My research compares two types of computer viruses and the subsequent transformations of communication and mutual understanding in a work of fiction and a fictional short film.

In Once Again, the third episode of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Hamaguchi Ryusuke imagines a world shaped by the computer virus Xeron, where people cannot use the internet to release any information. Telegrams and physical letters return to everyday life. In this context, two middle-aged women meet in front of Sendai Station and seem to recognize each other as former high school classmates. After a long conversation, one of them begins to doubt who she has met. Eventually, they realize they did not know each other before. However, their accidental encounter offers an opportunity to reflect on their past: they each imagine the other as someone they knew decades ago and express their innermost thoughts. In this process, although the original classmates are absent, the two women are still able to voice their aspirations and regrets. In other words, in a world without modern communication technology, both women use their imaginations to transcend temporal and spatial boundaries, revealing their true feelings face-to-face.

In The Land of Little Rain, a collection of six short stories, the author Wu Ming-yi imagines a global virus named “A Crack in the Cloud,” which can package someone’s data from the internet and deliver the key to the package to someone who knows the owner well. The recipients are able to uncover the unknown pasts of their closest acquaintances, especially when they encounter personal predicaments. Their minds are thus led to history and secrets through imagination. With the key, the protagonists create connections through emotions and aesthetics that transcend modern technology. Although people invent various communication tools and applications, they often cannot fully express their feelings to others. Yet, in these stories, the breakdown of privacy creates space for understanding and empathy.

Both works imagine a postmodern world without reliable modern communication technologies. However, these imaginaries do not predict a future plagued by a crisis of trust. Instead, both viruses aggregate people’s emotions and feelings over time, breaking down the boundary between physical reality and the reality of the heart and mind. Through these accidental encounters, mutual understanding is achieved at turning points of epiphanies.

British writer Francis Spufford's Golden Hill (2016) and Chinese-American writer Rebecca.F.Kuang's Babel (2022) are recent and award-winning novels. At the same time, the authors of the two novels belong to the academic school of writers, who graduated from Cambridge and Oxford respectively. Therefore, both novels are interesting and worthy of literary interpretation. Although Babel is a novel full of magic and legend and Golden Hill strives for realism, they both deal with the translation of mother tongues into English or the preservation of the original appearance of the language, and the two novels respectively show the overseas Chinese or their mixed-race descendants' pursuit of historical issues in England and America in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of nineteenth century. Through a series of actions, such as the self-destruction of the protagonist of Babel and the establishment of a ‘memory exhibition’ for the past, present and future by the character of Golden Hill, this paper attempts to explore the different choices and outcomes and their underlying meanings and problems in cross-continental, cross-racial and cross-cultural conflict, dialogue and consultation.

Chinese American literature has often reimagined Chinatown, an ethnic urban enclave of Chinese people located outside China, but some writings, particularly memoirs, have been criticised for promoting the total assimilation of ethnic minorities. To explore how the Chinatown motif has evolved in the 21st century, this study offers the first comparative and narratological analysis of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls (2009) and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020), investigating how they complicate the illusion of racial assimilation and reveal the performative nature of ethnic identity through gendered first- and second-person perspectives. Set primarily in Chinatowns, a literal and metaphorical stage, these novels trace pivotal moments in Chinese American history, from the detention of Chinese immigrants at Angel Island in the early 20th century to their continued confinement within Chinatowns in the later half of the century. Within this historical backdrop, the novels critique how white American norms of ‘Chineseness’ shape and discipline Chinese American performativity. This study argues that, through different narrative perspectives and gendered experiences, these new-century novels challenge the assimilationist ideals of earlier Chinatown memoirs, deconstruct dominant norms within an ethnic context, and evoke varied affective responses from readers. In doing so, this research opens new theoretical spaces for exploring performative identity and highlights the interpretative possibilities of narrative perspectives in representing performance.