It is not coincidental that all the diasporic writers examined in Chapter 3 write in English, now the dominant world language. In The Idea of English Ethnicity, Robert Young asserts that “Englishness was created for the diaspora— an ethnic identity designed for those who were precisely not English. […] It is, finally, English itself […] which holds the Anglo- Saxon world together fraternally in its impatient, perpetual circulations” (2008, 1– 6). But what does this mean for those who are not part of the Anglo- Saxon diaspora but who are nonetheless “in” English, an English perpetually haunted by another language? This chapter examines the ways in which English signifies metonymically in four recent novels from China and the Chinese diaspora, chosen because they all foreground English as an enigmatic reference point: Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese- English Dictionary for Lovers; Wang Gang, English; Ruyan Xu, The Forgotten Languages of Shanghai; Ouyang Yu, The English Class.

English and its meanings proliferate in unexpected ways. To illustrate this, let me relate a confluence of disparate events: I am asked to assess the research of a faculty member in a Southeast Asian university and discover only belatedly that the person is an applied linguist in second language acquisition. It dawns on me that I was contacted because of being institutionally (and globally in the terms of internet search engines) affiliated with English, but clearly this domain includes specific English- language teaching in the Southeast Asian context. I am definitely not an expert in linguistics but have dabbled around its edges as part of my attempts to parse the theoretical implications (and turbulence) of operating in languages other than one's first language. We are all split within language, but what are the effects and affects of being split among languages as well? The second event was my exchange with a colleague in Asian studies who questioned what she perceived as my attempts to police the ways in which a literature course was being taught in women's and gender studies (an interdisciplinary field after all) by a nonnative speaker of English.