Finishing Business in the Chinese Diaspora

This event is free and open to the public.

The USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies welcomes Nan Z. Da to our campus to explore the binge-worthy immigrant TV dramas of the 1990s that captivated audiences in China and abroad.

In the 1990s, Chinese audiences binge-watched TV shows about Chinese immigrants, written by expats who had returned to China. These multi-episode dramas offered gritty, realistic portrayals of life in North American cities and Chinese immigrant communities, exploring the highs and lows of migration: language barriers, labor struggles, family separation, domestic conflict, and interpersonal tensions.

This talk examines two TV-adapted novels by Glen Cao (曹桂林) and Chang Lin (常琳), exploring the circumstances of their publication, adaptation, and the tradition from which they drew. It argues that “finishing business”—the settling of scores and resolution of tensions in these stories—reveals as much about human emotion and storytelling as unresolved narratives, a deliberate cultural strategy that compels audiences to continually confront and re-evaluate underlying issues.

Bio: 
Dr. Nan Z. Da is an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Intransitive Encounters: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia UP, 2018) and The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025).

This event is co-sponsored by the Asian Studies program and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.