese literature has tended to remain in a
scholarly, specialist corner. When translations have been produced by
commercial publishers, they have relatively rarely devoted the editorial
resources necessary to achieve the stylistic standards expected in works
10
For further details, see Edward Fowler, Rendering Words, Translating Cul-
tures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction, Journal of
Japanese Studies 18, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 144.
11
For more discussion, see Bonnie S. McDougall, Modern Chinese Literature and
Its Critics, in Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences (Hong Kong: The Chinese Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 1743.
12
See The Times Literary Supplement, May 11, 2001, 23.
written directly in English or even translated from other languages.

Until recently, in a kind of vicious publishing circle, large publish-
ers have been wary of producing modern Chinese literature because
it is little known, generally viewed as being of poor literary value,
and therefore unlikely to attract audiences. The lack of modern Chi-
nese fiction in easy-to-find editions from major presses, together with
the frequently lackluster quality of the language on the rare occasion
that a work has not been sidelined into academic publishing, appears
merely to have confirmed general readers and other editors in their
instincts that Chinas recent literature is something to which they
should remain oblivious.13
The significance of the Nobel Prize lies in the position it occupies
in the global imagination as a unique, and (it is assumed) authori-
tative institution of world literature (it is virtually the only inter-
national literary prize, certainly the most prestigious and lucrative).
In the Western-centric world literary economy, winning a Nobel still
represents an important route to renown for authors in non-European
languages. Yet while it is pledged to ignore national boundaries, the
prize has long been dominated by Western writers and languages. It
has veered confusingly between different criteria in different epochs,
including a Goethean coolness of plasticity, universal accessibility,
engaged writing, pioneering experimentalism, anticommercialism, and
ethnic marginalia.14 As modern Chinese intellectuals have striven to
define their aims and seek sources of recognition through a century
of bewildering political and cultural change, the task of clarifying the
concept of good literature has not been helped by regard for the
Nobel Prize. It is neither a bastion of pure or abstract literary
values nor a consistent arbitrator among literary styles and nations.
My analysis of the significance of Gao Xingjians prize focuses in
part on one curious aspect of the prizes historical practice. Since the
Second World War, the Nobel Committee has sought to satisfy Alfred
Nobels founding stipulation that Nobel winners should demonstrate
13
For expanded comment, see Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital, 2636. In the
last five years, this situation has slowly started to change, with growing numbers of
translations of recent Chinese fiction being published in English, and sometimes by
prominent presses. Consider, for example, the publication of authors such as Ma
Jian and Guo Xiaolu by Chatto & Windus, and of Jiang Rong and Zhu Wen by
Penguin.
14
See Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria Behind the
Choices (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991).
204 julia lovell
an idealistic tendency of striving to benefit all mankind, through

selecting oeuvres of universal validity, honoring the difficult writ-
ing of figures such as T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, and seeking a
universal artistic neutralism, unrestricted by the concrete social refer-
ence points of realism. The prize, committee member Kjell Espmark
has commented, is in the end not given to an attitude toward life, to
a set of cultural roots, or to the substance of a commitment; the Prize
has been rewarded so as to honour the unique artistic power by which
this human experience has been shaped into literature.15 But Nobel
winners from outside the Western tradition (the numbers of whom
have been growing over the last three decades), it should be pointed
out, have rarely been commended for their universal artistic value. It
is instead their links to national cultural roots that have been praised,
implying that non-Western literatures are insufficiently advanced to
be prized for their intrinsic artistic qualities and are valuable mainly
as sociopolitical documents, as national obsessions: compare the com-
mendation of Claude Simon (1985 laureate, France) for his descrip-
tion of the human condition with the acclamation of Naguib Mahfouz
(1987, Egypt) as spokesman for Arabic prose.
Gao Xingjians prize appears to buck this norm, due to the Swedish
Academys commendation of his universal validity and his publicly
voiced stance of political detachment from China. Yet the double-
standard treatment of Western and non-Western writers reemerges
even in the Swedish Academys appraisal of Gao Xingjian. The Nobel
complexs denouement in 2000 revealed persistent political and aes-
thetic inconsistencies in responses to Sinophone writing in the world
literary economy.
II. Gao Xingjian and the Nobel Prize in Literature 2000
The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Gao Xingjian seems a neat rebut-
tal of the narrowly nationalistic aspects of the Chinese Nobel complex
and the long-standing marginalization of China in world literature: an
open-handed, universalistic welcoming of modern Sinophone writing
into the international canon. Gao writes in Chinese, yet revels in his
marginality from China without, it seems, any desire to seek national
15
Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature, December 1999, http://www
.Nobel.se (accessed on January 20, 2000).
recognition or identity. Apart from a public outburst around 1989,

Gao has led a life of hardworking exile, far away, he claims, from the
buzz of expatriate activity.16 He has worked to cultivate a studied artis-
tic neutrality, laying claim to a truly universalistic range of options, in
which he can make free use of his Chinese cultural heritage, retain
his freedom of sociopolitical commentary, and speak out on what he
chooses. In exile, he has built up (particularly in continental Europe)
a following for his drama and fiction, generating an enthusiastic body
of critical work.17
The theoretical basis behind Gaos stance was set out in his 1996
collection of essays, Meiyou zhuyi (; No-ism), in which he
defines what he is and what he is not: no-ism is an individual, inde-
pendent position of positively engaging in doubt. No-ism approves
of individual choice, but it doesnt view the individual as supreme
being . . . its best to stand on the sidelines and not harbour wild dreams
of dominating the world.18 Gao advocates a cold literature (leng de
wenxue ), in which the writer is not a hero, a revolutionary,
or a sacrificial object, and has no responsibility for his readers and no
task as regards society. No-ism is the most basic condition of freedom
for the contemporary individual.19 He distances himself from mod-
ern Chinese intellectuals, blaming the overbearing predominance of
-isms and slogans for impoverishing modern Chinese literature. Flee-
ing from the motherland and leading a marginal existence as an artist
are the only means by which he can achieve his writerly ideal of cold
detachment: I express, I exist.20
Consonant with his stance of creative independence, Gaos reasons
for exile emphasized the artistic over the political. An artist who
wishes to express freely, he remarked on leaving China for Germany
in 1987, would not want to stay in this country unless he goes against
his conscience.21 The events of 1989 led to Taowang (; Fugitives
[1990]), a play about the massacre critical of both Communist Party
16
Gao Xingjian, interview by author, London, March 9, 2001.
17
See Kwok-kan Tam, Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong:
Chinese University Press, 2001) and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14 (Fall 2002)
for useful collections of critical and bibliographic essays on Gaos work.
18
Gao Xingjian, Meiyou zhuyi [No-ism] (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1996), 2.
19
Ibid., 4.
20
Gao Xingjian, Meiyou zhuyi, 21, 111.
21
Sy-ren Quah, The Theatre of Gao Xingjian: Experimentation Within the Chi-
nese Context and Towards New Modes of Representation, Ph.D. diss., University
of Cambridge, 1999, 14.
206 julia lovell
brutality and the protesters radicalism. Gaos dramas of the 1990s

