Narrating Ethnic Performativity in Chinese American Novels

Chinatown has been shaped by Orientalist fantasies as an exotic, mysterious and even dangerous space. This research turns to Chinese American literature to investigate how this ethnic enclave and Chinese identity itself are constructed under racial scrutiny and compelled to perform. Through a comparative analysis of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls (2009) and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020), I examine Chinatown as both a physical and metaphorical stage, where Chinese Americans must negotiate dominant expectations of “Chineseness.”

In particular, Shanghai Girls traces the lives of two sisters in mid-20th-century Los Angeles, whose survival depends on adopting unstable, performed identities. With a similar focus on performed ethnicity, Interior Chinatown satirises contemporary Hollywood, following a Taiwanese American extra’s pursuit of the role of “Kung Fu Guy”. Through first-person female and second-person male perspectives, these works trace a historical arc of Chinese American performativity from the Angel Island Immigration Station in the 20th century to persistent media stereotyping in the 21st century.

In an era of growing hegemony and strained U.S.–China relations, this narrative research on Chinatown novels interrogates how marginalised groups have been compelled to enact acceptable versions of their ethnic identities and to explore possibilities for liberation beyond the script.

Shuyue Liu is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham, working on the Chinese diaspora and AI for literary criticism. Her PhD thesis asks how Chinese American literature narrates migration and evokes readers’ empathy. Her latest publications include “Empathy, Curiosity, and Critique: An AI-Assisted Mapping of Non-Academic Reception of Asian American Literature” in Textual Practice (2025), “Space, Time, and Progression: Narrating Chinese Americans Between Worlds in Literature” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2025), “Amy Tan’s Thing-Narrative in The Valley of Amazement” in Critical Arts (2024), and “A Multidimensional and Digital Humanistic Analysis of Style in Amy Tan’s Novels” in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2023).

MCI’s PGR workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the Manchester China Institute. They seek to bring together students, faculty and staff who can best provide feedback as postgraduate researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

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