報人、文人與旅人 : 劉以鬯在南洋

Despite Liu Yichang’s stature as a Shanghai-born émigré and Hong Kong literary icon, his early Nanyang fiction and journalistic work remain underexamined. This article reassesses his 1952–1957 stint in Singapore and Malaya through three interlinked roles: editor, writer, and sojourner, to show how transregional media circuits, rather than territorial rootedness alone, shaped a localized Mahua (Malayan Chinese) literary subjectivity and redefined how “local” literature is imagined and produced. Working as a newspaper editor during a volatile period of decolonization and the Malayan Emergency, Liu negotiated new readerships, market constraints, and regulatory demands, developing a keen sense of local socio-cultural conditions. His Nanyang-set fiction mobilizes local languages, customs, ethnographic detail, and interethnic romance, answering calls for multiracial Malayan nationhood while revealing an Orientalizing gaze and gendered asymmetries that underwrote cultural nation-building. By situating Liu’s contribution to Mahua literature within a transregional media network, the article reframes the localization of Mahua literature through a cross-border lens, illuminating the entanglements of diaspora, gender politics, and cultural identity in the making of postwar Mahua writing.