• 1 Such as the one retelling the adventure of Wong Nai Siong 黄乃裳 (1849-1924), an educator and reformis (...)

1The Guo fan ge or “Songs of the Going Abroad” are poems written in Southern dialects, here mainly Minnanhua 闽南话 (with some in Fuzhouhua 福州话),1 that circulated in the Chinese communities of Fujian, Taiwan and Southeast Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They constitute a minor part of the vernacular songbooks or changben 唱本 that were written in verse (of seven, six, five, and four feet), and eventually published in highly popular editions in Xiamen and other cities in South China. They may be divided into two subgroups according to the gender of the narrator. The long ones, changpian shuochang 长篇说唱, emanating from male migrants retell their fate abroad (except one play named Fanpo nong 番婆弄, or “The Foreign Woman” which consists of a funny dialogue between a Chinese man and a foreign woman (pp. 187-189)), while the short ones duanpian shuochang 短篇说唱, composed by females, deal with the points of view of the womenfolk on the harms of migration of their relatives abroad. It is a literature aimed at discouraging young men to go abroad to find a job. This explains why with the end of mass migration these songs have slowly disappeared.

• 2 The catalogue of the songbooks collected by Schipper has been published, see “Wubai jiuben gezice m (...)

2In the 1960s the late Dutch Sinologist Kristopher Schipper, then posted in Taiwan, managed to obtain one such song dating from the Daoguang 道光 (1821-1850), entitled Xinke guo fan ge 新刻过番歌 or “Newly Engraved Song of the Going Abroad,” compiled, ji 辑, by someone using the pen name of Nanan Jianghu ke 南安江湖客 or the Traveler of Nanan (South Fujian) of which he offered us a photocopy.2 In 1987, we gave a copy of it to Liu Denghan specialist of Chinese literature at Fujian Academy of Social Sciences, and this was the starting point for his research on the Guo fan ge. Between 1991 and 2017, he published several articles related to this song and its variants. At the same time, he undertook surveys in various villages of South Fujian and, with the help of other researchers, recorded short and long songs which were still known locally. He also collected other songs recorded independently in Fujian and in Malaysia especially thanks to the help of the late So Khin 苏庆华 and by Lau Tzy Cheng 刘子政.

• 3 Aying, Fan mei huagong jinyue wenxueji 反美华工禁约文学集 (Anthology of literay texts opposing American proh (...)

4The corpus is preceded by an introduction in four parts (pp. 1-9). The first part gives an overview of the economic reasons why the poorest villagers were forced to leave with the hope of finding work; the second deals with the difficulties encountered by the immigrants and the way in which the Guo fan ge reflect this alternative way of escaping poverty; the third gives a general presentation of these collective literary works, and the last sketches a comparison with the literature produced by the immigrants who went to the United States, and notably studied by Aying 阿英, and Him Mark Lay, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung.3