The Urge to Write “Chineseness” as a Melancholic Fantasy

Written in Palimpsest — A studio for long-form thinking

In a seminar last year, I was trying to articulate a structural observation: why do so many Chinese therapists feel they can never do enough? I see patients, I write, I supervise Chinese therapists—and yet the sense persists that it’s insufficient. The trauma is too vast; how many patients can any of us see in a lifetime? A classmate offered an interpretation: “In families where parents didn’t take up their caretaking responsibilities, children feel they have to do everything themselves.” I burst into tears—not because it was a personal revelation, but because it named something I’d been circling theoretically.

Later I realized: I know what it feels like to be erased. As someone who is queer, I’ve been told my experience is “just biology,” “just universal.” So when I try to name something about Chinese experience and get told “that’s universal too”—I recognize that violence.

This essay is not about what “Chineseness” is. It’s about why we so desperately need there to be one. And whether that urge can become something else.

I. Being Erased by “Universal”

I tell a supervisor that Chinese parents often humiliate their children in front of relatives. Not just humiliation—a peculiar mix of narcissistic degradation, the assumption that children are extensions of parents, and competition between families, all layered together. She says: “That happens in the West too. It’s universal.”

I write a term paper arguing that Chinese society systematically produces false selves. My marker’s comment implies: this isn’t unique to China.

I say Chinese parents restrict children’s access to anything related to sexuality. The response: “We used to be like that too.”

My frustration isn’t that they deny China has these phenomena. It’s that “universal” flattens the layers.

What I’m trying to point to is the stacking itself—how language, history, political structure, family system, and colonial wounds pile on top of each other in a particular way. That’s what I mean when I say “Chineseness”: not an essence, but a specific layering. But I don’t have the language for it, and when I try to gesture toward it, I get told it doesn’t exist.

“We used to be like that too” is worse. It places the West at “now” on the timeline and China at “before.” West equals modern equals progress; China equals not-yet-arrived. This is colonial temporality dressed up as empathy.

As a queer person, I recognize this move. When someone says “gender is just biology, that’s universal,” they’re doing the same thing—using “universal” to flatten a specific structure, to refuse to see the layers. So I’m particularly sensitive to how “Chineseness” gets erased. It’s the same violence.

II. A Déjà Vu

Last year, a debate erupted on an American academic listserv. It was about transgender rights—people arguing that certain positions shouldn’t be allowed, that the discussion should be contained. They announced they would open a second listserv.

I started archiving everything. My body knew what to do before my mind caught up.

The feeling was familiar. This is a skill I learned in China, where content disappears behind 404 errors. You learn to save things before they vanish. But why did I need this skill here?

Then the déjà vu hit: the structure is the same. Exclusion, silencing, making certain voices disappear—this isn’t “Chinese characteristics.” It happens in American academia too. In a debate about trans rights, no less.

You might think this realization would dissolve my attachment to “Chineseness.” If violence is everywhere, why keep insisting on something specifically Chinese?

But it did the opposite. It made me ask: if the violence is universal, then what am I actually pointing to when I say “Chinese”? And why do I—why do we—need so badly to name it?

III. The Doubly Manufactured “China”

“Chineseness” is not something we discovered. It was manufactured—from two directions at once.

From the outside: Western Sinology needed a fixed, researchable “China” as its object. Sinologists study “traditional China,” and when that China modernizes, they mourn. When contemporary Chinese poets write poetry that doesn’t feel “authentically Chinese” enough, Western critics attack them. This is the Sinologist’s melancholia: mourning a lost object that never existed, then directing that grief as aggression toward living Chinese people who fail to embody the fantasy.

From the inside: Chinese nationalism also needed a fixed “Chineseness” to construct national identity. The education I received told me our history is unique, our suffering is unique, our civilization is the center. Even our trauma is supposed to be special.

Lu Xun’s critique of Chinese “national character” (国民性) shows how these two directions meet. His framework was shaped by foreign sources—most notably Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1894), which he read in Japanese translation. So the very lens Lu Xun used to diagnose Chinese people came from a colonial gaze.

And here’s what got confused: In “Diary of a Madman,” Lu Xun wrote that history’s pages are filled with “eating people.” That’s a critique of a system. But “劣根性” says Chinese people are inherently flawed—that’s essentialism. One attacks structure; the other essentializes nature. Yet they merged, as if critiquing feudalism meant Chinese people have bad genes.

“Chinese people just have no 素质 (quality)”—this phrase is still alive today. And Chinese people readily agree with it. That’s self-Orientalism: adopting the colonizer’s framework to define yourself, then identifying with the definition.

I catch myself doing this too. When I try to explain something to my Western colleagues, I reach for “this is typical Chinese”—and I’m already inside the trap. I’m using a manufactured category while trying to point to something real.

