“I Know … I Live Here”: Laowai Writing in “the people’s republic of”

This essay examines laowai writing in Mainland China as an area of literary production. Laowai is the usual designation and frequent self-designation of China-resident Western foreigners and constitutes an identifiable migrant community in urban China. These laowai texts are written by and intended for a particular ethnically identifiable audience and constitute a body of work that is linguistically, culturally, and thematically distinct from other Anglophone writing on China. These works reflect the dialogic production of a new ethnic or pseudo-ethnic subject developing out of the gap between China-resident Western foreigners and the Chinese society to which they cannot be assimilated. Since Chinese society affords little room for hybrid identities among Western resident groups, the result is insider-outsider writing, which is deeply engaged with the fraught race and gender relations between Chinese and Western subjects in the cities of China. This group, socioeconomically privileged but culturally marginal, challenges both Chinese and foreign narratives about China.