Unfinished becoming: Seriality, temporality, and the making of literature on Wenxuecity

This article examines Wenxuecity, a long-running website for overseas Chinese communities, as a site of diasporic literary production shaped by distinctive temporal practices. Drawing on the serialized fiction of two active contributors and sustained observation of forum discussions, it identifies three intertwined temporalities: narrative, processual, and archival. Narrative temporality foregrounds authors’ self-directed rhythms of storytelling; processual temporality traces how ongoing exchanges between authors and readers turn writing into a collective, open-ended practice; and archival temporality reveals how dispersed texts accumulate into a layered record of diasporic becoming. The article argues that these temporal practices sustain a mode of digital cultural production oriented toward continuity, participation, and lived experience—one that contests the extractive logics of platform economies rather than merely operating within them. As a fragile media archive, Wenxuecity holds cultural memory in the constitutive tension between accumulation and precarity.