After the Second World War, countries in Southeast Asia--the region used to be called Nanyang by the Chinese-gained their independence from the colonial empires. In the process of nation-building, local culture was the dominant element in creating the new national identity, while Chinese culture (especially Chinese language and writing) was seen as a negative element in forming national unity. Under such a circumstance, Chinese intellectuals, politicians and writers were anxious to be accepted as patriots. They tried to be more localized, to grasp the local elements to represent themselves and to create a local Chinese national literature, e.g., Chinese Malaysian literature. Those elements, represented mostly as scenes of local color from local places, form the so-called reality of here and now (此時此地的現實) as well as Nanyang picture (南洋風光). Being successors of the May-Fourth cultural movement, these intellectuals and writers inherited the ideology of the vernacular New Literature, and they rejected the old writings that mostly written by the nineteenth century traveller-poets, late Qing civil officers, and diplomats such as Huang Zunxian, YangYin, and political exile like Kang Youwei. This article focuses on Kang Youwei's Nanyang Writings, the poems he wrote when he was a political exile, under the threat of arrest order from the Qing government. Living in a borrowed time and a borrowed place, he moved from Singapore, Tanjun Tuan, to Pulau Pinang, protected by the British government. Kang's Nanyang poetry represents his emotion and expresses his worry for Emperor Guangxu, the empire's corruption, his comrades' sacrifice, and his own reality of here and now. Meanwhile, the scenes of Nanyang expresses the innerscape of his poetry: the cloud, the tree, the sea, as well as the wind and the billows (天風與海濤); they expressed his sense of leisure and comfort in a life of anxiety. Such poems, in fact, attain higher literary quality than most Mahua new poetry, but they have hardly being accepted as Chinese Malaysian or Singaporean literature because Kang came from China and returned to China eventually. Under the category of nation-state and the ideology of New Literature, Kang's literary endeavor becomes superfluous.