Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader 9811983798, 9789811983795

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
A Note on Chinese Romanization
Contents
Editors and Contributors
Introduction: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century
1 The Historical and Theoretical Framework
2 An Overview of Chapters
References
The Reconstruction of History and Politics
Democracy Detoured and a Narrator Detached in the Political Fiction of Lai Xiangyin
1 Progression and Regression
2 Historiography and Metanarrative
3 Conclusion
References
A Venture into Taiwan’s Political Changes and Historical Memories Through Li Ang’s “Beef Noodle Soup”
1 Exploring the Historical Memories of the Homeland
2 “Beef Noodle Soup” in An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds
3 Between Fact and Fiction
4 Visceral, Gustatory, and Psychological Trauma
5 Recognition, Reflections, and Ironies
6 Some Concluding Remarks
References
Homegrown Stories: Gan Yao-Ming’s Fiction
1 Gan Yao-Ming
2 Contemporary Voices and the Magic of Realism
3 Maximalist and Homegrown Narratives
References
Genres, Forms, and Ideas
Clipping Wings: A Chronicle and Wang Wen-Hsing’s Art
1 Foreword
2 A Mid-20th-Century Pilgrimage: The Iowa Legacy
2.1 Flaubert’s Disciple: Literature as Substitute Religion
3 Narrative Device as Marker of Cognitive Capacity
3.1 “Shame”: The Affect that Defines the Sense of Self
3.2 A Transactional Approach to Religious Faith
3.3 Innocent Suffering, Vacuous Compassion, and the Instinctive Evil
3.4 Trauma and the Possibility of Redemption
4 Existential Despair Reimagined
4.1 The Ethical Implications of “Taste”
4.2 Bureaucratic Conspiracy, Kafka-style
5 Cultural Elitism and the Aesthetically Neutralized Sociocultural Critique
5.1 Depravity as Source of Mimetic Pleasure
6 “Greater Freedom” in Tactics to Maximize Affect
6.1 Affect Theory and the Tapping of the Bodily Realm for Aesthetic Resource
7 Contemporary Reception and Literary History
References
Xia Yu, the Supreme Stylist
References
Everything Everywhere All at Once: The New Taiwan in Egoyan Zheng’s Science Fiction
1 Ground Zero and Schrödinger’s Cat
2 Dream Devourer and Laplace’s Demon
3 Conclusion
References
Reflections Upon Gender and Sexuality
Chen Xue, Missing Fathers, and Queer Alternatives
1 “Lost Wings”
2 Becoming We
3 The Name of the Father
4 Coda
References
Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and a Farewell Letter
1 Domestic Violence
2 Intimate Partner Violence
3 Sex and Sexuality
References
Liglav Awu, Child of the “Double Country”: The Clarion Voice of Indigenous Women in Taiwan
1 Introduction
2 A Child of the Double Country
2.1 Awu’s Double Heritage
2.2 A Way Back
3 Decolonizing Via Literature: “Dismantling” then “Rebuilding”
3.1 Destigmatizing Indigenous Women
3.2 Defending Practices and Territories
4 Trans-Indigenous Bridges
4.1 Common (Hi)Stories
4.2 Survivance Stories
5 Conclusion: Awu’s Heritage
References
On Ethnicities and Races
Through an Indigenous Lens: Syaman Rapongan’s Rewriting of Oceanic Taiwan
References
Migrants of Today, Migrants of Tomorrow in Wu Ming-yi’s Literary Works
1 Dynamics of Taiwan
2 Migration and the Continued Catastrophes
3 Migrants of Yesterday
4 Migrants of Tomorrow
References
Anti-Japan or Becoming-Japanese: Li Yongping’s Writing on Japan in Postcolonial Taiwan
1 Japanese Memory in East Asia
2 The Anti-Japanism and Chineseness in Li Yongping’s Novels in the Twentieth Century
3 The Changes in “Japan” in Li Yongping’s Novels of the Twenty-First Century
4 The Diaspora and Translocalism
5 The Production of “Japan” in the Transnational Context
References
Huang Chong-kai and the Taiwanese Novel of Ideas
1 Gleaning or Gossip
2 Taiwan’s Diaspora on Mars
3 Counterfactual Historicity: A Taiwan–Cuba Great Exchange
4 Literary History as Media History
5 Language Lessons
References
Taiwan Literature in the Age of Globalization
Escape and Return: Ghostly Representations of Home and Abroad in Kevin Chen’s “Summer Trilogy”
1 Repressed Sexuality in Ghost Town
2 Ghostly Entrapment and Liberation in Florida Metamorphosis
3 Gendered Liberation in The Good People Upstairs
4 Conclusion
References
Sketches on a Blank Slate: Shawna Yang Ryan’s Future-Oriented Memories of the Past
1 Positioning the Writer and Her Work
1.1 Biographical Notes
1.2 Multiple Belongings—The Author
1.3 Water Ghosts—Challenging the Nation-State
1.4 Green Island—Pursuing the Nation-State
1.5 Multiple belongings—The Literary Works
2 Resonating with the Foundational Myth
2.1 Impact Event
2.2 Impact Narratives
2.3 Family as a Site to Retell Trans/National History and Build Identity
2.4 The Victimized Individual and the National Trauma—THE PAST
2.5 The Victimized Nation and Reconciliation—THE PRESENT
2.6 Activist Memory to Create a Trans/National Space—THE FUTURE
References
National Border on the Tip of Tongue: The Limit of Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon
1 Influx of Three Cultures and Their Queer Love Traditions
2 The Inscription of Nationality, or What Does It Mean to Speak?
3 The Unsayability of Queer Love, or Why It Must Be Left Unsaid?
References
Index