including Sheng si zhi jie (; Between Life and Death [1991]), Duihua
yu fanjie (; Dialogue and Rebuttal [1992]), and Yeyou shen
(; The Nocturnal Wanderer [1993])have been resolutely experi-
mental, addressing the fragmentation and insufficiency of the human
self.22 The settings are unspecified and the protagonists remain name-
less, leaving them open to interpretation as universal types (Man,
Woman, Girl, Prostitute). He makes frequent use of symbolic
devices and stylized dream sequences that break down the barriers
between internal and external realities. In life, rhetoric, and dramatic
art, Gao has striven to live up to the demanding, universalistic mani-
festo of Meiyou zhuyi. Henry Zhaoa leading Anglophone interpreter
of Gaos workmakes an impassioned case for the originality of Gaos
modern Zen theatre within world drama. Gaos work, he argues,
has broken with the anxiety of influence in world literature that holds
Chinese (along with much other non-Western) literature to be either
derivative of Western models or exotically politicized marginalia, and
has injected a fresh aesthetic into jaded Postmodern Theatre.23
Zhaos emphatic treatment of this question (he devotes the entire
final chapter of his book on Gaos drama to discussing it) highlights a
recurring problem in the reception of Chinese literature in the West:
its denigration for lacking international artistic value independent of its
nationally specific, sociopolitical exotica.24 Awarding the prize to Gao,
this cosmopolitan Sinophone exile who has broken with the obsession
with China, for his universal validity appears to break from this pat-
tern of reception, acclaiming his artistic originality as detached from
his marginal value as a Chinese dissident. A deeper probing of the
implications of Gaos commendation, however, reveals that his Nobel
Prize does not so easily resolve established, Western-centric inequali-
ties in the international treatment of modern Chinese literature.
Analyzed geographically, awarding the prize to Gaoa bilingual
French citizenreplicates a long-standing Western bias toward Chi-
nese writers who have migrated toward the actual centers (in Europe
22
For Gaos postexile work, see Gao Xingjian xiju liuzhong [Six Plays
by Gao Xingjian] (Taipei: Dijiao, 1996); The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, trans. Gil-
bert C. F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000).
23
Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experi-
mentalism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000), 20714.
24
See further discussion in, for example, Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital,
3236.
or the United States) of world literature. Compare, for example, the

international presence of a bilingual, U.S.-based author such as Ha
Jinwhose work in the past decade has scooped up two Pen/Faulkner
Awardswith the lesser stature of peers who have remained in China
and relied on translation to reach Western readerships. Even Mo Yan
, the most prolifically translated serious Sinophone writer (resi-
dent in Beijing), cannot remotely rival Ha Jins international reputa-
tion. Contrast the respectable though restrained British reception of
Guo Xiaolus more literary Village of Stone (translated from the Chi-
nese) with the wild popular acclaim of her chick-lit romance A Concise
Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (written directly in English).
It is, of course, not merely residence in the West and bilingual-
ism that enable a Chinese author to find international readers. The
notable failure of Eileen Chang (, 192195)an undisputed
literary star since the 1940s in Sinophone reading communities, and
able to translate her own works into Englishto relocate her Chinese
literary celebrity into Anglophone reading markets after moving to
America in the 1950s is a case in point. Achieving a reputation outside
China depends also on a writers ability to embrace the particularities
of a new cultural environment. In the case of Gao, his success has been
generated not only by his own talents but also by his endorsement of
the national literary values of his adopted country, France.
Pascale Casanova has eloquently detailed the concealed hierarchies
of the supposedly universalistic modern world republic of letters,
drawing particular attention to how the French language and Paris
have projected their centrality in this theoretically global literary
space. As the idea of a world literature has grown up over the past
few centuries, Paris developed into the institutions universal bank of
foreign exchange and commerce.25 The French made their national
European vernacular the first to declare war on the sacred authority
of Latin and assert itself as an international language of diplomacy,
high society, and literature: through centralizing literary and linguis-
tic institutions and promoting the legitimacy of the vulgar language
from the sixteenth century onward. Casanova notes with particular
interest the way French literary and linguistic values were successfully
projected not as a form of partisan national domination, but rather as
25
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 24.
208 julia lovell
the universal language of artistic cosmopolitanism. Paris established

itself as a denationalized and universal capital of the literary world,
ingeniously concealing the national cultural biases hedged within its
projection of the cosmopolitan ideal of world literature.26 France
and the French language to a significant degree have preserved their
international authority through the twentieth century, envisioning and
occupying the center of a new modern world literary space, a nexus
of authority from which writers from all over the worldIreland ( Joyce
and Beckett), Russia (Nabokov), Scandinavia (Ibsen), Czechoslovakia
(Kafka, Kundera), South America (Daro, Mistral ), North America
(Faulkner)have gained international validation, either by writing
directly in or being translated into French.
True enough, the high culture luster of French literary values
has been notably challenged in recent decades by the multinational
dominance of big-business Anglophone publishing consortia. Yet it is
possible to say that, particularly within continental Europethe broad
community in which a supposedly global institution such as the Nobel
Prize is firmly rootedFrench literary culture still carries a prestige
to which foreign writers can actively subscribe to bolster their own
artistic stature. There is, furthermore, no exact equivalent to this ethos
in the literary cultures of Anglophone territories such as the United
States or Great Britain.
Gao Xingjians success in his adopted country and across conti-
nental Europe (where he was much better known before 2000 than
in Britain or the United States) has been to a degree assisted by his
uncritical acceptance of Frances aspirations to represent a world capi-
tal of artistic freedom. In 1998, the influential French broadsheet Le
Monde published a 2,000word essay by Gao entitled My France
the Spirit of Freedom (Lesprit de libert, ma France) that fulsomely rein-
forced the countrys universalistic cultural self-image.
When I was barely fifteen, I had a dream that . . . drew me out of the
darkness of adolescence. I was sleeping with a marble woman, coldly
beautiful . . . losing myself in an exuberant freedom, even while I lived
under the red curtain of the New China. It was just after having
read La Venus dIlle, an anthology of Mrimes short fiction. . . . This
decadent, very French freedom . . . led me finally into political exile
in France.
26
Ibid., 34.
Gao went on to describe falling in love, around the age of seventeen,

with a memoir of Bohemian artistic life in 1920s Paris. My dream has
now become reality. . . . This individual . . . freedom still exists, and I
rejoice in it . . . I dont feel a stranger in France. . . . Every time I leave
Roissy airport, back from travels abroad, and hear French on the radio
in the taxi, this language that everyone speaks with a velvety vibrato in
the voice, gently singing its syllables, I feel relaxedas if I am already
home. Describing the process by which he became a Francophone
author and a French citizen, his essay celebrates an absurdly clichd,
Left Bank vision of Paris as the capital of poetry and romance (poetry
is everywhere in Paris, under its often grey sky, or drizzle, in its diverse
luminosities)always starkly contrasted with the authoritarian miser-
ies of China.27 The only works of mine that have a true value have
been written or finished in this country. . . . Where is my country? In
this spirit of freedom that unites humanity, that is the soul of France,
and that I will embrace forever.28
Never mind that Gao Xingjians roseate vision of this harmoniously
cosmopolitan, freedom-loving republic of letters seems to bear little
contemporary resemblance to the France that surrounds him. In 2006,
the suburb in which he lived, Bagnolet, was the center of the most
serious protest and rioting France had experienced since the dem-
onstrations of 1968, generated by escalating ethnic tensions between
old, white France and its communities of non-Caucasian (particularly
Muslim) immigrants. What is worth noting is that this paeanwritten
years before his Nobel Prize further boosted his national reputation in
Francewas published in the countrys major national broadsheet; for
all the insularity of British literary culture, it is hard to imagine an Eng-
lish newspaper giving this much space to such a hymn to the libertarian
intellectual paradise of London. French literary culture seems to project
an earnest sense of its own universal artistic centrality that has no pre-
cise counterpart in Anglophone territories. In tracing out the process
by which the Nobel Committee elected to honor Gao, we should not
overlook the fact of his residency in France (with its particular cachet
27
A country that, in the decade immediately following Gaos departure in 1988,
has itself acquired its own abundant and often thriving population of floating Bohe-
mian avant-garde filmmakers, artists, writers.
28
Gao Xingjian, Lesprit de libert, ma France, Le Monde, August 20, 1998. My
translation.
210 julia lovell
in the modern world republic of letters) and concerted endorsement of

