Abstract: Through an examination of Robert Bickers’1994 biographical notes “New Light on Lao She, London, and the London Missionary Society (1921-1929)” and Anne Witchard’s 2013 literary biography Lao She in London, this article identifies a peripheral perspective employed in both English accounts of Lao She’s British sojourn.  It argues that peripheral perspective -- casting a side-glance instead of a direct gaze at the subject --not only strategically responds to a paucity of historical records but also enables the authors to bring forth and reveal a more complex relationship of Lao She’s intellectual activities and London’s urban milieu life.  Sustained by their divergent social, cultural, and disciplinary concerns, Bickers’ and Witchard’s accounts complement Chinese-language life narratives of Lao She in that they propose an integrated, transnational form of historical understanding of individual sojourners.

Key words:  Lao She, sojourn, transnational life writing, peripheral perspective, modernism

Xiaoning Lu is Lecturer in Modern Chinese Culture and Language at SOAS, University of London in the United Kingdom.  Her work on modern Chinese cinema and culture has appeared in both Chinese and English academic journals including WenYiYanJiu (Research on Literature and Arts), Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Journal of Contemporary China.  She would like to thank the National Social Science Foundation of China for their funding of this research (“Compilation and Research of Overseas Life writing on Modern Chinese People,” 11&ZD138). The author can be reached by email at xl1@soas.ac.uk.