This article argues that Shu-ching Shih’s novel Passing through Luo-chin demonstrates a complexity of identities, fluid gender, and the national imaginary through the gender performativity of the protagonist, a male actor playing the part of woman during the Qing period. Attentive to the protagonist’s cross-dressing and the narrative strategy of the novel, this presentation analyzes the novel’s multiple relations with the national allegory. Inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Fredric Jameson’s discussion of national allegory, this presentation relates the novel to Chinese opera and Chinese classic fiction, situates it in Taiwan’s colonial history, and identifies its political metaphors of Taiwan.

Adopting the style of “storytelling” narrative tactics which I call “simulated storytelling” (ni-shuo-shu), Passing through Luo-chin not only successfully represents the protagonist’s “transgender diaspora”—a unique and difficult means of expressing self-identity, self-reflexivity, and self-positioning, but also reflects the diverse facets of working-class Taiwanese society and the national imaginary. With a critical view similar to that of transgender studies, the novel can also be read as a criticism of the preoccupation with heteronormative masculinity and the reproductivist family. Passing through Luo-chin suggests a certain connection of affect as an alternative way out for the socially marginalized characters to position themselves in the diaspora and redress their personal and national identities. In addition to delineating the possibilities and difficulties of gender- and identity-crossing and the fluidity of affect and identities, Passing through Luo-chin also provides multiple perspectives and reflexivity on the national imaginary.