This article provides a conceptual grasp of the corpus of work produced by Chinese Canadian writers and a framework for analysing its tropes and interpreting their political resonance. It defines the Chinese Canadian work as a three-phase counterhegemonic discourse: Writing back into a forbidden past; negotiating into the present; writing on boundaries. For the ambivalent, split diasporic subject to negotiate into the present from the forbidden past is to reinscribe itself as a locus of crisis, a non-identity, a doubling, a third term. Writing on boundaries can be read as a strategy of decolonization deployed by the subaltern in striving for self-vindication and self-fulfilment. This article provides a conceptual grasp of the corpus of work produced by Chinese Canadian writers and a framework for analysing its tropes and interpreting their political resonance. It defines the Chinese Canadian work as a three-phase counterhegemonic discourse: Writing back into a forbidden past; negotiating into the present; writing on boundaries. For the ambivalent, split diasporic subject to negotiate into the present from the forbidden past is to reinscribe itself as a locus of crisis, a non-identity, a doubling, a third term. can be read as a strategy of decolonization deployed by the subaltern in striving for self-vindication and self-fulfilment.