Citation preview

Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5

Chia-rong Wu Ming-ju Fan   Editors

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader

Sinophone and Taiwan Studies Volume 5

Series Editors Shu-mei Shih, National Taiwan Normal University, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Henning Kloeter, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Jenn-Yeu Chen, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan Nikky Lin, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

This book series aims to stimulate and showcase the best of humanistic and social science research related to Sinophone communities and their cultures in Taiwan and around the globe. By combining Sinophone and Taiwan Studies in one book series, we hope to overcome the limitations of previous methodologies to explore the many aspects of Sinophone communities and Taiwan from expansive perspectives that are comparative, transnational, and relational. The foci of the book series include, but are not limited to, the complex relationship between locality and globality, the interrelations among various categories of identity (national, cultural, ethnic, racial, gender, linguistic, religious, and sexual), the states of multiculturalism versus creolization, the politics and economics of culture, diasporic and anti-diasporic practices and expressions, various forms and processes of colonialism (settler colonialism, formal colonialism, postcolonialism, neo-colonialism), as well as indigeneity. Series Editors: Shu-mei Shih (University of California, Los Angeles) Henning Kloeter (Humboldt University of Berlin) Jenn-Yeu Chen (National Taiwan Normal University) Nikky Lin (National Taiwan Normal University) Editorial Board: Yao-ting Sung (National Taiwan Normal University) Christopher Lupke (University of Alberta) Sung-Sheng (Yvonne) Chang (University of Texas at Austin) Ann Heylen (National Taiwan Normal University) Edward Anthony Vickers (Kyushu University) Kuei-fen Chiu (National Chung Hsing University) Ping-hui Liao (University of California, San Diego) Shuo-Bin Su (National Taiwan University) Chu Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford) Cheun Hoe Yow (Nanyang Technological University) Jia-Fei Hong (National Taiwan Normal University)

Chia-rong Wu · Ming-ju Fan Editors

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader

Editors Chia-rong Wu GCLS University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand

Ming-ju Fan National Chengchi University Taipei City, Taiwan

ISSN 2524-8863 ISSN 2524-8871 (electronic) Sinophone and Taiwan Studies ISBN 978-981-19-8379-5 ISBN 978-981-19-8380-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

We (Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan), editors of Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader, are indebted to our home institutions, the University of Canterbury and National Chengchi University, for their substantial support along the process of compiling this volume. Our sincere gratitude is also due to all the contributors, the production team at Springer (including Arulmurugan Venkatasalam and Jessica Zhu), the series editors in Sinophone and Taiwan Studies (Shu-mei Shih, Henning Kloeter, Jenn-Yeu Chen, and Nikky Lin), the copyeditor Madeleine Collinge, and the indexing team (Sung-lin Wu, Pei-yi Lin, Paige Cai, and Chi Su). Special thanks go to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and National Taiwan Normal University for their generous grants towards our lecture series and copyediting, respectively. This volume could not be completed without the expertise and support mentioned above.

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A Note on Chinese Romanization

This volume basically adopts Chinese pinyin romanization for the titles of literary works and the names of writers and historical figures, except for the English names commonly used in the English-speaking world, such as Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Tenghui, Tsai Ing-wen, and Teresa Teng (Teng Li-chun). In some cases, the hyphenated English names of the authors are used upon the mutual agreement between the editors and contributors. Examples include, but are not limited to, Wang Wen-hsing, Gan Yao-ming, Wu Ming-yi, and Huang Chong-kai.

