Responding to the theme “Emancipatory Narratives,” this session investigates how cross-cultural and transnational life writing functions as a transformative and emancipatory medium for “native-strangers”—foreigners born in China and Chinese diasporic authors—to construct affective communities that transcend colonial binaries in the twentieth century. Situated at the intersection of transcultural biography, affect studies, sensory history, and postcolonial theory, the session argues that embodied memories and affective encounters generate emancipatory narrative forms that dismantle the imperial gaze while resisting reductive nationalist frameworks. Informed by Ruth Rogaski’s insight that in China’s borderlands “the identity of who was ‘imperial’ and who was ‘native’ was not stable across time” (Knowing Manchuria), we examine the works of Ludwik Czyżewski (b. 1912), Dorothea Hosie (1885–1959), and Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou (known as “Han Suyin,” 1916–2012), who occupy liminal positions: ethnically foreign yet natively embodied, or culturally Chinese yet transnationally situated. Their life writing transforms marginality—marked by unstable belonging, precarious community, and ethically ambiguous imperial legacies—from a condition of vulnerability into a site of critical agency and cross-cultural solidarity.

Drawing on scholarship on life writing that adopts transcultural, affective, and decolonial approaches, the session interrogates how embodied memories, sensory experiences, and affective encounters facilitate the construction of cross-cultural solidarity. It further considers the implications of such narratives in an age of political division and renewed geopolitical tensions. Unlike traditional travelogues that consolidate Orientalist distance, these writings from the margins emancipate both subject and reader from colonial epistemologies by centring the liminal perspective of the “native-stranger.” In doing so, they reconfigure narrative authority and foster alternative imaginaries of global belonging in the twentieth century.

Our three case studies trace an arc from Manchuria and Peking to wartime Chungking. Czyżewski, born in 1912 in Harbin to a Russian mother and a Polish father, deploys childhood sensorium as a counter-archive to later geopolitical estrangement. In a memoir addressed to his American grandchildren, he recalls: “My first conscious memories are of her [China’s] people and her landscapes. ... I am American now ... and I am proud of this nation of liberty, but I cannot forget my life spent in China. Let me try to describe to you how I have seen it before my eyes, as far as I remember.” Despite living for decades outside China, the affective and embodied connection formed in childhood remains the foundation of his life writing, enabling him to articulate belonging beyond national categories.

A comparable case is Dorothea Hosie, the daughter of British missionaries, whose life writing emphasises deep familiarity with Chinese social worlds and an enduring affective connection to China. Her writing evolves from early sensory encounters with Chinese communities toward a dialogic mode of representation that unsettles Orientalist hierarchies and re-centres Chinese epistemic agency. Her transcultural childhood fosters what can be described as an “affective cosmopolitanism from below,” grounded in an ethics of relational knowledge and care. Through depictions of hospitality and friendship, particularly in her interactions with figures such as Li Cheng, Hosie challenges colonial assumptions and moves toward a form of collaborative ethnography in which Chinese interlocutors emerge as co-producers of knowledge. Her work, including Portrait of a Chinese Lady, thus reimagines transcultural friendship as a space of anti-colonial critique and shared knowledge production.

These writings can be productively juxtaposed with those of Chinese diasporic authors. Han Suyin’s autobiographical Destination Chungking (1942) operates as an emancipatory narrative that dismantles Orientalist abjection through a strategic rearticulation of Chinese subjectivity. Where earlier discourses rendered the Chinese body as abject, Han’s narrative mobilises three interrelated registers: revolutionary modernity, the symbolic capital of education and gendered New Womanhood, and a reconfigured representation of the body as active and relational. By engaging Western cultural signifiers while simultaneously redefining them, Han transforms the Chinese subject from object to agent. Rather than occupying the marginal position of the “native informant,” she leverages her liminal status to construct a collective voice grounded in shared vulnerability and struggle. This shift from “I” to “We” becomes central to an emergent epistemology of cross-cultural resistance and solidarity.

Together, these papers interrogate how transnational life writing transforms the condition of the “permanent stranger” into a productive methodology for cross-cultural knowledge production and solidarity formation. By analysing narratives that move from exclusionary imperial gazes toward shared identification, the session demonstrates how native-stranger subjectivities unsettle Orientalist frameworks while offering new models of global belonging. In doing so, it highlights the emancipatory potential of life writing not only as a literary form but also as a critical practice capable of reimagining relationships across cultural and historical divides.