Letters of Penance: Writing America in Chinese and the Location of Chinese American Literature

Definitions of American literature have expanded from multi-ethnic to multilingual and bounded to borderless. Amid ever more inclusive understandings of what American literature is, this article shifts the focus to reflect on the many wheres in which that literature finds its being. Taking Sinophone fiction written by and about Chinese overseas students in the US (so-called liuxuesheng literature) as a case study, this article explores what it means to represent American diasporic experience not only in non-Anglophone tongues but for the eyes and ears of an ethno-linguistic community that often resides outside of the US. Through close readings of liuxuesheng literature, the article poses a series of linked questions. What role does non-Anglophone literature about America play in carving cross-oceanic conduits, the global circulation of Americanness, and the assuaging of diasporic guilt? Is there something tactical or performative about the decision to write about the American odyssey in the mother tongue for people at home? As their protagonists live the American dream/nightmare, liuxuesheng texts communicate the struggle between duty and desire through which many diasporans pass as they inch toward immigrant status and the guilty backlash that can floor them at that critical moment of cusp. Ultimately, though, the rapport that these texts create between here and there and the US and the world beyond reveals that multi-ethnic, multilingual American literature is as multi-situated as those who write and read it.