A site for self-fashioning

Ann Bridge’s first well-received novel Peking Picnic (1932) demonstrates her concern regarding the self-fashioning of expatriate women who physically live in Beijing, are emotionally attached to Britain, and socially engage in a local neighbourhood. The article traces the aesthetic presentation of expatriate women’s everyday life, including their living environment, social circle, and daily conversations, in Peking Picnic as a gendered counterpoint to the male-dominated academic and diplomatic contexts. Bridge’s transcultural self-fashioning, not a simple hybrid form of both home and host cultures but a fluid and heterogeneous sense of local identity coming into form in her negotiation of British, imperial, and gendered identities in daily life, shapes and is shaped by her engagement in non-binary possibilities, striking a fine balance between Chinese and British, fictional and factual, ordinary and political positions. Bridge reconstructs a local identity for expatriate women that coexists with their imperial identities, although the affective attachment to the locales is partially at odds with the imperial pattern on which they are drawn. This practice illustrates a means of transcultural self-fashioning in everyday life for British expatriate women in their association with Beijing’s locales as a challenge to patriarchal and imperial discourses

Ethnography · Everyday life · Expatriate · Formative assessment · Qualitative research · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Chinese history and philosophy · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics