Ying Chen’s Fiction: An Aesthetics of Non-Belonging

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From accounts of migration and stories of personal alienation, through the fragmented memories of former incarnations, to fable-like tales of half-breeds and species metamorphosis, Ying Chen’s fiction evolves as it revolves around questions of difference, otherness and identity, which is never fixed or singular. While presenting the narrators’ inner preoccupations and, in some cases, unreliable nature, the increasingly complex texts of this francophone-Chinese writer (1961-) also reveal larger concerns about dominant discourses, the limitations of social realities, survival, and the relationship between beings, all framed within an aesthetics of non-belonging. Intriguingly, the author achieves this by consciously distancing her works, from 1998 onwards, from any categorisation by ethnicity. This engaging study considers Chen’s writing from the contemporary perspective of the breakdown of traditional spatiotemporal experiences, the homogenization of places, the erasure of cultural differences, and the resulting tendency towards universalism.

Rosalind Silvester is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and Director of Education in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast.