Literary Lives
Translating the Chinese Diaspora
Yan Ge, Elsewhere: Stories. Scribner, 304pp., $27 cloth.
The title of Yan Ge’s latest short story collection, Elsewhere, evokes the contradictions inherent to the immigrant experience: if one is elsewhere, one cannot be home, even if the elsewhere one has chosen is a place that one may have idealized in the past. For many of the characters in Yan’s stories, particularly those who find themselves alone in a foreign land, the feeling of always wishing to be elsewhere (no matter where they might happen to live) captures a state of longing that appears to be the most permanent fixture of their interrupted lives.
It’s a familiar sentiment for many individuals who identify with the far-flung members of the Chinese diaspora, a group produced by successive waves of immigration following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the surge in international student enrollment in US and UK universities starting in the 1990s, and—more recently—the viral stories of Chinese immigrants crossing the southern border from Mexico to the U.S. in search of lives free from CCP intervention after mass Covid lockdowns. Yet as the foundational premise of Yan’s book, the wish to find oneself elsewhere forms the basis of a seemingly infinite number of plot permutations.
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