its set of universalisticin reality nationalartistic pretensions.
When considering the implications of the Swedish Academys selec-
tion of Gaos universal oeuvre, it also seems odd that mention of his
achievements in existentialist, nonreferential avant-garde drama occu-
pied only one quarter of the press release announcing his laureateship
on October 12, 2000. The rest was devoted to his two strongly auto-
biographical novels set predominantly in China, Lingshan and
Yi ge ren de shengjing (; One Mans Bible [1999]), and to his
play with the most specific political setting, Taowang.29 Is it perhaps
the case that despite the Swedish Academys multicultural welcoming
of the Chinese-born Gao into the global fold of literary modernity,
the academy has disguised a traditionalist Western view of Chinese
literature as obsession with China with praise of his universal valid-
ity (a description that is, arguably, far more obviously applicable to
his drama)? Do Gaos novels depict an acceptably dissident vision of
Chinese politics that the judges of world literature found lacking in
his drama, and thus fulfill the long-established requirement that mar-
ginal literatures should be in some way nationally representative to
win a Nobel Prize?
In theoretical terms, Gaos novels continue the aesthetic concerns
and modernist schema of his drama and essays. Both pick up on
devices and themes from Gaos plays: most notably the disorienting
and alienating use of personal pronouns; the search for consciousness
and for definition of the self; and confusion and skepticism about what
constitutes reality, history, and memory. Toward the end of Lingshan,
for example, Gao inserts a self-mocking dialogue between the author
and an imagined critic: This isnt a novel! . . . This is modernist,
its imitating the West but falling short. . . . Youve slapped together
travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoreti-
cal discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added
some legend-like nonsense of your own invention, and are calling it
fiction!30 Thus described, the novel sounds like a reassuringly open-
ended mix of myth and fact, past and present, supernatural and natu-
ral. The narrative voice moves between pronouns (I, you, she,
29
Gao Xingjian, Yi ge ren de shengjing (Taipei: Lianjing, 1999).
30
Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2000),
45253. Numbers in parentheses in this section on Lingshan refer to pages in this
edition.
he) that function as extensions of a fractured subjectivity used to

alleviate the narrators loneliness and restore the completeness of his
being, while the author ponders the perils of modernity, environmen-
tal degradation, the horrors of political repression and collectivism,
and the alienated individual.
Despite these innovations, however, both Lingshan and Yi ge ren de
shengjing fail to achieve the open-ended skepticism characteristic of
Gaos plays. The principal difficulty lies in the tone and presence of
the narrator(s). In Gaos drama, the portentousness of the questions
raised in dialogue is undermined by their stylized, performed qual-
ity. In his fiction, the strongly autobiographical elements combined
with the ponderous quality of the linking prose give his message a
fixedness that is a long way from the detachment that he advocates
elsewhere. The Nobel Committee called Gao a perspicacious scep-
tic, but romanticism conquers skepticism in Lingshan and Gaos voice
can sound baldly nave. I am perpetually searching for meaning, but
what in fact is meaning? (308). He seems torn between persecuted
marginality and heroism, as both a refugee from birth (381) and
a speaker of truths who suffers for his sincerity. Its because of this
damn portraying the truth that misfortune has befallen me and I have
fled here (384).
This romanticism undermines the claims to neutrality Gao puts for-
ward in Meiyou zhuyi, setting up a self-supporting opposition between the
national political center and the dissident, marginal hero. Lingshan firmly
reinstates a literary obsession with China from which Gao has pro-
claimed his detachment. He seems to be celebrating and attempting to
reassert the vigor of his truth-telling narrator, an impression strength-
ened by his protagonists affirmation of potency through frequent sex-
ual conquests. Gao the dramatist and theorist emphatically proclaims
detachment from the nation, and from the desire for national recogni-
tion. Gao the (Nobel Prize-winning) novelist valorizes the heroic indi-
vidual living in (oppositional ) symbiosis with the nation-state. Lingshan
thus begins to edge toward Gaos dissident version of obsession with
China, in his politicized meditations on escape from politically and
environmentally contaminated Beijing. The narrator travels on the
margins of society to evade political persecution, while Communist
officials are villains who ruin a good Daoist ritual (298). The message
of the novel polarizes the beleaguered but all-important self and the
repressive regime, rather than attempting the disinterested criticism
of belief systems in Gaos other politically informed work, Taowang.
212 julia lovell
(These points can be reiterated concerning Gaos 1999 novel Yi ge

ren de shengjing, another semiautobiographical account of Gaos experi-
ences under the Communist regime, interleaved with episodes [gen-
erally sexual] from exile, where Gaos romantic individualism again
reduces the central thrust of the novel to that of the individual self
battling political oppressors.)31
Praise for the universal validity of Gao Xingjians metaphysical
dramatic experiments seems reasonable enough. But by specifically
commending his two novels rather than mentioning by name any of
his dramas other than the sociopolitically specific Taowang, the Swed-
ish Academy is maintaining an old link between Sinophone literature
and (one version of ) a national obsession with China. The academys
praise conveys a backhanded compliment as it admits a Chinese writer
to world literature: universal validity in Chinese literature seems still
to return to obsession with China, as exemplified by the romantic
tendencies in Gaos fiction.
Though a positive gesture toward an individual writer and toward
Sinophone writing in general, then, the choice of Gao Xingjian (inevi-
tably) did not resolve the tensions raised over preceding decades by
modern Sinophone literatures quest for a place in the global canon.
And in certain parts of the mainland Chinese literary scene, percep-
tion of the biases apparent in the Swedish Academys honoring of Gao
stimulated an equal and opposite reaction of nationalistic sensitivity,
exposing the insecurities and uncertainties indigenous to this search
for recognition.
III. Conclusion: The View from China
Although there was no question of broader intellectual support for the

narrow party-state nationalism apparent in the official condemnation of
Gaos prize, and although a good number of intellectuals instinctively
responded with delight that writing in Chinese had received global
recognition, this jubilation was tinged with a certain bemusement
that Gaos name was so unfamiliar; few people in mainland China
had read the works for which he was given the prize at the time the
Nobel announcement was made. Commentators immediately began
31
See Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital, 16971 for more details.
to puzzle over what to call him, defining him variously as a Chi-

nese writer in inverted commas, foreign literature worker, exiled
writer, French writer, and so on.32 The fact of Gaos residence in
the West was quickly seized upon by skeptical commentators: This
prize reveals the Nobel Committees unchanging Eurocentric posi-
tion, remarked the critic Dai Jinhua . They very probably
believe that only a writer whos lived for such a long time in France
could blaze a new path for Chinese literature.33
Some of the most negative responses came from members of a
loose grouping of avant-garde poetsincluding Ouyang Jianghe
and Tang Xiaodu who at the time represented
the most internationalist sector of the mainland literary scene, and
who criticized the choice on a miscellany of geographic, literary, and
linguistic grounds. To such writers, nurtured in the elitist, cosmopol-
itan atmosphere of the 1980s, the Nobel Prize and its consecrated
authors continued to represent, up to 2000 at least, a shrine to literary
purity, an ideal of autonomous literature projected onto the West-
ern tradition, towering above the commercial free-for-all that Chinas
contemporary literary scene became in the 1990s.34 The Nobel repre-
sented the last imagined center of universal authority from which they
could seek international recognition. The Nobel Committees choice
of Gao Xingjiana selection vulnerable to accusations of politico-
cultural partialityseems finally to have destroyed such illusions. The
first complaint made was of tokenism: that the Nobel Committee had,
in Ouyang Jianghes words, begun to feel obliged to give the prize
to someone Chinese. So it wasnt a breakthrough for pure literature:
there were cultural, social, political factors at work. Yet even as Ouy-
ang bemoaned the apparent impure political bias in the Nobel judg-
ment, he complained that Gao was insufficiently representative of
post-Mao Chinese writing; if the Nobel Committee was determined
to give a prize to China, he believed, they should have given it to Bei
Dao (, b. 1949), whom he regarded as the most influential repre-
sentative of the post-Mao breakthrough in literary expression.35 One
imagines that whomever the Nobel Committee chose would have been
32
See Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital, 17183.
33
Dai Jinhua, interview by author, Beijing, March 26, 2001.
34
See, for example, Michelle Yeh, The Cult of Poetry in Contemporary China,
The Journal of Asian Studies 55 (February 1996): 53.
35
Ouyang Jianghe, interview by author, Beijing, March 24, 2001.
214 julia lovell
carped at for being insufficiently representative of Chinaa reflection

of the heavy, and unrealizable, responsibility heaped on the shoulders
of modern Chinese literature over the past century to speak out glob-
ally for the national polity.
Ouyangs criticism of Gaos works quickly morphed into an acute
sense of nationalistic copyright over the representation of China in
contemporary global culture. In his response to Gaos prize, Ouy-
ang fixed particularly upon the works cited by the Swedish Academy
in the press release about the awardLingshan, Yi ge ren de shengjing,
and Taowangall of which, as shown above, take a particular political
stance on China, tying the country to images of the Cultural Revolu-
tion and Tiananmen. By focusing on the dissident aspects of an exiles
oeuvre, he argued, the Nobel Committee was showing itself to be in
the grip of a Western superiority complex called the China mirage
(Zhongguo huanxiang ):
Westerners like to show sympathy towards the weak, the unfortunate:
people who live in China, under a dictatorship. . . . If Gao Xingjian was
just one of them, they wouldnt have given him a prize. . . . Chinese
literati who go to the West discover its advantageous to them to turn
China into a mirage or fantasy, something to be pitied. . . . Now, it seems,
to be successful Chinese writers have to write about a Chinese reality
defined by the West: the China mirage, sympathy for China, criticism of
dictatorshiponly rotten, corrupt things. Chinese reality isnt like that
anymore, thats the China of the past. . . . Is this really a prize for Chinese
literature? Or is it a prize for the political things that Westerners like to
read about China?36
The tenor of Ouyangs complaint highlights ongoing anxieties on the
part of Chinese writers about the creation of a national literature, its
relationship to the national reality, and an imagined international
(largely Western) readership. The fact that the first Sinophone Nobel
Prize went to a writer practically unconnected with contemporary
China brought out in such mainland authors (writing in the wake of a
realist tradition firmly entrenched by the dominant cultural national-
ism of May Fourth thought) an urgent commitment to a literature that
depicts the here-and-now of rapidly changing life around them, rather
than looking backward to a gloomy past. At the same time, however,
mainland critics from the 1990s onward have regularly berated con-
36
Ibid.
temporary Chinese writing for its superficiality, and for its failure to
plumb the depths of experience in China.37 Poets such as Ouyang
Jianghe, who lambasted Gao for his lack of relevance to contempo-
rary Chinese reality, have equally been criticized within China for
aspiring to write an opaque, difficult poetry apparently cut loose from
national, sociopolitical coordinates. Of all writers, poets have the least
influence on society, Dai Jinhua remarked in 2001. Contemporary
poets hallucinate that they can write as independent artists, with no
relation to China.38 Ouyangs complaints about Gaos prizewhich
express, on the one hand, an attachment to a global literary ideal, and
on the other hand, an obsession with Chinaexpose an ongoing
confusion about the purposes of Chinese writing today. Such writers
have been anxious for international recognition both as creative agents
and as acute chroniclers of contemporary Chinasignaling a continu-
ing, uncomfortable standoff in contemporary Chinese literature among
individual creativity, a sense of national responsibility, and regard for
(an inevitably partial ) foreign acknowledgment.
The only way out of this quagmire, naturally, is for mainland Chinese
writers to remain clear-sightedly skeptical about the sources of author-
ity and recognition in both China and the West for which they have
yearned. Literary intellectuals need to reconsider the hopes they have
invested in the dream of Chinese culture recovering lost glory through
external acknowledgment, in the neutrality of modern global orga-
nizations, and in the feasibility of their role as international cultural
ambassadors. And contemporary China in recent years has offered
plenty of evidence for the emergence of this newly detached mode
of thinking. Even the aggrieved Ouyang Jianghe admitted that other
Chinese writers reported the Nobel Prize 2000 made them realize for
the first time that the Nobel literature prize was a lottery . . . that Gao
Xingjian is like the buyer of a winning lottery ticket. . . . They take this
political game, cultural game, racial game, put them all together and
Gao Xingjian wins the prize.39 Its ridiculous to criticize the Swed-
ish Academy for lacking fairness or authority, one well-known writer
(who asked to remain anonymous) observed, because that would be
tantamount to acknowledging the Swedish Academy has the power
37
See, for example, comments reported in Lovell, The Politics, 155.
38
Dai, interview.
39
Ouyang, interview.
216 julia lovell
and the ability to make judgments over the literature of the whole
worldsurely thats impossible?
Particularly since the 1990s, as serious literature was increasingly
marginalized by the commercial free-for-all of the market economy,
writers focused their attention away from foreign sources of prestige
and toward mainland readers. For the younger generation of writers
starting with the New Generation (xin shengdai ) who emerged
during the 1990sthe deflation of Chinas Nobel complex in 2000
represented a curious cultural phenomenon well detached from their
lives: Theres no general reaction in Chinese writers, no envy because
of the money, no jealousy because we think we write better, the nov-
elist Li Feng remarked.
Gao Xingjians prize has more individual significance than anything
else. The society of such a big country as China has its own natural
direction . . . if China is a river, Gao is a different river, maybe a very
beautiful one, but one that we can only pass by. . . . I worry about how to
be a writer in China. [Chinese] writers abroad cant have much value in
China, because although they seem powerful overseas, they dont under-
stand much of whats going on inside the mainland. As a writer, the
greatest honor is to be acknowledged by your own people . . . to exercise
influence and provoke discussion among them.40
Even as, since the late 1990s, contemporary Chinese literature seems
to have become increasingly globalizedwith those who left in the
late 1980s traveling back and forth between China and the West (for
example Duo Duo , b. 1951, and Yang Lian, b. 1955), and with
slowly growing numbers of translations of contemporary Chinese writ-
ing published in the Westthe mainland Chinese writing and reading
market retains its own powerful national logic and tastes, highly distinct
from those of Western reading communities. China, obviously enough,
represents for contemporary Chinese authors a vast and primary audi-
ence, with preferences for literary and commercial genres and styles
thatfor the most partare unconcerned about their ability, or lack
thereof, to translate into Western languages. While Chinese authors
(like writers everywhere) have a natural strong interest in selling their
books abroad, the speed at which cultural fashions succeed each other,
the marginalization of serious literature, and the frequent ephemeral
brevity of print runs in contemporary China have firmly concentrated
many on the question of domestic sales. This Nobel Prize wont have
40
Li Feng, interview by author, Beijing, April 23, 2001.
any impact on ordinary people, declared Li Feng. A million dollars

isnt that much money in China now.41
For at least a few months after October 12, 2000, then, Chinese literary
intellectuals seemed willing to prioritize domestic concerns over the
hazy Swedish arbitrations of world literature, leaving the Nobel Prize
to its own business. But it would be rash to assume that long-cherished
hopes for a Nobel literature laureate resident on the mainland perma-
nently disappeared: in 2001, for example, Wenhua yishu chubanshe
(Art and Culture Press) launched a series of antholo-
gies of works by leading post-Mao mainland authors, such as Yu Hua
and Mo Yan, under the collective title Marching Toward a Nobel (Zou
xiang Nuobeier ); in October 2009, China Daily commissioned
a new article on Chinas ongoing Nobel literature prize anxieties.42
Throughout the post-Mao period, mainland Chinas Nobel complex
(and its denouement in 2000) has highlighted the nationalistic tensions
in the theoretically cosmopolitan projects of both world literature and
constructing a modern, global Sinophone literature, tensions that,
despite the much publicized rise of China, show little sign of perma-
nently disappearing while Chinese literature in translation (relative to
writing about China in Western languages) struggles to find a place in
the Western-dominated world literary economy. Even as writers have
traveled far from the mainland, the idea of China (the nation-state) has
remained a powerful influence on their careers: either in their literary
imaginations or in the expectations of Chinese and Western literary
intellectuals and readers. At the same time, though, the fact that dis-
cussion about the Nobel complex and about how China should be
represented in the global canon has persisted and regularly provoked
heated debate underscores how passionately contested the idea of a
Sinophone literature has been over the past century. That so much
attention has been paid to external sources of valuation indicates con-
tinued uncertainty on the part of Chinese writers as to their aims and
audience, caught as they have been between cosmopolitan yearnings
and anxiety about their role in shaping Chinas own culture. In short,
Chinese literatures Nobel complex and its quest for recognition help
reveal the pressure points in a modern literary identity not entirely
sure of itself.
41
Ibid.
42
Personal communication with China Daily journalist, October 2009.
COMMENTARY:
ON THE SAINIFENG AS A GLOBAL
LITERARY PRACTICE
Eric Hayot
It is one measure of the status of the debate on global Chinese lit-

