Most scholars regard Lin Yutang’s 1949 novel, Chinatown Family, as a failure. The novel did not sell many copies when it was published, and it failed to impress critics. Decades on, the novel has been largely dismissed as reactionary and crude by literary scholars, especially Asian Americanist critics. Readers then and now dismiss Lin’s attempts to create a definitive work of “Asian American literature” but this chapter carefully reconstructs the novel’s making in order to explore the potential affordances of Lin’s failure. What would it mean to take seriously the novel’s chief virtues, otherwise seen as limitations, such as “collaboration,” as the basis for rethinking the history of the Asian American novel, and where it might go today?

The Cold War threw Australian’s postwar hopes into stark relief. Social and economic rights became associated with a menacing global ideology, while the imperative of a new type of war saw political and civil rights challenged like never before. This chapter analyses the career of Australian civil libertarians in this decade, particularly in light of the 1949 trial of Communist Party of Australia leader Lance Sharkey for sedition and a 1951 referendum on whether to ban the party wholesale. While such moves drew calls of government hypocrisy in light of the recently passed Universal Declaration from civil libertarians, supporters could equally point to communism’s human rights abuses abroad. These usages commingled with and were enabled by earlier claims of British citizenship rights as instruments of political power and contestation. Similar problems emerged for Indigenous rights campaigners in the 1950s, who saw the UDHR as a roadmap for Indigenous equality. Such hopes soon gave way to the difficult reality of translating the Declaration's precepts into a very alien context and frustration at the limitations of their global influence or enforceability.