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Contents

Introduction: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan

1

The Reconstruction of History and Politics Democracy Detoured and a Narrator Detached in the Political Fiction of Lai Xiangyin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ming-ju Fan

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A Venture into Taiwan’s Political Changes and Historical Memories Through Li Ang’s “Beef Noodle Soup” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yenna Wu

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Homegrown Stories: Gan Yao-Ming’s Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bert Scruggs

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Genres, Forms, and Ideas Clipping Wings: A Chronicle and Wang Wen-Hsing’s Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

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Xia Yu, the Supreme Stylist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michelle Yeh

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Everything Everywhere All at Once: The New Taiwan in Egoyan Zheng’s Science Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wen-Chi Li

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Reflections Upon Gender and Sexuality Chen Xue, Missing Fathers, and Queer Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Carlos Rojas

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Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and a Farewell Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Linshan Jiang Liglav Awu, Child of the “Double Country”: The Clarion Voice of Indigenous Women in Taiwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Fanny Caron On Ethnicities and Races Through an Indigenous Lens: Syaman Rapongan’s Rewriting of Oceanic Taiwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Chia-rong Wu Migrants of Today, Migrants of Tomorrow in Wu Ming-yi’s Literary Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Gwennaël Gaffric Anti-Japan or Becoming-Japanese: Li Yongping’s Writing on Japan in Postcolonial Taiwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Min-xu Zhan Huang Chong-kai and the Taiwanese Novel of Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Nicholas Y. H. Wong Taiwan Literature in the Age of Globalization Escape and Return: Ghostly Representations of Home and Abroad in Kevin Chen’s “Summer Trilogy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Pei-yin Lin Sketches on a Blank Slate: Shawna Yang Ryan’s Future-Oriented Memories of the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Irmy Schweiger National Border on the Tip of Tongue: The Limit of Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon . . . . . . . . . . 235 Sophia Huei-Ling Chen Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women’s Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan.

Contributors Fanny Caron CNRS-Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA Sophia Huei-Ling Chen University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia Ming-ju Fan National Chengchi University, Taipei City, Taiwan

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Gwennaël Gaffric Université Jean Moulin, Lyon, France Linshan Jiang Duke University, Durham, USA Wen-Chi Li University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Pei-yin Lin University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Carlos Rojas Duke University, Durham, USA Irmy Schweiger Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Bert Scruggs University of California, Irvine, USA Nicholas Y. H. Wong The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong Chia-rong Wu University of Canterbury, Canterbury, New Zealand Yenna Wu University of California, Riverside, USA Michelle Yeh University of California, Davis, USA Min-xu Zhan National Chung Hsing University, Taichung City, Taiwan

Introduction: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan

1 The Historical and Theoretical Framework In the late 1980s, Taiwan experienced its most radical changes in decades since the Kuomintang (KMT) lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and retreated to Taiwan under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s command. The small island-state thus entered a symbolic phase in modern history due to its rapid industrialization. On the one hand, the economy of Taiwan reached its greatest height since the end of the Second World War. Taiwan was thus labeled one of the Four Asian Dragons (or the Four Asian Tigers) alongside Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea (Morris, 1996, p. 95). As Taiwan’s high-performing economy helped vitalize the local community, the authority of the KMT government was constantly challenged by a series of sociopolitical movements. On the other hand, Taiwan benefited from frequent intercultural exchanges with foreign countries as well as overseas imports of diverse theoretical discourses and artistic trends, which led to liberation from any singular and fixed ideology and paved the way for multiexperimental themes and forms of expression in the literary arena. In 1987, Taiwan’s President Chiang Ching-kuo decreed the lifting of the martial law imposed by the KMT about four decades before and officially ended the longest martial law period in human history. Thanks to the liberation and democratization of Taiwan, opposing political parties and independent media forms such as newspapers, radio, and television are legalized and operate beyond the government’s surveillance and prosecution. Additionally, Taiwanese people are allowed to publicly discuss once-taboo subjects, including but not limited to historical incidents, political claims, C. Wu (B) University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] M. Fan National Chengchi University, Taipei City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_1

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ethnic divides, and cross-Strait relations. Through the presidential election in 2000, Taiwanese people voted against the continuous single-party rule by the KMT for over half a century and made Chen Shui-bian the first president from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). This highlighted the non-violent transition of power in Taiwanese history and affirmed the new trajectory of Taiwan’s subjectivity and localization. Opposed to China-centric discourse, intellectuals have been compilating and publishing local materials, documents, files, records, and images, which have greatly contributed to the re-presentation and re-construction of Taiwanese history in the post-martial law era. These endeavors have not only put forward a variety of resources and discourses in relation to localism, but also facilitate the sustainable development of Taiwan literature in the twenty-first century—that is, the focus of this edited volume. When it comes to the book’s structure and design, this volume is indebted to Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (2007), a weighty collection of Englishlanguage essays co-edited by David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas. Writing Taiwan provides a comprehensive survey of modern Taiwan literature from 1945 to the early 2000s and thus extends literary analysis to methodological frameworks, ideological debates, avant-garde experiments, and the cultural, historical, and spatial politics of Taiwan. The major agenda of Writing Taiwan is twofold. First, it proposes “a way of rewriting China” (Wang, 2007, p. x) by examining Taiwan’s literary canons mainly drawn from the twentieth century. Second, it identifies Taiwan as “a discursive and political construct that is continually being constituted and contested through a multifaceted process of ‘writing’” (Rojas, 2007, p. 4). In response to the two thoughtprovoking claims outlined by Wang and Rojas, this volume aims to explore the multiethnic and multilingual way of rewriting Taiwan through a close investigation of both seasoned and rising writers in the twenty-first century. Despite its focus on the new styles and topics in literary writing, this volume recognizes the historical and cultural significance of the previous century, which provides a solid foundation for Taiwan literature in the new era. During the last decade of the twentieth century, Taiwanese writers presented a kaleidoscopic account of literary production in relation to the clash with the authoritarian regime and system by means of mockery and deconstruction. In terms of forms and techniques, Taiwanese writers probed experimental and non-mainstream narratives under the umbrella of serious literature. While Taiwan’s society and politics are still agitated by contentions and disputes in the twenty-first century, its literature parts way with the fin-de-siécle sociopolitical campaigns and points to a new formulation of cultural values. Despite the ongoing process of historical and political re-evaluation observed in the island-state, it is not the traditional literary writing of anti-authoritarian skepticism that occupies the center stage; instead, Taiwanese writers have started exploring the overlap and intersection of plurality and diversity with respect to the representation of varied ethnic voices and experiences. While redefining traditions and norms, Taiwanese writers lead readers to closely examine issues of the past, the present, and the future, such as the wealth gap, gender equality, ecological conservation, and transitional justice. Other key topics include how literature speaks to society and how Taiwan can be seen by the world in the new era that

Introduction: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century

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stimulates the rapid interflow of technology and the large-scale transformation of literary communication in the international network. While Taiwan literature in the twentieth century can be identified as a complex entity that thematizes rupture, grafting, and taboos in a sociopolitical sense, it further enriches topic selection and diversifies aesthetic expression in the twenty-first century, which emphasizes the subjectivity of Taiwan in transition. On one level, the scope of Taiwan literature in the last century was widened through the internalization and localization of the artistic methods drawn from Japan, China, and world literature across generations. This cross-cultural approach has been kept alive, enhanced, and even transmuted by the younger generation of Taiwanese writers to generate a new model of aesthetics in the past two decades. On another level, a number of groundbreaking writers who established their reputation in the previous century are not absent in contemporary academia while instilling in their literary works different local elements and sharpening their aesthetic visions in the new age of Taiwan literature. Notable examples include Wang Wenxing, the master writer of modernism from the 1960s, his successor Li Yongping from the 1980s, the representative feminist writer Li Ang from the 1980s, and the most prominent female and postmodern poet Xia Yu, all of whom continued to publish new works in the twenty-first century. Present-day Taiwanese writers are equipped with the knowledge to fully grasp aesthetic and cultural dimensions across borders. In a translocal light, these writers are tasked to investigate and represent both domestic and international issues through literary writing. As the dynamic between history and reality is always and still the core in focus, this volume encompasses three overarching categories in order to provide a systematic reading of Taiwan literature in the twenty-first century. The first and dominant category is the reflection and reconstruction of history and politics. The focus of the first category is not limited to the construction of a collective geography and political history of Taiwan; rather, it hinges on Taiwan through the lens of the commoners, the countryside, and the place-oriented counties/townships outside municipalities and capitals. For example, writers like Gan Yao-ming, Wu Mingyi, and Huang Chong-kai may still incorporate political history into their writings but would give more credit to Taiwan’s topography, scenery, crops, cultural relics, ethnography, art, and art and literary history itself. Additionally, writers like Li Ang, Lai Xiangyin, and Zhang Yixuan do not heap praise on or idolize the activists of democratic movements while criticizing the authoritarian regime but put into words the intricate hybridity within opposition movements and the legacy left behind by the KMT to this day. The second category sheds light on the continuous deepening of topics on human rights in relation to gender and sexuality. Since the 1980s, issues about women and homosexuality have played a pivotal role in the arena of Taiwan literature, which is thus recognized as the most liberal and open national literature in Asia, despite Taiwan usually being compared to a ghost country outside of the United Nations while being contested by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under its nationalist One China Policy. Readers can see in works by writers like Li Ang, Liglav Awu, Zhang Yixuan, and Kevin Chen the penetrating critique of fixed gender norms and representation of cultural diversity that carry out the educational function of gender

