This paper attends to matters of transnationalism: specifically, to transnational movement between China and francophone Europe. It dialogues with theoretical work on the interimplication of corporeal experience and urban existence produced by such as Elizabeth Grosz. In addressing the body-place dynamic in the transnational frame, it focuses on 3 contemporary autobiographical French-language novels. The novels are Amélie Nothomb's Le Sabotage amoureux, Suzanne Bernard's Une Etrangère à Pékin, and Elizabeth Qi-Guyon's Pluie argentée. The bodies that these novels invoke are European, youthful and female, and the city they are (trans)located within is mid-to-late-twentieth-century Beijing.

Dissecting these 3 texts, the paper will argue that in all of them, intercultural desire -- a desire for a corporeal sexual encounter with the Cultural Other -- is revealed as something that is both produced and prohibited in the bodies of the novels' heroines: bodies contained and constrained within Beijingese urban space. And it will reflect on what this tells us about representations, in France, of sino-French culture contact.