Transnational urban encounters: existential wanderings in Xue Yiwei’s collection Shenzheners
From Firenze University Press Book: Words and visions around/about Chinese transnational mobilities 流动
Giulia Rampolla, Rome University of International Studies
The Chinese writer Xue Yiwei 薛忆沩 (b. 1964) comes from a complex background of domestic and international migration: born in Hunan province, he lived in several Chinese cities, before expatriating to Canada in 2002. His prolific oeuvre stands out against the broad landscape of contemporary Chinese literature for its textual heterogeneity, for the writer’s meticulous investigation into the complexities of language, and because it overflows with literary hybridity and cultural intermingling.
The genesis of this multidimensional fictional universe is deeply embedded in the writer’s personal experience of transcontinental resettlement and in his intimate knowledge of Chinese and Western literature. From this perspective, the works of Xue Yiwei can be regarded as the outcome of transnational mobility and transcultural encounters on multiple levels: they relate the detached gaze of a migrant writer on his homeland; they challenge the common nation-bound literary categories and theoretical discourses; they cross the boundaries between literary genres; they reconceptualize Chinese fictional writing through the intercultural negotiation between Chinese and Western literary modes. As Hu stated (2021, 35): “Xue engages in a close dialogue with writers from all over the world […]. He takes as his homeland […] the whole of world literature.” Widely acclaimed in his native country, he prefers to remain on the sidelines of literary circles. However, Xue’s literary production is almost unanimously viewed by scholars as a distinctive phenomenon which, as Lin Gang observed while interviewing him, “goes some way to restore the reputation of Chinese contemporary literature” (Lin and Nashef 2021, 5), because it does not succumb to the commercial demands of the publishing industry.
Since 2016, following the translation of his works into English, Xue Yiwei’s fiction has been attracting the attention of an enthusiastic worldwide audience. The collection Shenzheners (2016), the first of his works to be translated into English, includes nine of the twelve stories of the Chinese edition. The original Chinese title, Chuzuche siji: Shenzhenren xilie xiaoshuo 出租车司机: 深圳人系列小说 (Taxi driver: Fictional series People of Shenzhen, 2013), was borrowed from the short story “The Taxi Driver” (Chuzuche siji 出租车司机, Xue 2016e), which is regarded as Xue’s most influential work, and his most well-known inside China (Zhao 2020, 8). Most significantly, the profession of the protagonist, expressed in the title, is based on permanent mobility, which symbolizes the migrant condition of the majority of Shenzhen’s population (Wang 2021, 71). In this collection, the writer’s acute transnational awareness is articulated through the harmonious interplay between Chinese and non-Chinese visions of the city, with a primary focus on the psychological and existential condition of the individual within the urban environment. The city was a key motif in Western literary modernism (Mullin 2016), an intrinsically transnational movement. While carefully examining the impact of globalization on the everyday existence of ordinary people within the particular context of present-day China, Xue exploits the typical approaches of Western modernism to the exploration of the city, as a lens for investigating both the urban transformations and the emotional responses of the individual to them.
Beyond modernists, a constellation of other foreign genres, authors and philosophical trends of different epochs can be found in the texts. In this respect, existentialism and absurdism provide this collection with an insightful philosophical background and a paradigm of literary alterity, which allows the writer to interpolate Shenzhen’s process of modernization into a broader cross-cultural outline of urban modernity. Linder (2001, 57) calls attention to the concern for the relationship between philosophy and literature which references to Wittgenstein, Hegel and Nietzsche in Xue’s works reveal; she maintains that by adopting a style strongly reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Proust, Joyce and Sartre, the writer reflects upon the influence of culture on the individual. Through these cross-cultural allusions, Xue takes world literature as the benchmark against which Chinese literature can be reframed, establishing a relationship of intertextuality with foreign fiction (Lin 2022, 206). Shenzheners is dedicated to James Joyce (1882–1941), whose masterpiece Dubliners ([1914] 2000) was the avowed inspiration for Xue’s collection. Several sources (Huang 2022; Ye 2019; Zhang 2018; Jiang 2017) debate the similarities and discrepancies between the two collections and their authors.6 It is particularly relevant to the current discussion that both authors were living abroad when they completed these collections, hence casting a deterritorialized gaze respectively on Dublin and Shenzhen. Furthermore, by providing a thumbnail sketch of several urban characters, each the subject of one short story, both works actually scrutinize human fate in the urban context. However, while the city in Dubliners is a synecdoche for an economically and culturally paralyzed Irish nation (Hamlin 2016, 129), Xue’s Shenzhen is a vibrant place full of opportunities.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0068–4.15
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/transnational-urban-encounters-existential-wanderings-in-xue-yiweis-collection-ishenzhenersi/13483