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equality in the contemporary society of the island-state. Annette Lu of the DPP was voted the first female vice president of Taiwan in 2000. Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP became the first female president in 2016 and won the re-election for her second term in 2020. Furthermore, Taiwan hit the world news headlines in 2019 by claiming the title as the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia. All the above achievements were made possible thanks to the prolonged advocacy and promotion of gender equality on the island. The third category brings into focus the positioning of multiethnicities in Taiwan. In the new era, Taiwan literature is no longer driven by Han Chinese people and language on the island. Taiwanese writers not only delve into the historical conflicts among the four major ethnic groups (Hoklo, Hakka, Mainlanders, and Indigenous peoples), but also employ the once neglected or forgotten mother tongues, customs, and memories in their Chinese-language writing. When it comes to constructing the multiethnic cultural experience of contemporary Taiwan, examples include Syaman Rapongan and his ocean-centered Indigeneity, Gan Yao-ming and Hakka culture, Li Yongping and Sinophone Malaysian literature, and the second generation of new immigrants who intermarry with local Taiwanese people. These writers undoubtedly broaden the original scope of the four major ethnic groups by producing source materials for their successors and critics and, more importantly, developing an alternative vision of Taiwan literature. In recent years, the first-generation and second-generation Taiwanese immigrants living overseas are also publishing Taiwan-focused literary works in foreign languages. Li Kotomi and Akira Higashiyama in Japan as well as Shawna Yang Ryan and Ed Lin in the United States of America are solid cases in point. In the twentieth century, Taiwanese intellectuals fiercely debate the necessity to have a standalone, independent Taiwan literature separated from Chinese literature and Japanese literature. Such contention was sparked and intensified by Ye Shitao (Yeh Shih-Tao; 1925–2008) and Chen Yingzhen (1937–2016), who were “representative writers in the spectrum of political ideology for ‘pro-independence leftist’ and ‘pro-unification leftist’” and “competing for the rights for interpreting history and for the voice in the polemics over ‘homeland literature’” (Chen, 2010, pp. 29– 30). This ideological clash has finally been settled thanks to the accelerating rise of local consciousness on the native soil of Taiwan. What Taiwan literature is currently deliberating is how to identity and position Taiwanese subjects in response to the crossover blend of nationalities and literary production in the new age. Under these circumstances, what can be the potential guidelines in the process as nationalities and literary production mix and mingle? How do we separate Taiwan literature from Chinese literature and Sinophone literature? How do we define and justify their overlap? And, finally, what are the limits and boundaries of Taiwan literature in the twenty-first century? This volume seeks to tackle these questions through the compilation of 16 chapters within the intercultural and multiethnic framework of Taiwan and beyond. Each chapter is dedicated to one representative writer in the literary arena of present-day Taiwan. This volume not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island-state.

