Regardless of how they approached the classical canon of Chinese literature, and irrespective of their internal diversity, the major writers of New Literature shared a common trait: they actively sought creative inspiration in a literary universe whose cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries transcended that canon. Their interest in different intellectual, aesthetic, and literary trends beyond China inspired them to not only consume imported texts and translations from abroad, but compelled many of them to physically venture beyond China in search of this knowledge and to then “translate the world” for readers back home. For many, the experience of living and traveling abroad itself motivated them to become writers. Against the bleak outlook of a newly established Chinese republic ravaged by internal and external conflicts, New Literature confronts (and reproduces) a “colonial modernity” simultaneously oppressive and emancipatory: while paving the way for humanist liberation from the bondage of “feudal” traditions, this modernity also exposes the dehumanizing material conditions of global industrial capitalism.⁴ Tempered by a sobering cynicism regarding these conditions, the sojourns of May Fourth authors and their creative works beyond China—as well as their selective discovery and appropriation of the “foreign”—produce an idealized dream of modernity as cultural enlightenment.

As a principal impulse of New Literature, the quest for enlightenment and humanistic emancipation transformed the South Seas as a Chinese literary trope. From a primitive, feminized, and fantastical realm of “southern barbarians” in the patriarchal worldview of imperial China, the Nanyang now came to symbolize the simultaneously binding and liberating conditions of colonial modernity that inspired the overseas voyages and outward orientations of modern Chinese authors. Many of these authors traveled to (and through) colonial Southeast Asia: whether a long-term destination or a short stopover to points elsewhere, the Nanyang left enough of an impression to be worthy of creative composition. These travel narratives are New Literature’s works of “South Seas color” (Nanyang secai). Though literary histories might remember them otherwise, canonical authors such as Xu Zhimo, Xu Dishan, Lao She, and Yu Dafu were all at one point “southbound writers” (nanlai zuojia; literally “writers who came south”).

Not to be written off as New Literature’s detour into exoticism, the impressionistic South Seas color in the short fiction of Xu Zhimo and Xu Dishan is integral to modern Chinese literary enlightenment. It suggests a broader conception of and inquiry into “the world” than typically attributed to the New Culture movement. South Seas color encompasses exchanges with, and sometimes misreadings of, manifold “others” who inhabit or navigate the cultural cross-waters among East, South, Southeast Asian, and Western experiences of colonial modernity. As narrative content, South Seas color denotes both an object of representation—typically a colonial Southeast Asian environment and South or Southeast Asian peoples—and a subjectivity of expression: the modern Chinese transoceanic traveler. The interaction between the traveler and his (as the authors, narrators, and protagonists are mostly male) object of representation (often female) produces local impressions—flavors, textures, colors, and sensations—that, although superficial, fleeting, and sometimes “indescribable,” prompt serious reflection and self-examination. As narrative form, South Seas color implies a travelogue style, even in the genre of short fiction. In the short stories of Xu Zhimo and Xu Dishan, the Nanyang is an itinerary as much as a destination of travel. This itinerary is noncanonical: it produces a brand of cosmopolitanism through historically overlooked axes of cultural comparison. This “discrepant cosmopolitanism” is shaped as much by the transcolonial network between China and Southeast Asia as it is the canonical blend of Chinese, Western, and Japanese elements attributed to the global paradigm of Chinese literary modernity.

To “save” China, therefore, was to “integrate her into the modern world” by freeing her from a “cosmic anomaly of immobility and stagnation.”⁸ This mission represented what C. T. Hsia famously referred to as modern Chinese literature’s “obsession with China” and its “moral burden.”⁹ What began as a political demonstration on May Fourth against the governments who orchestrated and agreed to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles blossomed into an expansive, energetic exploration and importation of “new thought” (xin sixiang) from a global array of sources, resulting in the emergence of diverse (and sometimes opposed) ideologies and literary camps. Though the authors of New Literature varied greatly, there is general consensus about their overall literary ambitions: defeating foreign imperial aggression could not begin from a revalorization of “the native past,” but rather from the exposure and eradication of the “feudal tradition” that made China particularly vulnerable to external exploitation.¹⁰

To this end, New Literature relied on establishing a clear, inviolable temporal and geospatial dichotomy: a temporal rupture between an enlightened modernity and a crippled tradition, and a geospatial demarcation of the boundaries between “us,” the Chinese nation (as a single territory and people) and “them,” the foreigners (predominantly Western and Japanese aggressors). New Literature’s prescribed content is deceptively simplistic, merely requiring the “realistic” depiction of the nation’s victimization at the hands of foreign imperialism and native feudalism. Mainland Chinese historians further delimit the scope of New Literature as a Marxian project of class struggle. Though writers explored a vast array of subjects such as “peasants, women and intellectuals, as well as the urban problems of alienation and isolation,” these themes get absorbed under the rubric of class-based oppression.¹¹ May Fourth activists distinguished their movement from previous political, cultural, and literary reforms through their articulation of and appeal to “the masses.”¹² As opposed to the esoteric scholarly essay or the serialized sensational popular novel, authors of New Literature advocated fictional realism in an often figurative, allegorical, short-story mode adapted from Western literary trends: by distilling a complex, contemporary social crisis into a single anecdote, short fiction could poignantly agitate readers with a modern sense of immediacy. While fictional realism ranged from the subjective reality of the individual (provided by the often unreliable perspective of a first-person narrator) to an omniscient one, it was ultimately supposed to awaken readers to broader social truths.¹³

