Coming to the United States as a full-grown adult, I knew that my life-long battle would be navigating in between different cultures. My research looks at how westerners and western cities are perceived and represented in overseas Chinese student literature from the Late Qing until the 1990s. Bai Xianyong, a potential Nobel Prize for Literature nominee from Taiwan, wrote the short story “The Death in Chicago” in 1964. While it is acclaimed to have created one of the most memorable characters in Taiwanese overseas student literature Wu Hanhun, scholarship on the masterpiece is scarce. My research reveals that as a modernist text, “Death” contributes to the World Modernist Literature by highlighting the phantom of horror as the existential psychic condition for the overseas. I am revising the paper and would like to submit it ASAP.