South-East Asian Chinese Literature And Racial Imagination

South-East Asian Chinese literature, with the state of exotic existence, has been reiterating the same themes of homesickness and China through its layers of images in different time and space. Through the study upon issues, such as the historical background of south-east Asian Chinese and identity recognition of south-east Asian literature, the essay proposes that the fact that south-east Asian writers share unique cultural psychology, in fact, contains the complex mixture of politics, history, race and culture, and centers on a loft and faraway cultural imagination of racial group. Then the essay offers a construction of racial imagination, and through the reading of the typical texts of south-east Asian literature, gives an illustration to the four strategies that south-east Asian literature has constructed for racial imagination, i.e., 1. through personal reminiscence of experiment; 2. through the retold racial reminiscence; 3. the imagery construction of a differentialized China and 4. rewriting of Chinese history. As the history turns to the new century, the boundary between races is becoming more and more vague. Thus the memory and understanding of hometown fall between certainty and uncertainty. The conclusion part of the essay, Imagination of the Frontier, comes as a complement and tells about the new trend of the racial imagination in south-east Chinese literature.