Literature in both Chinese and English written by people of Chinese descent born in Singapore and Malaysia offers a wealth of insight into the multiethnic, multilingual societies of those countries as viewed from the perspective of the majority ethnic group (in Singapore) and the largest minority (in Malaysia). It also provides fertile territory for investigating notions and representations of Chineseness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Meanwhile, the increasingly influential field of sinophone studies has ensured that broad questions concerning “Chinese” cultures and identities existing beyond China's borders continue to fuel productive debates. Given these circumstances, it is regrettable that the archive of scholarship on this literature remains somewhat impoverished; there are fewer English-language secondary sources on the Chinese-language literature portion, though, happily, some excellent additions (primarily book chapters or articles) have recently been made. E. K. Tan's superb Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World enriches the archive by keenly analyzing English and Chinese novels from Malaysia-born authors alongside the multilingual theater work of a Singaporean playwright in a book-length study. Tan draws upon an impressive array of theoretical resources to show how these texts reinvent Chineseness in Southeast Asia and prefaces his literary analysis with a rich and nuanced overview of the discourse concerning Chineseness, the Chinese diaspora, and the sinophone.

It is worth considering some key premises underlying Tan's study. Tan views the Nanyang Chinese experience as unique and creolized, and clarifies in an early endnote that “Nanyang” denotes the “South Seas” and connotes Southeast Asia. Since the broad time-frame of his study starts with 1965 (p. 4), when Singapore's expulsion from the newly independent Federation of Malaya meant that Singapore and Malaysia would develop separately, it is significant that Tan combines the sinophone identities in Singapore and Malaysia via the term “Nanyang Chinese.” Of course, the neighboring countries share a colonial past and the experience of Japanese occupation during World War II, and have similarly creolized societies; this decision may also relate to Tan's comparative literature background. Tan also prefers the identity category of the sinophone over that of Chinese, which he asserts “creates a framework that subjugates individuals and robs them of their agency to obtain self-knowledge by privileging national, racial, and cultural discourses” (p. 8). Insofar as Chineseness remains viable, it is “as an identity category that is always under construction” (p. 13). For the writers in Tan's study, China is an imaginary homeland that remains forever lost; Tan's analysis attends carefully to how the writers relate to their original homelands of Borneo, Malaysia, and Singapore along with their imaginary homeland of China.

Tan's study features writers, texts, and creative practices that deserve more attention than they have received to date. In chapter 1, Tan elucidates the process through which the Chinese Singaporean protagonist in Vyvyane Loh's World War II narrative Breaking the Tongue (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), set in Singapore and written predominantly in English (some Chinese appears towards the end), moves away from his father's British-worshipping identity and, through the assistance of certain characters and having undergone torture by Japanese occupiers, eventually adopts a translational sinophone identity (p. 59). Chapter 2 primarily deals with Chang Kuei-hsing's Qun xiang (Elephant herd, Taibei: Shibao wenhua chuban qiye gufen youxian gongsi, 1998), part of Chang's Rainforest Trilogy, which chronicles the protagonist's search for his uncle, who had retreated into the Borneo jungle to become a leader in Sarawak's communist guerrilla movement. Tan insightfully considers how Chang manipulates history, myth, and writing in the single language of Mandarin—despite Borneo's multilingualism—in order to convey a distinct sinophone Malaysian identity and experience, and to show how sinophone writings need not simply describe states of homelessness or exile, they can construct “the state of mind of being at home” (p. 164). In chapter 3, Tan valuably examines two plays by Kuo Pao Kun—Mama Looking for Her Cat (1998) and Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (1995)—along with Kuo's concept of “Open Culture” to illuminate the playwright's critique of state language policies and visions for a Singaporean cultural identity. Tan observes that Kuo's Open Culture diverges from the Singapore government's policies of multiracialism in that it “celebrates the intermingling of cultures (past and present, local and global) beyond the constraints of racial and linguistic origins” (p. 171).

Theoretically, Tan's astute engagement with Shu-mei Shih's conceptualization of the sinophone stands out. Tan prods us to see sinophone identities, identity formation, and the sinophone relational network as translational, thus highlighting aspects of the sinophone that argue further for its significance as a paradigm as well as a historical, cultural, and political phenomenon. This perspective is innovative and important, but it merited perhaps more attention than it received, amidst the book's other analyses. Hopefully this will prove to be one of the book's insights that others, or Tan himself, will pick up and run (further) with in the future.