This book explores Chinese diasporic literature and culture as an art of betweenness—of thresholds, border crossings, and many tongues. Spanning America, Britain, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, and Canada, it traces how writers of Chinese descent have shaped a distinctive literary tradition beyond China's borders.

The volume ranges across poetry, fiction, memoir, and theatre, examining diverse expressions of diasporic experience. Chapters explore diasporic ballads, Chinese-language writing from Singapore, nineteenth-century pidgin writing by Chinese miners in colonial Australia, and the work of Hong Kong women poets in Britain. The collection also analyzes contemporary Chinatown narratives, diasporic poetry, and theatrical explorations of identity and power. An interview with a prominent diasporic writer and an afterword on diaspora as translation round out the volume. Probing identity, home, and translation, the collection illuminates the shifting forms of diasporic life and the inventive voices that make Chinese diasporic writing one of world literature's generative currents. It offers fresh perspectives on how displacement, multilingualism, and cultural hybridity shape literary expression across generations and geographies.

This collection is essential reading for students, scholars and researchers in comparative literature, diaspora studies, Asian American studies, postcolonial literature, cultural studies, and world literature. It will appeal to researchers exploring transnational identity, migration narratives, multilingual poetics, and the global dimensions of contemporary literature.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Jonathan Locke Hart holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of Academia Europea. He is also Senior Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College, University of Toronto, Associate of Harvard University Herbaria, and Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He has authored over thirty books, edited numerous volumes, and published over one hundred articles and essays. A recipient of many international awards, including two Fulbright Fellowships to Harvard, he has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Leiden, UC Irvine, Peking University, and elsewhere internationally.

Shang Wu is a faculty member at the College of Foreign Languages, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include Asian American studies, translation theories, and travel writing. Recent publications include "Writing Travel as Janus: Cultural Translation as Descriptive Category for Travel Writing" in Interlitteraria and "Revisiting Asian American Poetics: A Review of Heterogeneity and a Case of Russell Leong" in Canadian Review of American Studies.