11 Welcoming the Other Hospitality and Citizenship in Chinese American Fiction Melissa Lee The languages of hospitality, and the concepts of host and guest, visitor and foreigner, have contributed to a contemporary understanding of citizenship in transnational Chinese fiction in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Representations of traveler mobility and citizen situatedness reveal the instability of cultural individualities where claims on one’s identity are understood only in relation to others. These manifestations of shifting cultural identity are revealed in metaphorical language and imagery, and are articulated through host and guest relationships in situations of migra- tion and mobility. In particular, this article focuses on successful bids for citizenship in Chinese contemporary fiction, where hospitality is explored as both an act of welcome and an act of hostility. Attending to terms such as “ownership,” “host,” “visitor,” and “guest,” I establish a hierarchy of power relations which shows how citizenship functions as securitization in these chosen texts. Concepts such as immigration, asylum, and temporary and permanent residency establish boundary lines that divide people into citi- zens, noncitizens, and foreigners. These themes are then articulated into a language involving characterizations of hosts and guests, and the language of hospitality is sanctified and used in statecraft to represent the demar- cated borders of a nation state. This chapter will discuss Derrida’s extensive writings on hospitality, including the concept of xenos (foreigner), and the absolute right of the host to identify the stranger and as such, through this mandatory identification process, contain the threat that transnational sub- jects might pose. The texts that I will analyze in this chapter (all written post-2000) include works by Chinese authors who write about immigration, and who have experienced transition and transnationalism in their own personal biographies. Ha Jin’s A Free Life (2007) and A Map of Betrayal (2014) are both about main characters who are raising families in between countries and citizenships. In both novels, the immigrants are welcomed in that they make successful bids for citizenship, and a process of assimilation follows. However, the difference between the two texts is that in A Free Life, the landed immigrant is in earnest about relocation, whereas in A Map of Betrayal, the immigrant is a spy. In Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy (2014), hospitality and migration become crucially related to gender difference