This article offers a close reading of literary fiction by three representatives of the Russian emigration in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Short stories by Mikhail Shcherbakov (1890–1956), Al’fred Kheidok (1892–1990) and Boris Iul’skii (1912–50?), which have been collected and published in new editions in Russia in 2011, are used as a window into the mental world of the writers and readers of Russian literature in Harbin and Shanghai. The purpose of the enquiry is therefore to deduce from these texts how their authors viewed the non-Russian people (mostly Chinese and Japanese) that surrounded them and how they both perceived the expectations and reflected the values of their émigré reading audience.