Writing the South Seas is clearly an ambitious project in scale and scope; its title sounds like it is promising something that is nearly impossible to achieve. Yet, once scepticism related to the title is suspended long enough for the entire contents to be read from cover to cover, it would appear that the author might have succeeded, after all, in the impossible task he promises his readers in the title.

Given the scholarship that has been produced on the history and politics of the Chinese in Southeast Asia since the era of Victor Purcell and William Skinner in the 1950s, it is actually quite surprising that not more has been done concerning postcolonial literature in Chinese in Southeast Asia. One would expect that a book like Writing the South Seas would have been published some decades ago. Nonetheless, the field and subject matter of this book is obviously very different from Purcell's and Skinner's. Historians and political scientists have often complained about the difficulty of studying Southeast Asia as a region due to the great variety of languages and cultures involved in a relatively small region. This is despite the existence of extensive European language archives from the colonial era that help, quite significantly, to fill in basic information and provide context for much that has been going on in this region for, at least, the past two centuries. The same cannot be said of similar research on literature, especially Sinophone literature in Southeast Asia. There exists little in the way of colonial era studies or systematic recording of the development of this particular genre.

It should be noted, however, that this book is not simply an account of the development of Chinese literature in Southeast Asia. Writing the South Seas aims to illuminate a few complex issues relating to postcolonial Chinese literature in Southeast Asia. First, it differentiates the different types of authors who wrote in Chinese: travelling authors from Mainland China, some categorised specifically as ‘Southbound authors’, others who resided in the South Seas, and some who were even born in Southeast Asia. Second, the book investigates and analyses the perceptions, expectations, and attitudes of Chinese thinkers, authors, and audiences in the Mainland towards these so-called Sinophone literatures of Southeast Asia. Third, Writing the South Seas also attempts to understand, analyse and present the self-perceptions and identity politics of the ethnic Chinese producers and consumers of these Sinophone postcolonial cultural products. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Brian Bernards discusses the respective perceptions, expectations, and biases of Mainland Chinese and the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia in Sinophone literature, which reflects the changing relationship between both groups during the colonial era, the building of nation-states, and the Cold War in Southeast Asia.

Writing the South Seas boldly defines some contentious terms, including ‘Southeast Asian postcolonial literature’, ‘Sinophone literature in Southeast Asia’, ‘South Seas colors’, and quite a few more. The book provides new and intriguing perspectives, not only for understanding Chinese literature beyond China, but also for a sort of intellectual and emotional history of the Chinese in Southeast Asia and their relationship with the region and their ancestral homeland. In doing so, Bernards manages to provide comprehensive and convincing arguments concerning Sinophone literature in Southeast Asia on a variety of difficult issues — including ethnicity, language and dialects, religious beliefs, colonial influence, and Cold War ideology. This is an invaluable work on literary history that could only have been written by a scholar of Chinese language, literature and culture.

There are a few shortcomings that may be due to the sheer range and complexity of this highly ambitious project. The chapter topics could merit books of their own, and some readers may be put off by the central discussion of chapters based on only one or two literary works. Moreover, the fact that, aside from Mandarin, the author seems to have a more substantive background in Thai than any other Southeast Asian language, appears to result in a rather unbalanced depth of analysis, as seen in a comparison between the chapter on Sinophone literature in Thailand with the other chapters on Chinese writing from Malaysia, Singapore, and Borneo.

Overall, Writing the South Seas is an impressive and substantial accomplishment and will be an important resource for studies of Sinophone literature, postcolonial literature, the Chinese diaspora, and Chinese–Southeast Asian relations.