ABSTRACT
In an exchange of emails during the summer of 2019, Chinese Canadian author Ying Chen discusses with Christine Lorre-Johnston some of the key notions linked to cosmopolitanism and migration that are explored in the rest of this book. This deliberate exchange of “letters,” preceded by Lorre-Johnston’s presentation of the writer, takes Chen to reflect on the crucial role of books and translation in the circulation of ideas, and the sad fact that books may be an endangered species, like letter-writing, in our digital era of fast communication. Chen also meditates on her sense of being homeless and on her relation to place, in the context of climate change and of our search for sustainability on this planet, and describes her experience of a simple life on a small island in British Columbia, where she feels most at peace with the world, in body and mind. She considers the experience of racism of Chinese immigrants to British Columbia and concludes that Vancouver is a multiracial rather than a multicultural city. As for cosmopolitanism, it is above all an ideal—unlike globalization which manifests itself primarily as the practical circulation of capital—or a mental zone, a utopia that turns its back to the “gray space” where ordinary life follows its course.
