The “Psychic Exile” piece on Liminal Magazine is less a traditional review of a single book than a kind of spirited, deeply textured reflection on Ouyang Yu ’s literary world and the psychic landscape his writing inhabits. Right from the first line— “Ouyang Yu is full of shit” —reviewer Cher Tan signals that this is going to be a candid, confrontational encounter rather than a polite, detached assessment. At its core, the essay uses an episode from Ouyang’s 2010 novel The English Class to gesture toward some of the larger currents in his work: linguistic struggle, the absurdities and violence beneath the surface of language, and the migrant’s uneasy negotiation with a culture that both needs and otherizes him. In that novel, the scene about teaching a child the English word “shit” isn’t just a humorous vignette—it encapsulates the deeper friction between languages and the way that trying to inhabit a foreign tongue becomes a mode of ...