Pure Ethnicity in Hybridization: A Returnee’s Quest for Chineseness in “Love in a Fallen City”

Most critics find Fan Liuyuan, the male protagonist in Eileen Chang’s novella “Love in a Fallen City” (1943), to be a simple character. What they fail to take into account, however, is the complexity of Fan Liuyuan’s identity as well as his predicament, both before and after his return to China. By adopting the concept of diaspora, the present study explores how his desire for an absent authentic Chinese culture is developed, and how his failure to come to terms with his hybrid identity in his search for pure ethnicity results in a series of fruitless attempts to construct his cultural identity in his homeland. Chang’s depiction of this futile pursuit indicates that pure “Chineseness” exists only in the diasporic imagination rather than in any tangible object or place. Such a revelation negates the essentialization of pure Chineseness and allows for more diverse articulations of diasporic ethnicity.