FROM THE EUROPEAN SOUTH 2 http://europeansouth.postcolonialitalia.it ISSN 2531-4130 Bordin 109 Tiananmen Fiction: Literary Insurgencies in the Diasporic Chinese Community Elisa Bordin University of Padua ABSTRACT This article investigates the literary representation of the 1989 protest of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, in three texts that can be ascribed to what Belinda Kong defines as ‘Tiananmen fiction’, that is, works produced by writers in the Chinese diaspora with Tiananmen as a central narrative event. The analyzed novels, Ha Jin’s The Crazed (2002), Xialou Guo’s I Am China (2014), and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), all written in English, take some distance from other more traditional themes in the literary output of the Asian diasporic community, usually linked to the iden- titarian issue, to embrace a clear political and ethical stance. Although produced in distinct geographical areas (the US, Canada, and the UK) and by authors differently ascribed to the Chinese diaspora, the selected texts share an interest in the historical event of Tiananmen Square as an occasion to reflect on questions of human dignity, national history, and the revolutionary role the arts have in totalitarian regimes – all themes that merge in the memory of Tiananmen. The current emergence of such issues in the literary production of the Chinese diaspora offers an opportunity to discuss the representation of Chineseness both at home and abroad, providing a resistant positioning against the official history of the country that has silenced the event, and highlighting the importance of insurgency as a tool for the survival of human dignity. I can’t compare life with death, truth with imagining, my palms with the back of my hands. Tonight, the night that never ends, a tree grows out of tear, and from the tree many desperate hands are hanging. In your dark night my words fail to form. Liu Xia, “Dark Night” (1997) 1 1. Tiananmen Square in facts and fiction The architect Chen Gang posited Beijing’s Tiananmen Square as a ‘zero point’ . He used the father of Marxism Friedrich Engels’ words to explain his own vision of Tiananmen: “Zero is a definite point from which measurements are taken along a line, in one direction positively, in the other negatively. Hence the zero point is the location on which all others are dependent, to which they are all related, and by which they are all determined. Wherever we come upon zero, it represents something very definite: the limit. Thus it has greater significance than all the real magnitudes by which it is bounded” (as reported in Thien 2016, 297; italics in the