Haiyan Lee's captivating study of the figures of the stranger in Chinese literature and popular culture powerfully connects Chinese cultural studies, transnational literary and critical studies, and studies of ethics and political philosophy. Lee demonstrates a remarkable breadth in marshalling critical scholarship from a diverse range of fields and an impressive analytical depth in close-reading a selection of textual and visual materials in their critical contexts. The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination breaks new ground in the field of Chinese studies in its judicious treatment of spirits, animals, unattached women, migrants, class enemies, and foreigners in Chinese literature and popular culture as training grounds for the articulation of the Chinese moral imagination.

Lee groups the figures of the stranger in three parts: the alien kind, fictive kin, and friends and foes, and each part contains a pair of chapters. In part one, chapter 1, “The Benighted and the Enchanted,” explores the ways in which twentieth-century Chinese writers construct religion as an estranged “heterotopia” and how it might serve as vital sources of meaning in Chinese moral and social life. In this context, Lee offers fascinating new readings of canonical texts such as “New Year's Sacrifice,” The White-Haired Girl, Soul Mountain, and “Here Comes the Ghost Eater,” to place religion as one form of modern enchantment for the training of stranger sociality (p. 70). Chapter 2, “Animals Are Us,” examines how animals serve as the preeminent strangers in human society whose state of being other-than-human is also why they are indispensable to human beings. The porous boundaries between humanity and animality and the refusal of ontological distinction between humans and animals in early Chinese thought planted seeds for the pervasive tropes of transmigration in Chinese literature, as well as stories featuring figures like Monkey in Journey to the West, who emerged as a “greater-than-human figure in order to help lift humanity out of its delusions and base pursuits” (p. 80). Lee offers a fascinating reading of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in this context, using its male protagonist Ximen's animalistic reincarnations to reject China's socialist past while offering an ambivalent take on its present and future. Treating Wolf Totem much more critically, Lee concludes that one must not only live but also think with animals and move beyond sympathy to forge new norms, institutions, and processes in defiance of sovereign hegemony.

Following spirits and animals as the ultimate strangers, part two, “Fictive Kin,” centers on the figures of unattached women and migrants. Chapter 3, “The Power and Pollution of the Stranger Woman,” zooms in on the unattached woman whose dangerousness is thought to possess demonic powers for some, while bringing revolutionary changes to others. In this context, Lee reads A Flower in a Sea of Sin and the various retellings of the Sai Jinhua story as potent demonstrations of a half-century's “reform, rebellion, retrenchment, and revolution in the waning years of the Qing empire” (p. 129). She cites political and feminist theorist Bonnie Honig to conclude the chapter by arguing that the stranger woman makes possible “the interstitial public sphere” as “a realm of new relations and realities” beyond the control of patriarchal kinship or the state (p. 157). Chapter 4, “The Country and the City,” takes the migrants between the country and the city as its focal point and examines the image of the English teacher, a sent-down youth from the city to the country, in the novel English, and the maids and tenants in the television series 28 Maids at Professor Tian's and 28 Tenants at Professor Tian's. These case studies substantiate Lee's claim that “sections of the population were estranged from the body politic and forced to play surrogate strangers in a nation that had resolutely abolished stranger sociality” (p. 193).

Part three, “Friends and Foes,” foregrounds class enemies and foreigners as the ultimate strangers in a divided society. In chapter 5, “The Enemy Within,” Lee borrows insights from history, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy to shed light on the process in which a local tyrant was turned into the archetype of the landlord class and enemy of the socialist nation in the Water Dungeon narratives and the Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures (p. 202). In chapter 6, “Foreign Devils,” Lee emphasizes the contingency and marginality of “cosmopolitanism,” and uses it to consider a form of subaltern encounter with “the foreigner,” as enacted by peasants in the controversial film Devils on the Doorsteps, and by domestic helpers in the popular television series Nannies for Foreigners. Lee concludes that a cosmopolitan ethos does not necessarily presuppose mobility but must be alive to experiences of dislocation brought on by war or global capitalism, and at tension with hegemonic nationalism (p. 246).

Lee demonstrates her ambitious engagement with much broader concerns beyond Chinese literary and cultural studies in her conclusion. Inspired by Emmanuel Lévinas and considering the encounter with a stranger “the most naked, and sublime, moment” in understanding morality (p. 286), Lee argues for the power of fiction as the best dress rehearsal for the performance of the theater of stranger sociality and the exercise of our moral faculty. She further touches upon the cognitive approach to literary and cultural studies and its power in connecting literature with the ethical goal of justice. For her, “literature casts a beguiling ‘veil of ignorance’ over us so that we can inhabit other selves, other perspectives, and other worlds” (p. 301).

Lee concludes her study by insisting on the power of literature in inviting its readers to embrace the world as a foreign land in the spirit of an exile. It is through our lifelong apprenticeship in literature, she compellingly argues, that we can learn to be moral and just by experiencing the lives of others. In this sense, Lee's book continues her deep engagement with moral philosophy in her previous work, Revolution of the Heart, Footnote ¹ and ushers in exciting new research on justice at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, critical legal studies, and cognitive science. Anyone concerned with issues of morality and justice in our contemporary world should carefully engage with Lee's bold interdisciplinary scholarship and join any possible debate it might generate.