editor of Literature of the Hundred Flowers (1981),
a two-volume selection and translation of the his-
tory, criticism, fiction, and poetry of 20th-century
Chinese literature.
In 1967 she launched with Paul Engle the In-
ternational Writing Program at the University of
Iowa. For her distinguished contributions to cul-
tural exchange, Nieh was nominated with Paul
Engle for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, received
the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts
from the Governors of the Fifty States in 1982,
and also received awards from the governments of
Hungary and Poland.
Narrated by a Chinese woman who suffers
from schizophrenia, the full English translation of
Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (1988)
begins in 1945 in war-torn China when Mulberry
is 16 and ends in 1970 in the United States when
Mulberry becomes Peach, a totally opposite per-
sonality. The novel is divided into four parts, with
each part opening with a letter to the U.S. immi-
gration service written by Peach, an illegal alien,
and closing with an excerpt from Mulberry’s diary.
Each excerpt of Mulberry’s diary is set in a time
and place saturated with historical significance:
Part 1 (1945) details a journey on the Yangtze
River to Chongkqing close to the end of the Japa-
nese invasion and World War II; Part 2 (1948–49)
addresses the besieged Beijing on the eve of the
Communists’ victory over the Nationalists; Part 3
(1957–59) takes place in an attic room in Taipei
ruled by the Nationalist Party with an iron fist;
Part 4 (1969–70) portrays the United States mired
in the cold war and the Vietnam War. Written in
a style of modernist stream-of-consciousness and
postmodern pastiche, Mulberry and Peach is rich
in allusions and images drawn from culture and
classics, both Chinese and Western, and involves
a diversity of themes. Among others, they con-
sist of the struggle between a traditional society
and modern colonizing powers, political tur-
moil, forced exile, immigration and displacement,
schizophrenia, identity transformation, and the
inscription of the female body with the ideologies
of patriarchy and nation.
Yan YingNigam, Sanjay (?– )
Born in India and raised in Arizona, Sanjay Nigam
spent summers of his childhood with his grand-
parents in Delhi. A physician and medical re-
searcher, Nigam read voraciously to relax from the
demands of medical school and wrote fiction while
working as a medical researcher. His works have
appeared in Story, Grand Street, and The Kenyon
Review, and he has been chosen by Utne Reader as
“one of ten writers changing the face of American
fiction.” A sensitive and intellectual writer, Nigam
sets his books both in India and the United States
and writes in a distinctively different voice in each
of his books. With precision, he delineates the in-
terior landscape of Indian immigrants’ surprises,
compromises, and losses as they shape and shift
identities, adapting to their new country without
culturally abandoning their ancestral world. Fash-
ioning identities with cultural markers of both
countries, his immigrants find themselves alien-
ated sojourners in familiar landscapes, rendered
surreal by their ever-shifting consciousness.
The Non-Resident Indian and Other Stories
(1996) explores the perpetual in-between world of
immigrants. Deploying Indian mythical figures as
frame stories in the prologue and epilogue, Nigam
articulates the anguish of uncertainty and the
alienation of non-resident Indians (NRIs). In the
prologue is the mortal Trishanku, punished for en-
tering the abode of gods, eternally stuck between
heaven and earth, a spectator of souls journeying
to their destinations. In the epilogue is Ghatotka-
cha, half-monster and half-human, contemplating
his problematic relationship with his father, the
mythical and powerful Bhima, again a spectator of
the Mahabharata war, his compensation for check-
ing his boundless power. These in-between abodes
of Trishanku and the hybrid state of Ghatotkacha
are Nigam’s metaphors for the immigrant experi-
ence. The immigrants in these short stories range
from doctors in “Charming,” who fancy them-
selves descendants of kings, to math professors
in “Numbers” who despite their “mathemagical”
abilities cannot compute simple verbal tasks and
taxes. They find their new world so unreal that
they slip into either fantasy or paralysis, rendering
their special talents impotent. But no matter howNigam, Sanjay 215