Adopting fictional realism and targeting the masses meant eschewing the classical literary script (wenyan wen)—the common written medium of the scholar-elite—to capture the vernaculars of the “nation’s people” (guomin), particularly when rendering spoken dialogue. The impulse toward vernacular realism was actually one toward linguistic plurality—not unification—that shattered rather than consolidated the collective ideal of a “common script” (tongwen) among the Sinitic languages. Yet the vernacular movement (baihua yundong) intended to foster a unified—not pluralized—notion of national culture. The institutionalization of “standard Chinese” as a common vernacular script—literally “pure speech writing” (baihua wen)—was based on conformity to a monolingual standard: the grammatical patterns and vocabulary of spoken Mandarin and its northern Chinese variants. The vernacular movement naturalized the perception that standard Chinese reflected the social reality of a nationwide readership. As the “National Language” (Guoyu), it was imagined as the “Common Speech” (Putonghua) of the masses. As the medium of New Literature, standard Chinese was more the creation of a new social reality than it was its reflection.

Of course, the formal experimentation of New Literature was not a mere exercise in propagating a standard vernacular. Exposing an overemphasis on the vernacular script as modern Chinese literature’s primary revolution in form and as its foundational “technology,” scholars have revealed other novel tools and technologies heralding its arrival. These include the advent of visual media such as film and photography.¹⁴ Modern Chinese literary histories characterize May Fourth writers as the pioneers of new forms who experimented with novel “tools” and “absorbed all the main trends in Western culture—romanticism, realism, naturalism, and symbolism.”¹⁵ These writers were well versed in Western literature, whether in its original languages or in Chinese or Japanese translation. Beyond that, they also spent at least some portion of their young adulthood studying abroad or sojourning in places such as Japan, Europe, and North America. The Western and/or Japanese education these authors received was a major contributor to the enlightenment ideal of May Fourth discourse: they saw experimentation with Western literary forms (sometimes patterned after similar Japanese experimentations) as necessary for Chinese literary, intellectual, and spiritual development.¹⁶

Given the scholarly emphasis on the lengthy periods that many canonical writers of New Literature spent studying, working, or traveling abroad in the West and Japan, advancements in steam-engine technology that revolutionized transoceanic travel in the late-nineteenth century should likewise be recognized as another profound technological influence on Chinese literary modernity, for these steamships made possible the writers’ distant sojourns and returns.¹⁷ Although travels to Japan and Western countries were no doubt integral to the creative impulses of Chinese literary modernity, these sites were not the only travel destinations of significance. Yet modern Chinese literary histories are generally bound by a tripartite China-West-Japan paradigm that masquerades as “the world.”¹⁸ This paradigm precludes broader readings of modern Chinese literary enlightenment and nationalism: namely, it pins these ideals to the deceptively clear-cut spatio-temporal dichotomies between a native feudalism and a foreign imperialism while reducing them to a literary blend of “Western form” and “Chinese content.”

The China-West-Japan paradigm of New Literature fails to capture its truly global character, mainly by suppressing its transcolonial dimension. Consider the following story, which follows a fairly conventional May Fourth plot line: a young man aspires to receive a modern, Western education, but his more traditional father opposes, particularly because the Western imperial powers have disgraced his country. The young man falls in love with a childhood friend, but his father opposes the match because the couple’s horoscopes do not align. The young pair allegedly commits suicide by drowning themselves in a lake—their ultimate tragedy drawing attention to the larger social forces (feudalism and imperialism) that control their fate. This is the plot to “Birds of a Feather” (“Mingming niao”; literally “birds of the same fate”), a short story first published in China’s Literary Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) in January 1921. The author, Xu Dishan, is one of New Literature’s foundational authors. The plot in which two young people navigate a broadening sphere of progressive ideas and cultural influences, but are thwarted by their parents’ adherence to feudalistic superstition, is actually the story’s least fascinating and most clichéd feature. Rather, the appeal of “Birds of a Feather” is that it is considered New Literature’s first work with a truly “exotic tone” (yiyu qingdiao).¹⁹ The story takes place entirely outside China and none of the characters are Chinese.²⁰ Instead, they are Burmese, and the story is set in Rangoon.

Xu Dishan wrote the imaginative “Birds of a Feather” from personal experience: from 1913–15, he lived in Rangoon as a Chinese-language instructor at a local middle school. In the story, Xu frequently refers to Burmese sites and historical events from the British colonial era. For example, Jialing’s father harbors long-standing resentments over the British construction of a military post on the grounds of the holy Shwedagon Pagoda in 1852. This outrage morally justifies his irate opposition to his son’s desire to attend an Anglophone school established by Christian missionaries. After debating the matter, Jialing and his father reach a compromise, agreeing that he will attend the Rangoon School of Advanced Studies, since the institution apparently strives harder to “preserve Burmese customs.”²¹ Through the colonial Burmese setting (rather than the imperial centers of Japan or the West) and Burmese characters (non-Chinese subjectivities), Xu Dishan’s discrepant overseas route of “enlightenment” challenges the “obsession with China” that permeates the origins of a Chinese literary modernity constituted from a China-West-Japan global paradigm.

Although he was the first author of New Literature to compose a work of “exoticism” on colonial Southeast Asia that reflected his travel biography and cultural interests, Xu Dishan was by no means an anomaly. Most of the authors who embarked on transoceanic voyages to Euro...