UCLA

The increasing prevalence of literature which pushes the boundaries of national literatures as as well as the difficulty that the methodology of comparative literature has with negotiating texts without a clear-cut national provenance has led to the increasing interest in reviving the term “world literature.” While most of the current theories of world literature are concerned with the migration of texts or authors unidirectionally, from the periphery to the center, this study is interested in tracing the migration of authors and texts along their itineraries. The benefit of this model is the way that it allows multidirectional movement, texts and authors move back and forth between countries, languages, and literatures in ways that current models of both comparative literature and world literature do not account for. The itineraries of the three writers and their texts also reveal the ways that the geopolitics of the time influenced literary movement: writers moved south to avoid Japanese conquest in the 1930s and 1940s and moved westward to the United States in the 1950s. Xiao Hong’s itinerary takes her ever southward, through the shifting map of the Republic of China at the time. While she is most commonly identified as a Northeastern writer, Xiao Hong wrote most of her most famous works in exile in Shanghai. Her works must be understood in light of her self-imposed exile. Zhang Ailing’s itinerary took her to the British colony of Hong Kong as a young woman. After returning to Shanghai, she earned literary fame writing tales of exotic colonial life for a Shanghai audience. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Zhang returned to Hong Kong briefly before immigrating to the United States. She had hopes for an Anglophone career, introducing American audiences to China, but remained ultimately unsuccessful in retooling herself. Nevertheless, Zhang found lasting fame among Sinophone audiences in Hong Kong and Taiwan, styling herself as “the last aristocrat” of lost Shanghai. Lao She had a wide and varied itinerary, however one portion which remains relatively understudied is his sojourn in the United States shortly after the end of World War II. While there, Lao She played an active role in shaping his Anglophone career following the success of Evan King’s translation of Camel Xiangzi (Luotuo Xiangzi) as Rickshaw Boy. Lao She collaborated in the translation of three of his other novels into Chinese, The Yellow Storm, The Drum Singers, and The Loves of Lau Lee. Eventually Lao She grew disillusioned with American publishing and returned to China, taking with him several unpublished manuscripts which were later lost. The Chinese translator Ma Xiaomi, later translated the English translations of these manuscripts and restored them to the original Chinese manuscripts. In charting the circulation of writers and texts along their itineraries, it is possible to see the way in which different writers of different languages and literatures intersect. Rather than looking at the movement of Chinese literature into the canon, I look at the globalized connections which have occurred through travel, collaboration, and contestation in several different languages and literatures.