Chinese Diasporic Writers and Artists: Reimagining Identity and the Self Beyond and Without China

This book presents new and original essays that capture the enigmatic and intriguing personal and imagined worlds of Chinese writers and artists in diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Including chapters on artist-writers such as Gao Xingjian, Dai Sijie, Ha Jin and Hong Ying, Tyrus Wong, and Shen Wei, the book explores personal cross-cultural experiences through their literary and other artistic works, reflecting on their cultural identity, their native home, and their new home, the past and the present. By writing, filming, and painting about their diaspora/diasporic experience, they are writing about their selves and the traumatic experience many of them have gone through in forgetting the past, forgiving the damage, and foreshadowing a future by re-visioning their selves. Their experience represents a generation’s quest for an identity of being Chinese but culturally distanced from China. As a study of cross-cultural human experience through the lens of literature, film, and other arts, this book will not only appeal to students and scholars of Chinese diaspora studies, it will also appeal to those with an interest in Chinese literature, film, and culture.