The problem is: the real thing has no language. The manufacture filled that void with a fantasy.

IV. What Gets Lost

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: in this double manufacturing, “China” gets produced—but actual Chinese people get lost. The fantasy needs a fixed object: either the glorious civilization or the inferior race. A living person, with contradictions and specificities, doesn’t fit. So the manufacturing erases precisely what it claims to represent.

Both the Sinologist’s fantasy-China and the nationalist’s glorious-China are constructs. Neither can respond to you. Neither can see you as a specific person with specific experiences. “China” is constantly talked about, theorized, claimed—but it cannot respond. It’s present and absent at once. You can try to locate yourself inside “Chineseness,” but you’ll find only a mirror that doesn’t reflect back. The child keeps trying to activate the mother, to get her to see him, to make her come alive. It never works. So the trying never stops.

The sense that one can never do enough is this trying—not a personal failing, but a structural position produced by the absent object.

And a mother who is present but cannot respond produces narcissistic injury. Without mirroring, the child cannot stabilize their sense of self. They oscillate between grandiosity (I am special, my suffering is unique) and emptiness (I am worthless, I have inferior roots).

This explains why “劣根性” discourse has two faces that seem contradictory but are actually one. Self-deprecation (”Chinese people are just like this, we’re hopeless”) and narcissism (”our problems are uniquely Chinese, no one else can understand”) come from the same wound. Both are attempts to manage a narcissistic injury caused by a “China” that cannot see you.

The melancholic fantasy works like this: if I imagine there is a “real China” somewhere—pure, traditional, unpolluted—then maybe I can recover it. Or: if I insist that all the violence is concentrated here in China, then maybe somewhere else is clean. The foreign moon is always rounder.

Both moves avoid the unbearable truth: violence is universal, and there is no pure origin to return to.

When I felt disappointed by the American academy—”I thought it would be more progressive, more open”—that was the fantasy collapsing. There is no “there” that is clean.

V. But This Might Be Collective

You might say: this is just your personal psychology. Maybe you have issues with your mother, and you’re projecting onto “China.”

But I’m not alone. In that seminar, another Chinese classmate felt the same weight of impossibility. We talked about it privately—the weight, the impossibility. This is one of the reasons many Chinese therapists enter the field: we want to transform intergenerational trauma. We feel we have to, because at the higher level, no one is dealing with it.

When collective trauma gets denied at the social level—when the state inflicts wounds but forbids mourning, when history gets rewritten, when 404 errors erase memory—then individuals feel they must carry everything. The failure of collective processing becomes the individual’s impossible task.

The specific layers matter here: colonial shame that was never worked through. Revolutionary trauma that cannot be named. A culture that doesn’t make space for emotional expression. Rapid development that treats feeling as inefficiency. These stack into a particular form of absence—not the only one in the world, but this one.

This is the “Chineseness” I’m trying to point to: not an essence, but a specific way that history, politics, language, and silence have layered into a structure that cannot respond.

VI. Generating Language

So the urge to write “Chineseness” is melancholic. It comes from lack, from the absence of mirroring, from wanting to activate an unresponsive object.

But creation is not the same as activation.

When I generate concepts from my clinical and cultural work—ways of naming structures I’ve observed that don’t have English or even Mandarin words yet—something shifts. I’m no longer waiting for “China” to see me. I’m producing language that didn’t exist before.

These concepts come from Chinese clinical and cultural material. They carry the specific layering. But they can travel. They can dialogue with Western psychoanalytic concepts without being translated into them. They don’t need to be called “uniquely Chinese,” and they don’t need to be dissolved into “universal.” They’re just tools—born from a specific place, useful elsewhere.

Achebe chose to write in English, but made English carry what it wasn’t designed to carry. He transformed the colonizer’s language instead of refusing it. My position adds another layer: not just translating from Chinese to English, but generating something new in the movement between languages.

This is what I’ve been calling the “translational ego”: a subjectivity that doesn’t settle in “China” or “the West,” but exists in translation itself. Not a fixed position, but a movement.

The urge to name “Chineseness” started as melancholic—trying to fill a lack, trying to make the absent mother respond. But generating theory is different. It doesn’t fill the lack. It works inside the lack and produces something.

VII. Never Enough, Still

The sense of insufficiency hasn’t gone away. It may not—it’s structural, not personal.

The trauma is still vast. The collective processing still isn’t happening. The absent mother still doesn’t respond.

But now the structure is visible. The urge to write isn’t just compulsion—it can become creation. Not activating an unresponsive object, but generating language where there was none.

Maybe this is what I can do: not write what “China” is, but make the layers visible. Give a position to what keeps getting erased by “universal.” Produce concepts that others can use.

Not enough. But something.