ABSTRACT
French writing continues to emerge from unusual sources. Just the other day, I reviewed lively novels and unsettling short-prose texts penned directly in French, respectively, by a Slovene (Brina Svit) and a Czech (Petr Král). In the not-too-distant past, I have dealt with arresting work produced by other unlikely Francophones, including an Armenian, an Argentinean, and an Egyptian Greek. Now a few Chinese Francophone writers have appeared. Probably others will crop up as the children born of parents arriving in France during the immigration waves of the 1970s and 1980s come of literary age. These hypothetical poets and authors will hopefully open up perspectives on the ongoing diversification of French culture—which is definitely undergoing an identity crisis—or, perhaps even better, on less predictable subject matter. However, for the time being, the Chinese writers who have adopted French as their literary language have all been born and raised in China; and they have emigrated to France for political reasons, a motivation usually inducing them, in one way or another, to remain focused on their homelands. I have selected three.
