China, Malaysia, and millennial diasporic identity in Tash Aw’s The Face and Five Star Billionaire

ABSTRACT

Chinese diasporic literature is alert to China’s rise as a major political and economic power in the 21st century. In the novel Five Star Billionaire (2013), Chinese Malaysian author Tash Aw focuses on the megacity of Shanghai to capture China’s economic and cultural vibrancy in the new millennium. Aw’s novel shows that he is not only excited but also trepidatious about the implications of 21st-century China’s emergence as a superpower. In his non-fiction essay The Face: Strangers on a Pier (2016), Aw represents the diasporic Chinese subject as a world traveller and cosmopolite, someone who embraces the exhilaration of transnational mobility. Unconstrained by the demands and imperatives of the nation state, Aw’s huáqiáo (overseas Chinese) readily travels abroad to tap global opportunities as well as to meditate on the delineations of Chinese diasporic identity in the new millennium.

KEYWORDS:

• Tash Aw
• Malaysia
• Shanghai
• diaspora
• mobility
• millennium

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Walter S.H. Lim

Walter S.H. Lim is an associate professor of English literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (1998); John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (2006); and Narratives of Diaspora: Representations of Asia in Chinese American Literature (2013). He also coedited a collection of essays titled The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia (2010).