Yang Kui's polyvalent identity and the question of authenticity

This chapter examines the long career and extraordinary life narrative of Yang Kui. Yang was a member of the transcolonial generation that experienced the transition from Japanese colonial rule to the Chinese Nationalist regime. The long arc of his career contains a record of the extraordinary event and the contested Japanese and Chinese identities that resulted from it. The writer-activist personifies the doubly ruptured colonized self that sought rehabilitation from the trauma. The chapter deals with three phases of Yang Kui’s life narrative: the proletarian phase, the transcolonial phase with the extensive revisions of his published works, and the eremitic or life-writing phase.