Transboundary Writing

This dissertation studies the writers emigrating from the mainland to Hong Kong for various reasons. Some of them are those refugee writers and left-wing writers who immigrate to Hong Kong before and after the founding of the new China. Others are the writers self-exiled to Hong Kong affected by the Cultural Revolution and batches of writers after that. They have secured significant position in the history of Hong Kong Literary. Being once immersed in two different kinds of cultural backgrounds, these writers have gained different life experiences between Hong Kong and the mainland as well as their voluntary or forced exiling experiences. All these not only affect their literary creation greatly, but also make them perplexed and anxious about seeking for their identities, which have exerted great influence on their creative mentality and identity construction.The whole dissertation views three groups of the writers emigrating from the mainland to Hong Kong from a general perspective. It chooses some novels by such typical immigrant writers as Liu Yichang, Xuxu, Cao Juren, Taoran, Yan Chungou and Wangpu as the focus of the detailed analysis. In order to promote further research, it inquires into similarities and differences of these immigrant writers, such as their general characteristics, creative mentality, conceiving characters, the ways of imagining Hong Kong, identity construction of the referable environment, contents of identifying and narrative motifs.Living in the multicultural dialogue context and with mixed identities, these immigrant writers are such a group being double-marginalized. The result is the interaction with the multi-referable environments such as their mainland experiences, Hong Kong commercial context and the post-colonial cultural circumstances. These marginalized writers are in an awkward situation because they have not established their identities either in the center of the mainland or in Hong Kong. A strong sense of alienation is their common mentality at the beginning of their immigrating life, whether they are Xuxu, Cao Juren, Liu Yichang in the 50s, or Taoran, Yan Chungou in the 70s, or Wangpu in the 80s. They are two common motifs of their transboundary writing and their identity construction, one is the sentimental and painful recollections of their past life, their culture and tradition in the mainland, the other is the uncertainty in value explanation and the perplexity of their non-established identities due to their disconnected experience and in the process of its reconstruction. Missing the hometown means forgetting it and help to keep their feets on the ground in Hong Kong.