Introduction: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century

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2 An Overview of Chapters This volume involves wide-ranging topics, such as the rewriting of Taiwanese history, human rights, political and social transitions, post-nativism, Indigenous consciousness, science fiction, ecocriticism, gender and queer studies, and localization and globalization. The goal is to rethink these existing topics and further explore innovative takes on Taiwan literature in the contemporary era. Tailored to accord with the three fundamental categories of Taiwan literature emphasized earlier, this volume is divided into five parts. It is pivotal to consider the five parts of the volume are in place to facilitate thematic readings. These five parts are interconnected, and readers can easily spot overlaps across sections. The first part of the volume spotlights the reconstruction of history and politics in Taiwan literature. Ming-ju Fan opens our volume with a stimulating chapter about Lai Xiangyin’s metanarrative through a clear-eyed consideration of The Translator (2017), a collection of seven previously published stories and five new works. Historical driven, Lai’s stories engage with such significant democratic movements and achievements as the Peasant Movement, the Shell-less Snail Movement, the Wild Lily Student Movement, and presidential elections in the post-martial law era. Fan sharply points out that Lai’s rewriting of Taiwanese history goes beyond one singular localist vision and further intensifies the internal conflicts within the opposition movement against the KMT rule. To sum up, Lai’s chronological account of Taiwanese history and individual experiences is provocative and confounding at the same time, as the female protagonist of the last story in the collection encounters considerable difficulties in properly translating her parents’ past into another language. The translation issue here points to complexity of mediation and communication across historical time and ethnicities on the island as suggested by Lai’s political fiction. In Chap. 3, Yenna Wu closely examines “Beef Noodle Soup,” a short story drawn from Li Ang’s An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds (2007). Wu not only offers an engaging close reading of Li’s literary text on the specific Chinese/Taiwanese dish, but also extends her discussion to the historical and political contexts of modern Taiwan. Wu argues that “Beef Noodle Soup” straddles between fiction and reality and thus invites sophisticated readers to reflect on the political transition from the past to the present. While highlighting the inhuman practice experienced by both mainlander-prisoners and native prisoners in 1960s Taiwan, Wu aptly draws the parallel between food and politics during the White Terror period, thus illustrating different dimensions of trauma—be it physical, psychological, or historical. Surprisingly and allegorically, the beef noodle soup in Li Ang’s writing is eventually identified as a Taiwanese invention that speaks to the traumatic memory and cultural hybridity observed in the island-state. In Chap. 4, Brian Scruggs looks at the genre of xiangtu (or native-soil) fiction in the short stories and novels written by Gan Yao-ming. After quickly sketching the development of xiangtu literature from the 1920s to the 2020s, Scruggs offers an introductory account of Gan’s Hakka background and early career as reporter and teacher, followed by an emphasis on the trope of details and dialects embedded in the

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author’s literary writing. This chapter sees in Gan’s works a profound mix of xiangtu fiction and postmodernity via the forms of anime-realism and magical realism. By comparing Gan’s fiction with foreign authors/auteurs such as Mark Twain, Paul ¯ Kingsnorth, Stanley Kubrick, Hayao Miyazaki, and Otomo Katsuhiro, this chapter illuminates the evolving artistic trend of Taiwan literature with respect to the techniques and styles drawn and adapted from imported literature and cinematography. In light of Gan’s obsession with details and dialects, this chapter helps review and redefine xiangtu fiction as a (trans-)local genre in 21st-century Taiwan. The second part of the volume contains three chapters that, despite their marked discrepancies, share a common relevance and interest in a further exploration of genres, forms, and ideas in Taiwan’s literary production. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang establishes a conceptual framework for an understanding of canonized writer Wang Wen-hsing’s literary art. It is hard to overstate the importance of Chang’s chapter in this volume for two major reasons. First, Chang advocates for Wang’s modernist writing in opposition to the overpowering native-soil literature in contemporary Taiwan. Chang carefully analyzes Wang’s aesthetic insights represented in Clipping Wings: A Chronicle through the adoption of modern Western literary theories, such as mimesis and affect. Second, Chang extends her theoretical examination of Clipping Wings by responding to lukewarm feedback the novel received from readers and critics alike. As the chapter highlights, the potential “datedness” of Wang’s language innovation and thematic focus simultaneously reinstates the cultural importance of Wang’s novel in response to global modernism, thus revitalizing the once-celebrated genre of Taiwan literature in our time. Following Chang’s chapter, Michelle Yeh’s chapter is a masterclass on the innovative features of Xia Yu, whose use of themes, language, and even book design has revolutionized modern poetry in Chinese. While literary production in postwar Taiwan is dominated by a historically and sociopolitically driven discourse, Xia Yu’s poetics is boldly crafted to address the personal experience and affect of a cosmopolitan woman with an experimental twist. Identified as “a poet’s poet” by Yeh, Xia Yu amazes and confounds her readers through a series of language games that involve the dynamics of signifier/the signified, translation/mistranslation, visual/sensual, and more. On top of her creative poetry and designs, Xia Yu bookends her mostly self-published books with interviews and postscripts that create an extra space for the author to directly engage with or guide her readers in a “self-fashioning” way. Xia Yu’s poetry, therefore, functions as a counterpoint to most of the literary works analyzed in the volume. In Chap. 7, Wen-chi Li pursues a science-fiction quest to analyze Egoyan Zheng’s two major novels, Dream Devourer (2010) and Ground Zero (2013). Li brilliantly employs two thought experiments—Schrödinger’s cat and Laplace’s demon—to rediscover and reinterpret the sociopolitical fabric of Egoyan’s sci-fi writing through the lens of post-xiangtu (or post-regional) writing in Taiwan. Despite its sci-fi skin, Egoyan’s literary work reconnects futuristic settings with the unflagging issues observed in postwar Taiwan. On the one hand, Ground Zero illustrates an apocalyptic picture of Taiwan after nuclear explosion, which makes explicit the impotence and corruption of the ruling party in the face of the extreme ecological crisis. On the

