Agency and Creativity in Exclusionist North America: Chinese Overseas Student Writings of Chen Hengzhe and Xie Fuya (1919–1926)

Already on American soil, many Chinese student travelers sought to use their time to explore and turn their experiences into published works and travelogues. As a result, these routes and the writings that accompany them demonstrate a spectrum of Chinese experiences in North America during the Exclusion Era. The Chinese narrators in the writings of elite overseas Chinese students Chen Hengzhe ( 陈衡哲 ; 1890–1976) and Xie Fuya ( 谢扶雅 ; 1892–1991) carve a minor subjectivity through prose and poetry respectively that contributes to critical global history. Their voices are a creative vocalization of overcoming legal restraints placed on ethnic Chinese in textual representation that goes beyond narratives of oppression and resistance. The archives present an interesting and important perspective on Chinese raced bodies in twentieth-century North America.