Chinese or Something ‘Else’? Yan Ge’s Metalinguistic Debut

As one of the most promising voices in contemporary Chinese literature, Yan Ge 颜歌 (b. 1984), has been exploring a variety of themes and styles in her already prolific production in Chinese. After traveling abroad and then moving to Ireland in 2015, she increasingly became interested in her position as an in-between writer. Finally, with her most recent work Elsewhere (2023), she approaches the practice of writing in a foreign language to engage in a profound discussion about the power and the limits of language itself. Elsewhere is a collection of short stories written in English that span from ancient times to the contemporary world, moving from China across Europe and beyond. Yan Ge’s plots revolve around love, sex, poetry, and death, intertwining reality with the surreal and sewing together different interpretations of the diasporic experience. This paper focuses on the author’s creative use of language as an example of translingualism, analyzing her depiction of identity and distance encoded in the narrative text. Being a Europe-based Sinophone writer, Yan Ge offers a unique perspective on the hybridized identities characterizing “Sinophone Europe,” testing the power of language in defining not only the experience of international migration as it is traditionally understood, but also the relationships that affect the migrant subject, even when the crossed borders are only in one’s mind.