Peking Man in American Literature

Excavated in northern China in the 1920s and lost in the 1940s, the Peking Man 北京猿人 fossils and the attendant written works about them provide a rich archive of artifacts concerned with the mysterious origins of humankind. Missing in material form for nearly eighty-five years, as a metonymic trope these fossils have been hiding in plain sight, featured in several late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century American novels. This article focuses on works including Philip K. Dick’s The Crack in Space (1966), Claire Taschdjian’s The Peking Man Is Missing (1977), and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), arguing that such texts aim not only to recover the cultural memory of the missing fossils but also to reveal fissures and fusions characterizing Sino-American relations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.