erature that at an otherwise lovely dinner earlier this year, I listened
to a senior scholar of Chinese literature tell the rest of the table that
Shu-mei Shihs recent arguments about the history of the Sinophone
should be considered in light of the fact that Shih grew up mostly
in South Korea and Taiwan, and that therefore she wasnt really
Chinese.
That people occasionally say such stupid things should come as no
surprise to anyone who has ever attended a dinner party, even if,
as I am told, they are not very much like revolutions. Nor should it
come as much of a surprise to anyone in Chinese studies, since one
of the fields ongoing features is active and public conversation about
genetic and political authenticity, about the possible grounds for being
or counting as Chinese, and about the distribution of the right to speak
for or as Chinese across ethnic, cultural, and epistemological boundar-
ies. Though other fields of cultural and literary study have also been
touched by debates revolving around the kinds of subject positions
authorized to generate knowledge of a topiccan men speak as femi-
nists, or for feminism? Algerian Jews for or as French?the scope of
such discourse in Chinese studies is, in my experience, uniquely exten-
sive, including a wide range of possibilities ranging from the patently
biological to the purely idealized, and public, taking place in open
scholarly debate and critique. Consider how difficult it would be to
explain the field to a stranger without touching on the political and
methodological differences between scholars trained inside or outside
of the Peoples Republic, the importance of the arguments around
cultural China to diasporic literary and scholarly production, or
the political, economic, ethnic, linguistic, and national relationships
between ethnically or linguistically Chinese communities in such places
as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the Peoples Republic,
or the United States. That is why, when one scholar attacks anothers
ideas by noting, casually, that she is not really Chinese, my frustration
220 eric hayot
and disgust is accompanied by a strange sense of nostalgia, of being

very much at home: at that dinner I felt right in the middle of what it
means to be thinking about Chinese studies, and China, today.
The dinner party thus reminds me that the emergence of the
category of the Sinophone in the American academyand of the
Sinophones various cognates and alternatives, in English and Chi-
nesehas as much to do with ongoing political tensions around the
centrality of mainland China to authentic Chineseness as with any-
thing else. These tensions are in play when we debate the meaning
of the concept: whether the Sinophone is, as Shih has argued, an
explicitly minoritarian literature, referring only to those texts produced
in Sinitic languages beyond the mainland, or, if produced inside it,
then on its margins (and thus largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-
century phenomenon), or whether it should include and indeed sub-
sume the literature of the Peoples Republic into a far longer, far more
geographically variegated tradition that stretches back to the earliest
development of Sinitic writing systems (in effect reconceiving the entire
history of what would formerly be known as Chinese literature in
terms of a topography unusually sensitive to differences in region, dia-
lect, movement, and sociospatial relations of all types).
A completely new Chinese literature, or an aesthetico-political
antagonism to the old one: my dinner companion read the latter as
an affront, since it suggests, given the contemporary valuation of the
minor in the American academy, that the vanguardist value in Chinese
literary studies going forward will inevitably be foreign to the Chinese
center. And he took the former, generously, as a potentially welcome
complement to existing mainland literary history, assuming, to be sure,
that such a complement would never supplant the established central-
ity of the mainland as the root and origin of real Chineseness.
Which is to say that he did not like the Sinophone at all, or that
if he liked it, it was only because he misunderstood it. Because the
force of the suggestion that the Sinophone includes the center (i.e.,
mainland literature written in a perfectly standard Chinese) lies not
in its accommodation of existing literary history but in its threat to
rewrite that history virally, from the inside, and thus to undermine
the entire apparatus of the national literary paradigm. From this per-
spective the differences between these two potential articulations of
Sinophony matter less than their resemblance, which stems from the
exorbitant ambitions of their collective attackand it is an attackon
the centrality of the concept China.
commentary: on the sainifeng 221
With the word China we have one of those useful situations in

which the translation so awkwardly and awfully renders its equivalents
in the original that it verges on revelation. The meanings of China
in English collapse all of the complexity articulated by the difference
between Hua and Zhong (not to mention Han or Xia )
whose historical valences and referents challenge the most assiduous
makers of dictionaries.1 The word China thus, far more egregiously
than its Chinese-language counterparts, reminds us how strongly the
concept China (however one writes it, or refers to it, in Chinese)
generates its motive force from the presumption of continuity it cre-
ates. That continuity authorizes the entire historiographical apparatus
sustaining humanistic and social scientific research on China, as well
as the various modes of its cultural and political (self-)production, of
which literature constitutes but a particularly resonant instance. Like
all national names, China helps people who have many things in
common forget the things that would, if remembered, divide them.2
And so, regardless of how exactly one defines the term Sinophone,
its substitution for Chinese in Chinese literature willmerely by
virtue of its not referring to an identifiable or singular nation-state
dismantle the hegemonic focus of a national Chinese literature and
perhaps of a national literature at all, as David Wang and Jing Tsu
note in their introduction to this book (8).3 In this way the importance
1
But quickly: Hua refers largely to a cultural tradition; Zhong to a national one; Han
to an ethnic group; and Xia, the name of the first Chinese dynasty, for long periods of
time in Chinese history to the cultural tradition believed to originate in that particular
political formation. Each of them thus coincides with what one might mean when
referring, in English, to China.
2
Joseph Ernest Renan: Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have
many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French
citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every
French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the mas-
sacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families
in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would
anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances which
are liable to disrupt any genealogical system (Quest-ce quune nation? [Paris: Michel
Lvy Frres, 1882], 9).
3
Let us note in passing that in Chinese this terminological shift feels substantially
less dramatic, since the word , so crucial to the production of the terms that we
now can translate as Sinophone, is already widely in circulation as a dialectical
support for the national . This is so even in the Chinese names for the Peoples
Republic of China and the Republic of China, where China, invisibly to those who
do not have some Chinese, refers specifically to the cultural tradition that precedes
and sustains the founding of the nation-state. So the nation, like all nations, lays claim
to its origins in a folk.
222 eric hayot
of the debate around Sinophone is radically different from the

potential impact on Chinese literary studies of the terms that have
preceded it: unlike overseas or diasporic Chinese literature, or Chinese
Malaysian or Malaysian Chinese literature, each of which locates the
specificity of its address explicitly outside the national norm established
by the Peoples Republic, the Sinophonefar more than even global
Chinese literaturethreatens to upend the stability of the center,
rather than simply reproduce and valorize a form of marginality that
relies on it.
This collection appears precisely in the incipience opened by that
debate, whose possibilities may yet develop. What everyone in this
book does agree on is the importance of resisting the hegemonic focus
of a national Chinese literature. But the authors here adopt quite
different positions with respect to the relation between traditionally
conceived Chinese literature and the field of play potentially addressed
by the Sinophone. Tee Kim Tong, for instance, justifies his proposed
use of xinxing huawen wenxue , new Chinese literatures,
by noting that it too resists the co-optation of the diasporic and bor-
der voices into the China-centric dominant institution under the rubric
of overseas or world Chinese literature (105). Tracing the origins of
the Sinophone and its homonyms back to the concept of a Chinese lit-
erary commonwealth, articulated at a conference in West Germany
in 1986, Tee proposes thinking of multiple Sinophonic centers out-
side the mainland, arguing that each Sinophone literature works in
its own field/system within various environments, which differ along
geographic, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and national lines (104).4
Though new Chinese literatures is not among the choices Sau-
ling C. Wong considers in her wide-ranging look at the nomenclature
of the Sinophone, Tees use of huawen to describe the wenxue
is well in line with her preferences on that particular matter, and in
keeping with the general resistance to China-centrism of the volume
as a whole. The alternative to , as Wong notes, has tradition-
ally been huaren (Chinese in the sense of person), which as a
4
The polysystem Tee describes, precisely because of its use of the term new
(modeled on the current use of new English literatures), keeps the center from swal-
lowing the margins, but at what cost? That the novelty here is associated entirely with
the diasporic grants the very centrality of the mainland (as primary in relation to the
secondary, as permanent in relation to the temporary; as old compared to the new)
at precisely the moment it attempts to combat it.
modifier for the term literature designates the field of ethnic-nation-

