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During the Cold War, the ideological struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Chinese took place on the pages of literary texts. A battle of the books between Washington D.C. and Beijing mobilized entire networks of U.S. Foreign Service posts, book publishers, and higher education institutions to take sides in propagating representations of either democracy or communism to ethnic Chinese communities around the world. In Writing on Water, L. Maria Bo argues that these propagated literary texts, simply by undergoing translation, also became the means for new forms of anglophone Chinese identity and diasporic communities to emerge.

Rather than examining how translated literary texts produced strict equivalents that "worked" to spread ideology, Bo reads these texts as fluid equivocal exchanges. She attends to the various languages through which these texts traveled, including hegemonic varieties of English, numerous forms of Chinese, and other local patois. Doing so uncovers how ideology and meaning come undone in these texts-in-transit, allowing us imagine the formation of dispersed, ideologically diverse reading publics spanning East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the US heartland.