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other hand, Dream Devourer can also be treated as a political allegory that envisions a global sci-fi world in connection with the colonial history and postcolonial context of Taiwan. Through his unique sci-fi xiangtu narrative, Egoyan’s novels grapple with the lasting historical pains and ethnic conflicts that continue to define and divide Taiwan. Breaking ground in Part Three, Chap. 8, a crucial contribution from Carlos Rojas, undertakes an in-depth analysis of Chen Xue’s published and republished stories to relocate the politics of gender and homoerotics in contemporary Taiwan. By acknowledging the historical significance of Taiwan’s 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage, this chapter traces Chen Xue’s literary career from 1995 to 2019, which chronicles the author’s literary focus and approach in response to her personal experiences and the sociopolitical realities regarding homosexuality on the island. Through his contextual reading of Book of Evil Women (1995), A Wife’s Diary (2012; co-authored with Breakfaster), When I Became We: Thirty-six Possibilities of Love and Relationships (2018), and Fatherless City (2019), Rojas intellectually explores the shared theme of “fractured families” that occupies a pivotal place in Chen Xue’s unorthodox writing, as the absence of fathers remains a politically loaded issue that confronts the traditional patriarchal and heteronormative paradigms in a psychoanalytic sense. While affirming the symbolic trope of missing fathers, this chapter provides a penetrating view of queer alternatives in Chen Xue’s works. A different strain of gender and homoerotic politics is recounted in Linshan Jiang’s succinct chapter dedicated to the tropes of sex and sexuality in the two novels by Zhang Yixuan: The Love that is Temporary (2011) and A Farewell Letter (2015). This chapter shows us that Zhang, as a queer and lesbian writer, presents an acute view of traumatic memories relating to domestic violence and intimate partner violence. Through the first-person narrative, Zhang’s female protagonists embody a complex process of self-reflection that facilitates her readers’ understanding of the committed situation and beyond. The dynamism of this chapter is justified by a refreshing juxtaposition of trauma and salvation in the sociopolitical and diasporic contexts of Taiwan and abroad. Jiang concludes with the statement about how Zhang’s queer writing proposes a critical way to reconcile traumatic memories with sexual exploration across temporalities and spatialities, thus shedding new light on the tongzhi, or homosexual, literature in 21st-century Taiwan. Expanding the previous two chapters on gender politics, Fanny Caron contributes an invaluable chapter on Liglav Awu, a prominent Paiwan female writer, and the revolutionary gender discourse embedded in her works. In Caron’s account, Awu’s writing marks the transition from colonial to postcolonial conditions endured by Indigenous peoples in Taiwan with a focus on how Indigenous women are silenced and alienated in the Han-dominated Taiwanese society. Caron further accentuates Awu’s identity as a subject of “double country” (or “double heritage”) that straddles her Paiwan and Han backgrounds. Though focusing on Awu’s earlier works, this chapter sharply raises emerging topics that tally with the Indigenous, environmental, and international dimensions of Awu’s literary production and thus connects the writer with the preponderant cross-cultural trends of Taiwan literature and the global

