AI comments on 'Psychic Exile' by Cher Tan: https://www.liminalmag.com/liminal-review-of-books/psychic-exile

By Ouyang Yu

 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 survival and alienation at once. 

Tan’s piece isn’t flattering in a conventional sense, but it isn’t dismissive either. It reads Ouyang as an author who resists easy classification and whose work resists the comfort of assimilation. His novels and poetry, as other scholarly writing on him suggests, constantly unsettle fixed identities and deliberate linguistic expectations: the migrant isn’t someone who simply becomes “Australian” or remains “Chinese,” but someone haunted by both and neither at the same time. 

“Psychic exile” here becomes a metaphor for Ouyang’s ongoing literary project. The writer’s use of English isn’t just a practical choice—it’s a psychic terrain where belonging and otherness play out. His texts, as others have noted, deliberately draw attention to the disjunctures and tensions inherent in writing across languages and cultures, creating a body of work that feels unsettled, provocative, and unapologetically complex. 

What Tan’s essay does effectively is refuse the idea that literary merit must be measured by conventional standards of polish or assimilation. Instead, she situates Ouyang in a lineage of writers who use language to expose discomfort and contradiction, privileging what some might call “rawness”—the unfiltered collisions of linguistic, cultural, and personal histories—over the neatness of marketable narrative. 

Ultimately, the article captures the uneasy energy of Ouyang’s writing: it’s demanding, often resistant to summary or resolution, and it forces readers to confront the uncertainties and contradictions that come with writing from the interstices of identity. It’s a piece that challenges readers to think with Ouyang’s texts rather than about them, to inhabit their discomfort rather than smooth it over.

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