Reading Contemporary Chinese Migrant Fiction : Memories in Negotiation, Contradiction, and Translation

Reading Contemporary Chinese Migrant Fiction examines the spectrum of Chinese migrant writing about memory since the 1990s and what it tells us about history, memory and trauma in contemporary China.

This book discusses the critical narrative of memory in overseas Chinese migrant fiction as an alternative account of histories. It reveals how writers, including Ken Liu, Yiyun Li and Geling Yan among others build the multiple facets of memory and explore the traces and significances of trauma through fiction. The book identifies a tension in dialogues between the writers’ memory construction and public discourses, social powers, and transcultural experiences. The counterforces in self-reflexive memory writing are thus unearthed between collective and individual, public and private, as well as global and local.