alist contestation sustained by a vision of Chinese cultural genocen-
trism . . . [that] fits well into a vindicating and triumphalist narrative of
the recent rise of China (87). Wongs preference for is, within
the confines of this volume, uncontroversial, perhaps because it, along
with the vision of Chinese triumphalism, has tended to emerge from
scholars working or trained in the Peoples Republic, none of whom
has contributed to this book. This fact, perhaps the necessary price of
the books coherence, indicates how forcefully the hegemonic focus of
a national Chinese literature bears upon contemporary debates in the
transoceanic field of Chinese literary studies.
The resistance to nationalism is accompanied here by a consistent
antagonism toward the hegemonic idea of a single Chinese language.
That focus is attacked most singlemindedly by the proposed Chinese
translation of the term Sinophone, huayu yuxi wenxue
. The addition of yuxi , language system, to a phrase,
(literature in Chinese), that is already in wide circulation in the
field5 grants the Sinophone (until now nominally a version, at least in
its Chinese iterations, of concepts like literature in Chinese) some of
the force of Dominic Cheungs terms huayu lingyu (Chinese-
language field) or huayu quan (Chinese-language sphere), since
fields, spheres, or systems locate their possible centers inside larger
constellated wholes, rendering them subject to historical and aesthetic
modification by other members of the field, sphere, or system to which
they belong. From a systemic perspective, Mandarin Chinese (Putong-
hua ) is the privileged member of a class whose other mem-
bers differ from it not in kind but only by virtue of shifts in cultural,
geographical, and political context. The inclusion of writers working
in pidgins, creoles, dialects, and other local or even national forms
would not so much dislocate the center as remind us that its centrality
is one of the subtending forms of its self-production.6 At its best such
5
This is another useful occasion to note the emphases provided by the bilingual
terminology: how broad a distinction, orthographically and conceptually, between
Sinophone and literature in Chinese! And how much finer a one, how much
more emphasis on the subtle yet significant revision of an existing concept, in the dif-
ference between and !
6
Would the list above include Japanese and Korean literature written in classi-
cal Chinese? Here we see that the decentralizing effects of a transnational linguistic
focus can turn quite easily into the motive force of an expansive national reclamation
project: either classical Japanese literature destabilizes from a new within the ethnic
224 eric hayot
a reminder would serve not only to extend our sense of the linguis-
tic complexity and self-constituting nature of the center itself but also
to help us appreciate in individual works the labor of both linguistic
centrality and the various unmarked or absent voices that make it
possible. This is what I take from Carlos Rojas analysis of the absent
appearance of hometown dialect in the work of the Tibetan writer
Alai, and from Ng Kim Chews history of the complexities of speaking
in/as Malaysian Chinese. I find it also, most extravagantly, in David
Wangs extension of the field of the literary (and its strange combina-
tion of graph and phone) to the making of sounds that do not belong
properly to any single nation or language, as he suggests in his study
of the compositional oeuvre of Jiang Wenye. Jiangs inclusion reminds
us that dialect occupies only one possible position in the wide field
of phonic registrations of culture, which includes not only music but
also noise, babble, and silence. Such a field baffles the strictures of
any singular writing system. Here the work of someone like Xu Bing,
were it ever to leap from the aesthetic to the quotidian, would, like
Lu Xuns famous Q , remake the boundaries of a writing system that
has in so many cases marked the appearance of pure sound with a
diacritical marker (the radical kou ) whose purpose it is to designate
the included exclusion of the nonsemantic.7
From this perspective the inclusion of music as such would be this
volumes most radical reading of the phone in Sinophone or the
literature in global Chinese literature. The collection restricts itself
and national singularity of Chineseness (and Japaneseness), or it confirms once and for
all the true Chineseness of Japan. Here content (and hence an open politics) enters
the picture, as that decision cannot be made in advance on purely formal grounds. Let
us note by extension that the contemporary stakes of the expansion of (the) Chinese
language(s) in Chinese studies and elsewhere are very much engaged with the future
prospects of the contest for world language supremacy between a mostly American
English and Mandarin Chinese, a contest firmly national in its origins and its politi-
cal effects (when will, for instance, Chinese become an official language of the United
Nations?).
7
Anyone who spends time in the Peoples Republic today will marvel, however,
at the afterlives of Lu Xuns alphabetic adventure: today to speak and read Chinese
is to be engaged continuously, in writing and in speech, with the Roman alphabet
(as it is pronounced in English), from parking areas in train stations and airports
(C , D ) or in news reports of the renamed swine flu, the H1N1 virus, pronounced
aitch-yi-en-yi. Not to mention, of course, the ubiquity of Arabic numerals and pinyin.
I note that the chosen translation of Sinophone, while very much in keeping with
contemporary practice in Chinese-language literary terminology, favors in a fairly
classic way sense over sound, yet another gesture in the contested history of the rela-
tionship between the semantic and the phonic.
more or less to the geographies defined by the older frame of overseas

Chinese literature or literature in Chinese (this latter has always
referred to the outside of the PRC): references to fiction and essays
from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia reinforce a sense that the
global in global Chinese literature tends to mean the globe except
China. This exclusion, which is modulated in Shihs use of Sino-
phone to refer to minoritarian discourses in the PRC and by Rojas
essay on Alai, indicates a contemporary limit of the transoceanic or
diasporic critique of the PRCs national and linguistic hegemony. Are
we witnessing the emergence of a soft consensus, in which the force
of these new terms is restricted by virtue of their use largely to define
the same thing (what used to be called overseas Chinese literature),
rather than to rework the categories of literary history itself ? Or are
we witnessing the first cracks in the political, geographic, linguistic,
and national wall that separates the mainland from the global, if
not for all of Chinese literary history, then at least for its modern
iterations?
Here it seems to me that the most promising avenues for further the-
oretical work belong to Jing Tsus project on language reform and to
Andrea Bachners theorization of the sinograph. Both essays remind us
that the history of Chinese languages; their differentiation into dialects;
their relation to the philosophy of writing and to writing systems; the
role the most prominent system of Chinese writing played in the devel-
opment of a transcultural elite discourse in China, Korea, and Japan;
and the role it played in relation to one or more versions of the ver-
nacular, all mean that the entire question of the language of literature,
of the -phone or the -graph as suffix and as concept, is not just a weak
mirror of the history of languages elsewhere but a historically unique
and deeply powerful materialization of the theory and philosophy of
the relation between culture and language. That both these terms can
find their English meaning in the single character is not the mark
of confusion or a lack of clarity but an indication of philosophical and
cultural complexity. A phrase like , with its doubled , far
more clearly than its English equivalents directs us toward the mate-
rial, lived history of literary meaning as a function of the concepts of
writing and culture, which in turn subtend the question of Chinese
literature as a function of the history of China (or China).
I do not want to suggest, however, that the only way to theorize
Chinese literature comes through faithful renditions of the ground of
its historical reality, as though historys appearing were not, in fact,
226 eric hayot
also, a series of appearances. As well suggest that knowledge about

