The representation of the Chinese immigrant in Spanish culture has mainly hewed to hackneyed stereotypes of machine-like and constant productivity, as well as homogeneity. In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Biutiful (Citation2010), the Chinese are reduced to childminders and exploitative bosses, while in Almudena Grandes’s novel Los besos en el pan (Citation2015), a group of Chinese hairdressers are presented as identikit and docile, deprived of any individuality. Elvira Navarro’s novel La ciudad feliz Navarro (Citation2009) fictionalizes the coming-of-age of a young Chinese immigrant male child and the travails of his Chinese immigrant family as they settle into Spanish society. The novel reconceives Chinese immigrant integration into Spanish society as a complex phenomenon, forged at the interface of converging linguistic, emotional, gender, and mnemonic factors in both the country of origin and the host country. In so doing, it underscores the complexity of Chinese assimilation to Spain, which has been reduced to ghettoization, while also reconceiving Chinese immigrants as sentient, historical beings and unique individuals who enact idiosyncratic gender performances. Drawing on a wide range of affect, gender, migration, and linguistic theories, I analyze the representation of Chinese immigrant masculinity and femininity within the novel, which encompasses the categories of the tiger mother, the traumatized male immigrant, the father-son relationship, the ageing male immigrant, and the second-generation male immigrant. In so doing, I highlight the heterogeneity of the representation of the Chinese immigrant, thus expanding the current understanding of it.