Chinese writing in English: nation, representation, and identity in Chinese immigrant writers' literature,1980-2020

Since the late 1980s, Chinese immigrant writers’ representations of China have been credited with “authenticity”, which functions as a window for the English-speaking world to understand the history, culture, and politics of contemporary Chinese society. Because of these writers’ decision to write in English, their works are often assimilated into the literature of ethnic minorities in the host country and merged into genres like Chinese American literature or Chinese British literature. However, the intersectional space that these immigrant writers inhabit in relation to language, culture, and identity has inspired me to investigate the seeming plausible “authority” that they obtain in representing China. Indeed, in comparison to Chinese American writers, whose narratives about China are often questioned on the basis of their reliability, writers from mainland China often earn greater credibility with far less effort. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the pivotal concerns of language, identity, and representation, tackling their inextricable relations with the nation and the concept of “Chineseness”. By investigating the representations of China constructed by Chinese immigrant writings from 1980 to 2020, the thesis identifies three waves of Chinese writers in English, marked by historical turning points that inspire their dedication to writing literature in English, namely: the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in 1976; the Tiananmen Protest in 1989; and the influence of globalization after 2000. These key historical moments permeate through each wave and emphasize both continuity and discontinuity between their generational representations. Each wave offers an aspect – historically, allegorically, and individually – that locates the ways in which Chinese immigrant writers reshape, challenge, and negotiate with the idea of “Chineseness”, a concept that scholars from diaspora studies have been wrestling with for decades. The idea of “Chineseness” has arguably become a hegemonic authority symbolized by the collective national identity connected to mainland China. Therefore, the Chinese ethnic community outside of China aims to subvert its centripetal authority by claiming agency from “the periphery”. The binary of “the centre” versus “the periphery” has determined many discourses on China, whereas the intricate conflicts and dynamics within the nation are often homogenized. The following chapters are therefore developed in accordance with the three waves and the corresponding arguments concerning the theoretical discussion of “Chineseness”. Chapter one examines memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, written by intellectuals who suffered during the time and who tried to “authenticate” their personal accounts as testimony to the brutality of the Maoist regime; chapter two examines the ways in which second-wave writers like Ha Jin and Qiu Xiaolong question traditional realist representations of China; and chapter three showcases the ways in which writers demonstrate a more individualistic formulation of personal space. Together, my analysis shows that these Chinese immigrant writers are reappropriating “Chineseness” as a linguistic and cultural signifier in the English-speaking world, in order to shape a heterogenous landscape of Anglo-American literature. In the meantime, the historical and political space of contemporary China is reconstructed by writers, projected with both their prospects and criticism, through which they are able to maintain an ambiguous and ambivalent bond with their homeland.Doctor of Philosoph