Nicholas Y. H. Wong teaches Chinese-English translation and writes on labor, language, anti-colonialism, and capitalism in Chinese writing from the Malay world. At SCAS, he will study the Southeast Asian “coolie question” via Chinese petitions from colonial sources. Currently he is completing a book on how indentured labor was developed as a linguistic subject within genealogies of liberalism, anarchism, communism, nationalism, and popular religion.

Forthcoming work include essays about Malayan Esperantists on Chinese language reform; literary humanism, modernism, and decolonization; legal publics in the Straits Settlements; translations of anticolonial manifestos and Daughters (Balestier Press) by the Taiwanese poet Ling Yu, recent winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. As Zhou Sivan, he has published three poetry chapbooks.