Exploring the“Cosmopolitan”Innovation of Overseas Chinese Student“Autofiction”: On the Multi-dimensionalities of Lyu Xiaoyu’s Man Under the Water

Within the tradition of overseas Chinese student literature grounded in the autobiographical style, the protagonists’anxiety over their national-racial identity and their political concern for the motherland in crisis often sit at the centre of the whole narrative. Scholar-writer Lyu Xiaoyu’s debut novel, Man Under the Water, published in 2023, blends elements of fiction and nonfiction to portray the protagonist L as an atypical Chinese international student. More importantly, it depicts an Oxford “community” composed of students from diverse national backgrounds. Through the multi-perspective narratives of this international ensemble, the novel signals a complete shift from the traditional focus on national-racial anxiety in Chinese overseas student literature. Employing firstperson narration throughout multiple contexts featuring memories from imaginary futures, Man Under the Water constantly shifts between the perspectives of the narrator “I,” L, and L’s friends, reiterating —through the overlapping identities of the author Lyu Xiaoyu, the narrator “I,” and the character L—the possibility of understanding the Other and the necessary pursuit of cosmopolitanism.This paper situates the novel within the context of Chinese overseas student literature, with a particular focus on the dialectical tension between its “autofictional” characteristics and its cosmopolitan orientation. By analysing the novel’s textual effects across three dimensions, namely character choices, narrative voices, and linguistic style, the author aims to explain why many readers perceive the book as “narcissistic” and highlight how this attribute of “narcissism” exposes the paradigmatic predicament contemporary Chinese transcultural writing tends to be caught in. While affirming the innovativeness of Man Under the Water in both its narrative forms and thematic concerns, this paper also points out certain limitations in its textual effects. It concludes with the hope that different interpretive modes and receptive horizons may arise from the translation of a new wave of Chinese transcultural writing led by a younger generation of cosmopolitan writers like Lyu.