| As the world was concerned with the Tiananmen Square Event (TSE, 1989), Chinese exile writing started attracting the attention of the Western reading public. This attention reached a climax in 2000 when Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize. In contrast, the literary critics in China remained nearly silent on Chinese exile writing.;In this paper, I attempt to explore why these two worlds, the Chinese and the Western reading publics, respond differently to Chinese exile writing. Examining the works of Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, and Dai Shijie, I argue that, due to the absence of the Chinese reader and the implied presence of the Western reader in their work, such writers maintain an ambiguous position between writing and watching trauma. Furthermore, I suggest that the implied presence of the Western reader makes exile writing fall into the danger of becoming a lens that blurs the boundary between watching and voyeurism. |
