Letters of Penance: Writing America in Chinese and the Location of Chinese American Literature

A notorious scene in the 1993 television drama Beijingren zai Niuyue (Beijingers in New York) shows the main character Wang Qiming, a Chinese intellectual turned immigrant entrepreneur in the US, brandishing a fistful of dollars and ordering the prostitute who lies sprawled beneath him to utter the words “I love you” (“Episode 16”). For anyone familiar with the cultural representation of the liuxuesheng, or Chinese overseas student, this lurid tableau has something of the inverted déjà vu about it. In particular, it appears to restage the symbolic scene in “Zhijiage zhi si” (“Death in Chicago” [1964]), a short story by the Taiwanese American writer Bai Xianyong, in which the protagonist Wu Hanhun celebrates earning his PhD at the University of Chicago by spending the night with a prostitute. In the cold electric light of her apartment, he discovers that the flame-haired femme fatale who enticed him earlier that evening is a middle-aged woman whose red wig conceals a matted mop of sparse, mouse-brown hair and whose well-upholstered figure owes its curves to corsetry. “Tell you the truth,” she says, “I’ve never done it with a Chinese before. They say that Orientals are nice and gentle” (10). The next day, overcome with disgust and humiliation, Wu drowns himself in Lake Michigan. Fast forward to the triumphalist scene from the television show Beijingers in New York, in which the shift in power relations is writ almost risibly large and where Wang’s newfound bravura seems to spell an end to the sexual timidity and suicidal urges that have dogged the liuxuesheng throughout his literary history.

Beijingers in New York—both as the original novel by Cao Guilin (1991) and as the television series it later spawned—was an enormous cultural event in China, devoured by millions and pored over by critics for what it revealed about China’s post-socialist rise. Sheldon H. Lu puts it plainest when he writes that “in the realms of sex and business the Chinese male is transformed into an aggressive and confident player, even on the home turf of advanced Western nations” (32). Underlying such analysis is the notion of metamorphosis: China’s new clout is rewiring the diasporic psyche, and men like Wang can spearhead a new US-based entrepreneurial superclass, free to prosper and fornicate without guilt in a world that is their oyster—unlike Wu, the slave of an inequitable Cold War order. Yet this onward-and-upward argument ignores the status that the two protagonists share as diasporic male subjects with desperately divided loyalties: both are Chinese-speaking intellectuals on the move and on the way up in the US but still bound by ineffable ties to the places they have left behind. Of course, it is possible to read the literary liuxuesheng as a symbol of the shifting fortunes of China or Taiwan on the global geopolitical stage, but to do so finesses the awkward identity that links these protagonists—and many more male liuxuesheng—in an ongoing genealogy shaped equally by duty and desire. This identity is engendered by the male liuxuesheng’s role as a Chinese-speaking intellectual in the US, a role whose supposed responsibilities are encapsulated in the expression liuxue jiuguo (“studying abroad to save the nation”) but whose lived realities are immeasurably more complex. This shared selfhood makes Wang and Wu brothers under the skin and compatriots of the mind who may experience different fates in America but for whom triumph and disaster—to quote Rudyard Kipling—are “two imposters just the same” (21).

As Chih-ming Wang observes, the male liuxuesheng is an American diasporic subject like no other. A constellation of race, gender, and class, his identity traditionally combines aspiration with obligation and loyalty with guilt, and the nation-building burden that sometimes jars against his self-interest lends a specific intensity to the familiar struggles of diasporic life. What is more, his journeys through geopolitical and social space tell us a great deal about what migrancy means, not just for those who leave but for those who...