Ying Chen

Ying Chen's own crossing is evidently one of the mind, achieved “with the help of translations in the first instance, then through language learning.” Thus ocean-crossing is less a matter of geographical displacement than of travel through time, languages, and cultures: all components of the self. The reader is aware of two parallel trajectories: that of the female protagonist; that of the writer. Following the former on a fraught voyage that sees her crossing to and fro between lives, imagined or real, and witnessing her progress, the reader also becomes aware of the writer's own project unfolding and evolving alongside. This essay interrogates those parallel journeys: that of a character determined not to fit within a specific time or place but to find an identity outside them, and that of an author in search of the style that will match the quest. The notion of “poethics” encompasses those two exemplary pursuits. Similarly, I argue that these journeys are inscribed in a limitrophe space, a bordering area open for exploration that simultaneously asserts separateness and shared proximity, a symbiotic environment that sustains the quest

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