China can only come from inside China, or from the ethnically Chi-
nese (that dinner party again!). The point is rather that the seriousness
with which we take these questions need not try to force the Chinese
foot into the Western shoeto make the Sinophone a perfect mirror
of the Francophone or some other equivalent.8 Nor should the fact
that the Sinophone is so clearly not an exact analogue of the Franco-
phone count against its use (analogies are analogical, after all ). Rather,
I wish to insist on the ways our theories of shoes can be modified by an
attention to the historical specificity (and diversity) of the feet that fit
in them. To note that Sinitic languageswhose major features include
their historical tendency to have been considered as a single language,
to have dominated a number of national cultures, and to have pro-
duced a particular arrangement of the relationships between speech
and writingought to affect our theory of the relationships between
languages and literatures is simply to insist on the relevance of those
languages to a truly global or even first-philosophical perspective on
literary history. The end result of such a recognition ought to be bet-
ter theories of both feet and shoes, phones and graphs, or of the rela-
tion among culture, language, ethnicity, and nation, which would in
turn allow us to say things about the Francophone or the Anglophone
that the generation of those categories from a largely Francophone or
Anglophone perspective, respectively, has kept scholars in those fields
from being able to see.
For instance: Bachner points out that in the Chinese case the term
Sinophone feels strange at least partly because of the historical abil-
ity of the Chinese graph to subsume and on occasion render invisible
8
This latter is, let us not forget, not only the site of a potential critique of the sin-
gularity and hexagonality of Frenchness, but also on occasion a state-sponsored frame
for the production of cultural hegemony. The 2006 manifesto signed by forty-four
French-language writers against the category of the Francophone puts the concept
decidedly on the side of the nationalists and the patriots, including none other than
Nicolas Sarkozy, who wrote in response in Le Figaro that Francophonie is not dead.
What does it mean in such a context to model the Sinophone on the Francophone?
Perhaps only that we ought to look forward to a moment when the Sinophone itself
will become the subject of popular debate, or to one in which it will have outlived
its conceptual usefulness. But the developmental path of the Sinophone will surely
not follow precisely the one set out before it by the Francophone, if for no other
reason than we now have that example to enlighten us. For more on the concept of a
littrature-monde en franais, a world literature in French, and the contemporary rejection
of the term Francophone, see the essays in Pour une littrature-monde, ed. Michel Le
Bris and Jean Rouaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
certain forms of phonic difference, and recommends a retheorization

of the term at least partly on this basis (thats how she gets to the sino-
graph). Good point. And as true for the Anglophone and the Franco-
phone as of the Sinophone, not only because, as Lydia Liu has noted,
alphabetic written languages are not and have never been purely
phonetic, but also because standard written French and English have,
like Chinese, tended to override (and conceal ) differences in accent,
dialect, or local grammar in the production of an openness to assimi-
lation.9 We are still waiting for a novel written in a creole to win the
Booker or the Goncourt prize. A comparative study of the history of
the concealments of metropolitan tongues inaugurated by the Sinitic
example could produce a global history of the material relationships
between graph and phone that would show us the Anglophone or
Francophone in startling new illuminations.
From the perspective of a literary study sensitive to the global net-
work of languages and the topographies of national and linguistic
power that govern the production of literature, patriots angry about
Gao Xingjians winning of the Nobel Prize get one thing right: Gao
is not exactly a Chinese writer anymore. Nor is he in any simple way
a writer of literature in Chinese. Then again, neither is Mo Yan, and
neither was Lu Xun (and neither were Confucius, Sima Qian, or Qu
Yuan): whatever Chinese means in these contexts is always subject
to the modifications and emendations that terms like Sinophone or
global Chinese literature make it easier to see.10 This does not mean
that there is no such thing as a Chinese literary tradition, or the Chi-
nese nation. It means that the tradition and the nation always operate
in relation to multiple forms of complexity, including the global,
however that is articulated and conceived in any given cultural and
historical moment, and the Sinophonic, that is, the particular
9
See Liu, iSpace: Printed English After Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida, Critical
Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 51650. When we say Anglophone literature, we mean
literature that is written in English; but such literature does not speak English; nor
does it have to be written by someone who speaks English, since its entirely possible,
though not in quite the same way as in Chinese, to write in English without learning
to speak it. Or consider a novel like Louis Wolfsons Le Schizo et les langues, in which
a character allergic to speaking in English finds ways of using phonetic equivalents
in other languages to communicate in English. =
I would like to talk with Juliann, for instance.
10
Recall that at various historical moments the reigning empires were proudly
multiethnic, and that the nominal purity of the Han ethnicity is only a function
of its forgotten absorption of small tribes and other formerly differentiated groups.
228 eric hayot
topographical arrangement of writing and speech, dialect and national

(or elite) language, through which the literature speaks itself as such.
That the Chinese literary tradition always relates (in both its largest
conception and its individual instances) toand often conceptualizes
a connection between the local and the global, that it appears inside
highly contested fields of linguistic conflict and political dominance,
that it is invariably a partial product of the history of its own writ-
ing system and the theories of representation that subtend it: all this
means that the Chinese literary tradition is no different from any other
national literary tradition. The intensity of the debates around the cri-
tique of nationalism and national literary histories in Chinese studies
is, likewise, no different from the critique being undertaken in other
national literary fields. The point here is not that such a critique needs
finally or belatedly to arrive on Chinese shores. The point is that the
critique of nationalism, national languages, and national literary stud-
ies, if it wishes to be truly global, must launch itself from those shores
as well, lest its postnationalism either minimize the conflict among
the interests of monocultural states and multilingual communities or
promote generic critical lexicons that presume universal translatabil-
ity or global applicability.11 To do so, such a critique needs the help
of scholars in Chinese, who know enough to allow the material histo-
ries of East Asia and its language systems, including the national lan-
guages, the dialects, the pidgins, and the combinations of graph and
phone known variously as , , , and Mandarin Chinese,12
to wreak upon the coming transformations of global literary thought
the effects of their particular difference.
11
Emily Apter, Untranslatables: A World System, New Literary History 39 (2008):
581.
12
Remembering that the word mandarin comes to English via Portuguese, which
gets it from Malay, which gets it in turn from Sanskrit (in its meaning of counselor,
mandarin is rooted in man-, to think, a root it shares with mantra).
INDEX
Alai 115n1, 116132 Foucault, Michel 186

Ang, Ien 8, 9 France (as centre of World Literature)
Apter, Emily 228n11 207210
Arnold Schnberg 163 Francophone 226n8
Asian American studies 30 Freud 122
Baba Malay 9 Gao Xingjian 78, 129131, 198217,

Babas 35, 38 227, passim
Bartk 157158, 160161, 174 Genocentrism, translocalism,
Borges 128 racinationism
genocentrism/genocentric 50,
C. T. Hsia 7 5660, 62, 65, 7071
Cai Xiyong 111 racinationism/racinationist/racination
Cantonese 137, 143, 148, 154 50, 52, 5659, 6162
Chang, Eileen 207 translocalism/translocalist 50,
Chen Duxiu 197 5660, 62, 6465
Cheung, Dominic 7879, 81, 8586, Global/quanqiu
223 vision/shiye 4950, 56, 5964,
Chinese American 7273
literature 4951, 5456, 62, 6569, other (including globalization,
7172, 7576 globality) 4951, 5455, 57,
Chinese Americanist 63, 6566 6061, 6465, 6973
Chinese Americans 58, 62 Goethe 200
Chow, Rey 8, 11 Guo Songfen 22
Chow, Tse-tsung 8182, 86
Chung-wai Literary Monthly 83 Ha Jin 207
Confucius 165166, 169, 171 Ha Jin 131
consumption 133, 135, 137, 139, haiwai huawen/huaren wenxue (overseas
141146, 152 Chinese literature) 62, 6465, 70,
7475
Deleuze and Guattari, minor Hall, Stuart 79
literature 117 Han Chinese 3031
Deleuze and Guattari 1920, 23 Han script (Chinese characters) 32
Derrida, Jacques 182 hanja, Korean language and 32
Derrida 130131 Hanyu 2930, 35, 3738, 4042
dialect(s) 9596, 9899, 101102, hawker 147151
105114, 116117, 120, 124125, Hong Kong 134, 137, 142143,
127 144n19, 145151, 153154
Diaspora/diasporic 49, 5657, 61, 67, Hong Ying 198
71, 7376 Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin 123
Hrabal, Bohumil 20
eating/food 134138, 140141, Hu Shi 9899
143148, 150153 Huang Zunxian 99, 112
eccentric writing 133 Hugo Schuchardt 111
ethnic minority 116117
ethnic studies 29, 35, 46 Jameson, Fredric 19
Exiled writers 199 Japan 157161, 163165, 171173, 175
230 index
Japanese fiction in translation 201202 Orality 134, 138, 143

