China’s foreign student programs, many initiated under the banner of the unity of socialist countries and Afro-Asian solidarity, were originally designed to project international recognition of the newly established People’s Republic of China. Yet, these initiatives unfolded within an environment where government agencies closely monitored public expression and everyday life. For foreign students, daily life was mediated by state-managed hospitality, limited mobility, and surveillance. On the Chinese side, distrust of foreigners was pervasive at that time and actively cultivated by the authorities. All this caused foreign students to experience a feeling akin to what today is known as political depression.

In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’ in nineteenth-century and contemporary Euro-American contexts. Using these two novels as examples, this essay traces the dialectic of self-representation and interpellation, the afterlives of transgenerational trauma, and the imbrication of aspiration with pleasure. It further elucidates how Zhang entwines debates on universal human rights amid anthropogenic catastrophe with an analysis of individual responsibility under transnational capitalism.