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Diasporic Returning: On Chinese Dreams beyond China
Room 4502 (Lift 25-26), HKUST
Abstract: This talk features the theme of return in Chinese diasporic narratives since the late 1970s when China began its post-socialist transformation. Ranging from films, autobiographies, and fictions written by diasporic Chinese authors, including Peter Wang’s 1986 film A Great Wall, Maxine Hong Kingston’s 2011 memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Gish Jen’s 2022 collection of stories Thank You, Mr. Nixon, among others, these narratives present and embody a complex structure of feeling about the opening of China, about being Chinese overseas in the era of China’s rise, and about diverse and sometimes conflicting aspirations for and experiences of returning to China. Against the campaign to tell the China Story well, these stories of diasporic returning--with an emphasis on the problematic of trans/national relations--offer a different approach to the discussion of Global China by shedding new light on how the China Dream is understood beyond China. READ MORE...
Online Book Talk - Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation
Zoom
Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation by Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li focuses on the self-translation of Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang, 1920–1995), one of the most important Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Although self-translation is overlooked in most studies of her work, Chang’s literary achievements are attributed in part to her lifelong self-translation of her lived experiences and family sagas, as well as her bilingualism. This book enriches current studies of self-translation by proposing a new hypothesis of theorizing self-translation as a performative act, characterized by its in-betweenness and the aesthetic freedom that the self-translator enjoys, contextualized within larger debates about translation and the specific practice of self-translation in Chinese history in comparison to its Western counterpart. READ MORE...