Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive focus of his writing. Across a rich body of work (of short stories and novels), he demonstrated keen powers of social observation in revealing how class, regional, phenotypical, and generational distinctions defined Harlem and shaped an appropriate literary aesthetic. Fisher’s satirical yet loving eye is matched by a musical ear in stories about African Americans becoming modern in the black metropolis. Southern greenhorns are vulnerable to being fleeced by urbane northern hustlers. Grandmothers bearing the memory of the South fear and admire in equal measure the way Harlem shapes their grandchildren. Blues and jazz underscore vernacular speech, as street talk engages rural accents and bourgeois tongues. And such sensitivity to the city’s quotidian features informs Fisher’s ultimate understanding of Harlem as the space of encounter between logic and faith, science and superstition for African Americans.

Chapter 3 uncovers the memory production that centered on the mainlanders’ native places in China, which emerged after the shock of 1958. When people realized that they might never see home again in their lifetimes, a profound sense of loss and depression began to set it. The need to mitigate this “social trauma of the diminishing hope (for return)” resulted in efforts to gather, preserve, and disseminate “local references” – historical and cultural information about one’s home provinces, counties, towns, and villages in China via shared memories. These efforts manifested themselves in the publication of provincially based magazines and books, as well as in public exhibitions and the construction of temples and cultural museums. The mainlander native-place associations became the main driving force behind these mnemonic projects from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. Going against the previous interpretation that saw these activities as part of the state-led Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, the chapter argues that the production of native-place memories was closely associated with mainland exiles’ attempts to rebuild community, to seek roots locally in Taiwan, and to pass on their native-place identities to their Taiwan-born children. Unfortunately, young mainlanders were uninterested in their parents’ native-place memories and identities.