ABSTRACT
As the end of the last century approached, two writers situated on opposite sides of the Atlantic began, almost simultaneously, to undertake a pair of unrelated literary projects that would directly engage a single, all-butforgotten historical milieu. The year that captured their literary imagination was 1937, the pinnacle of the Republican era as well as the year of the infamous Nanjing Massacre. Born in 1936, the very year his novel begins, Zhang Beihai (pen-name of Chang Wen-yi ) is too young to remember the events portrayed in his work. Ye Zhaoyan, who was born twenty-one years later, is even further removed from the historical era in question. Nevertheless, in 1996, the Nanjing-based Ye Zhaoyan published the novel Yijiusanqi nian de aiqing (Nanjing 1937: a love story) (1996), an encyclopedic reconstruction and chronicle of the final days of the Republican capital. In that same year, in his TriBeCa condo in Manhattan, Zhang Beihai began the research which would ultimately culminate in the publication, four years later, of his own novel Xiayin (Hidden knight-errant; translated as Swallow) (2000), a nostalgic re-creation of the historical, literary, and topological configurations of Republican-era Beiping [Beijing]. In their respective narrative constructions, literary modes, and strategies of urban representation, both Swallow and Nanjing 1937: A Love Story function as sentimental, nostalgic gestures to the past. However, in both cases we not only are presented with a reconstructed literary portrait of two 1930s Chinese cities and a contemporary reinvention of popular Republican-era literary
genres, but also are offered new possible trajectories for these modes of literary and historical representation.
