Chinese Flower in the English Garden: Hybridity and Cultural Translation in Liu Hong's The Magpie Bridge

This paper investigates the possibility of reading literary texts of diasporic writers as that of hybridity and cultural translation. Through a close study of motifs and narratives in the novel, this paper regards The Magpie Bridge as a metaphor of how migrants of contemporary societies evolve in an organic field of intercultural conflicts and reconciliation. The novel presents forbearance and hybrid cross-fertilisation as answer to the reconciliation between oppositional (albeit hierarchical) cultures, values or beliefs; and it goes beyond the theme of reclaiming history and justice'' that characterises postcolonial literature. The novel is read both as a feminine and a feminist celebration of the beauty of hybridity borne out of intercultural appropriation (translation).