Jiang Wenye 157161, 163165, Orientalism 163
167173, 175 overseas Chinese (huaqiao) 3233
Jiarong 124 Overseas Chinese literature 77, 83,
John Okada 7 89
overseas Chinese 13, 5
Kafka, Franz 23n12
Kingston, Maxine Hong 7 Pearl Buck 131
Korea 32, 38, 44 phonics 9596, 98
piglet 15
Lacan 122 Pinyin 105
Lao Naixuan 106, 112113 Prokofiev 158, 161, 163, 174
Leung Ping Kwan 134, 137 putonghua 30, 38
Li, Yongping [Lee Yung-ping] 17, 22,
24, 27, 87 Saussy, Haun 182183, 187n10
Liang Qichao 197 Shen Xue 2223, 103, 104nn19, 210
Lim, Kien Ket 19 Shih Shu-mei 7879, 83n8, 87n13,
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin 83 177, 219, 225
Lin Jianguo 183 Shijie huawen/huaren wenxue (world
Lin Xingqian 17 literature in Chinese/by Chinese)
Lingis, Alphonso 186187 4950, 61, 63, 6669, 72, 75
Liu, Lydia 227 shu 152
locale 65 Singapore 3233, 35, 37
localization 63 Sinitic language 29, 3642, 44
located 61 sinograph 177178, 179n4, 181185,
Locatedness 5152, 6869, 72 190191, 193194
Lu Xun 197, 224, 227 Sinophone 1, 34, 67, 913, 29,
Lu Zhuangzhang 102, 107, 111 3233, 3536, 3840, 4347,
220223, 226
Ma Jianzhong 108 articulations of 39, 44, 48
Ma Kwok Ming 145 Chineseness and 43
Ma Yuan 116 colonial history and 40
Mahua literature [Sinophone Malaysian community of change 45
Literature] 80, 8389 global multiculturalism and 39
Malaysian Chinese literature 17, 183 immigration and 34, 4244
Mandarin 93, 9596, 105106, 109, linguistic power struggles and 40
112113 literature in Sinitic languages 4042,
Mao Zedong 116, 126129 46
May Fourth 4, 8 literature/writing 4950, 52, 54,
missionaries, Western 31 6173, 75
Mitchell, W. J. T. 185 monolithic Chinese culture and 40
mother tongue 98, 111 as notion in disappearance 39
place-based 43
Naipaul, V.S. 2427 writers 51, 71
national language 93, 9599, 104, Sixteen Bagatelles 163164
108114 student immigrant literature 6
native speaker 96, 110114
Nativism 16, 18, 21 Taiwan no Bukyoku 164
Ng, Kim Chew 8889 Taiwan 3637, 4042, 157, 159161,
Nieh Hualing 67 163, 174175
Nobel Complex 199 American right associated with 47
Nobel Prize for Literature 199, independence claims of 39
203217, passim multilingual community 37, 40
index 231
New Taiwanese identity 37 Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling 79n4

Taiwanese 27 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia 222
tattoo 185186 World/global Chinese literature 77
Tcherepnin, Alexander 157, 161165, Wu Zhuoliu 131
167
Tee Kim Tong 19, 222 Xingsheng tong (Opening with Shapes and
The Music of the Confucian Temple Sounds) 100
165169, 172173 Xu Bing 224
Tibet 116, 121, 123, 129
translation 116120, 124125, 127 Yamada Kosaku 158, 160, 171
Tsu, Jing 11 Yan Geling 198
Tu Wei-ming 8 Yang Lian 198
Typewriter 104 Yang Mu 22
Yang Qiong 9899
Urban cartography 145 Yu Dafu 2122, 26
Yu, Kwang-chung 82
Wanchai 147148, 151
Wang Gungwu 1, 2n1 Zhang Guixing 177179, 188, 194,
Wang Zhao 95, 97, 106 194n19
Wang, David Der-wei 78, 8081, 86
wen 187188
CHINESE OVERSEAS:
HISTORY, LITERATURE,
AND SOCIETY
ISSN 1876-3847
Chief Editor
Wang Gungwu
Subject Editors
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, David Der-wei Wang, and Wong Siu-lun
Editorial Board
Ien Ang, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Liu Hong, Frank Pieke,
Elizabeth Sinn, and Jing Tsu
1. Chu, R., Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and
Culture, 1860s 1930s. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 17339 2
2. Lim, J., Linking an Asian Transregional Commerce in Tea: Overseas Chinese
Merchants in the Fujian-Singapore Trade, 19201960. 2010. ISBN 978
90 04 18243 1
3. Tsu, J. and D. Der-wei Wang, Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays.
2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18765 8

(Chinese Overseas - History, Literature, and Society) Jing Tsu, David Der-Wei Wang-Global Chinese Literature - Critical Essays-Brill Academic Pub (2010)

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Global Chinese Literature

History, Literature, and Society

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Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

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printed in the netherlands

Acknowledgements ..................................................................... vii

1. Introduction: Global Chinese Literature ............................... 1

2. Minor Sinophone Literature: Diasporic Modernitys

3. Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural

4. Global Vision and Locatedness: World Literature

5. (Re)mapping Sinophone Literature ....................................... 77

6. Sinophonics and the Nationalization of Chinese .................... 93

7. Alai and the Linguistic Politics of Internal

8. Thinking with Food, Writing off Center: Notes on Two

9. In Search of a Genuine Chinese Sound: Jiang Wenye

10. Reinventing Chinese Writing: Zhang Guixings Sinographic

11. Chinese Literature in the Global Canon: The Quest for

12. Commentary: On the Sainifeng as a Global

Index ........................................................................................... 229

Andrea Bachner, Ph.D. (Harvard University), is Assistant Professor of

Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity Col-

Eric Hayot is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the

Julia Lovell is lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of

Carlos Rojas is Assistant Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and

Reflections of Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008)

Shu-mei Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She

Kim Tong Tee, Ph.D. (National Taiwan University), is Associate Pro-

Jing Tsu, Ph.D. (Harvard University), is Associate Professor of Chinese

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese

Sau-ling C. Wong is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of

Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang

The idea of a global Chinese literature draws together three rec-

laden terms: huaqiao , huayi , haiwai huaren . Desig-

Admittedly, associations with nationalism render diaspora a prob-

or literary Chineseas the language of modern literature, for instance,

to reestablish itself as a world power in the twenty-first century, the

geographical knowledge of particular areas of strategic concern.6 The

alliances with regard to diasporic studies. The open-ended struggle

and use this triangulation to question the implications of being drawn

production that suggests an ongoing ideological conflation between

A critical diasporic cultural politics should privilege

conditions exist in direct relation to the percentage of the population

mainland Chinas discursive apparatus and expressive style, replicat-

If we say the former approach (Chinese) often results in a cultural

is always amenable to a national allegorical interpretation.6 However,

While in Malaysia in 1939, Yu Dafu published a short

white travel writing like that of Conrad or Maugham.10 This latter

literatures composed in minor languages (like Sinophone literature in

movements principle of negativity, and literatures creative principle:

was a journey that broke my life in two.17 To overcome the lack of

Consequently he is in two worlds: a politically instable postcolonial

generation of Naipauls father, Seepersad Naipaul. Finally proficient

Fang Xiu . Zhanhou Ma Hua wenxueshi chugao [A Preliminary

This chapter offers a broad, programmatic view of the parameters

I. The Chinese Diaspora

Manchu dynasty of the Qing (16441912), whose expanded territory

early twentieth century; a practice of self-examination that internal-

Malaysiathe so-called Straits Chinesedeveloped their own par-

is Chineseness, or, more precisely, different degrees of Chineseness. In

on the Chinese diaspora, furthermore, the Chinese American is a

II. The Sinophone, as Such