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Indigenous community in the twenty-first century. A substantial work on the resistance and empowerment of Indigenous women through Awu’s works, this chapter also builds a bridge to the following part on multiethnicities. Part Four explores the themes of ethnicities and races that run through the entire volume. In Chap. 11, Chia-rong Wu steers the volume away from the main island of Taiwan with the re-deployment of Orchid Island and the Pacific Ocean in Tao writer Syaman Rapongan’s oceanic discourse. This chapter demonstrates how Rapongan’s seafaring writing is dedicated to the core task of not only challenging the Handominated framework but also diversifying land- or mountain-based Indigenous literature in Taiwan. To unpack Rapongan’s oceanic vision, this chapter offers a critical appraisal of Floating Dreams in the Ocean (2014) and Mata nu Wawa (2018), both of which correspond with the author’s mounting confrontation with undying colonial practices in the contemporary period. The greatest strength of the chapter lies in the reiteration of Rapongan’s deconstructive view of China’s continental and Taiwan’s main-island ideologies. By plaiting Rapongan’s rewriting of oceanic Taiwan with Epeli Hau‘ofa’s “We are the ocean” theory, this chapter delivers a timely theoretical critique that stretches the scope of Taiwan literature in regard to the global Indigenous network and even world literature. An exhilarating piece by Gwennaël Gaffric, Chap. 12 delves into the figuration of migrants across the globe in Wu Ming-yi’s fiction and prose collections. Gaffric argues that Wu’s audacious writing avoids the pitfalls of being limited to specific geographical locales, temporal settings, and colonial minds in the global age. Through his works on mobilities of animals (including migrant butterflies) and human subjects, Wu unfolds the potentiality of straddling between species, histories, races, ethnicities, and nationalities. The impact of the Second World War, for instance, can never be fully assessed through any singular lens, be it geopolitical, national, or historical, but should be examined within a much larger environment that encompasses both the spaces of the living and the non-living. This chapter further borrows Dan Bloom’s theoretical term—Climate Fiction—to illuminate the phenomenon of international migration and climate refugees, thus promoting an ecocritical vision that seeks mutual understanding and co-existence in the twenty-first century. In Chap. 13, Min-xu Zhan critically adopts Leo T. S. Ching’s theory to explore both the anti-Japan and “becoming-Japanese” sentiments observed in Li Yongping’s literary works. Zhan first surveys the notable Taiwanese fictions on the topic and then extends his discussion of the transition from anti-Japanism to the other end of the spectrum in 21st-century Taiwan by treating Li’s novels as a bridge between the two opposite ideologies. As argued by Zhan, “becoming” goes beyond the limitation of “imitation, learning, and identification,” thus blurring the border between the self and the other and complicating the subjective identity in a plural sense. Departing from Chinese nationalism and anti-Japanism, Li showcases a growing understanding of, or strong interest in, Japanese samurai, food, animation, and even imperial soldiers in his later works. Therefore, this chapter offers an insightful interpretation of Li’s works that pushes the boundary of identity politics across races and regions in response to the extraordinary discourses of translocality and postcoloniality in contemporary Taiwan.

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In the next chapter, Nicholas Y. H. Wong deals with the literary-historical account represented in Huang Chong-kai’s The Content of the Times (2017) and The Formosa Exchange (2021). Wong skillfully draws the link between Sianne Ngai’s concept of the “gimmick of the novel of ideas” and Huang’s perplexing narratives on virtual reality and population exchange. This chapter also identifies literary history as media history, as it taps into the imaginary nexuses of Taiwan–Cuba, Earth–Mars, and US–China relations in Huang’s metafictional writing that intriguingly bears witness to the White Terror period of Taiwan and reimagines the past and future of the island. Through his rhetoric of “counterfactual historicity,” Huang participates in the revision and reconstruction of Taiwan’s diaspora. From this perspective, this chapter leads readers to scrutinize Huang’s novels and further extend their textual reading to a profound act of contextualizing contemporary Taiwan in a sociopolitical light. Taiwan is thus imaginatively re-worlded and its literary literature rewritten thanks to Huang. This volume closes with the topic on Taiwan literature in the age of globalization by using Pei-yin Lin’s chapter to set the tone for this concluding section. In Chap. 15, Lin comprehensively charts the formulation of the border-crossing “Summer Trilogy” by Kevin Chen, a Berlin-based Taiwanese writer. By implementing a close reading of Ghost Town (2019), Florida Metamorphosis (2020), and The Good People Upstairs (2022), this chapter convincingly discloses the interconnectedness of escape and return of Chen’s protagonists by placing side by side the ghostly repressed homeland (Yongjing and Yuanlin) and the relatively liberal foreign land (Berlin and Florida). Lin takes a further step in casting the limelight on a shortlist of provocative subjects, including, but not limited to, homophobia and the political authoritarianism of the island-state, as interrogated and trialed in Chen’s fictional universe. On a higher level, this chapter represents an ambitious venture into Chen’s transnational identity that simultaneously seeks root in and rebels against Taiwan’s (post-)nativist literature. Echoing the previous chapter’s cross-cultural and transnational agenda on Taiwan literature, Irmy Schweiger’s chapter provides an invigorating overview of Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan and her novels. Schweiger begins by elaborating how Ryan’s English-language literary writing on Taiwan is convoluted and empowered by her Taiwanese American identity and position. This chapter further explains the significance of the 1947 February 28 Incident and the pursuit of Taiwanese independence and democracy as the historical backdrop of Ryan’s Taiwan-focused novel Green Island through the lens of national trauma and memory politics. By reflecting on the forced amnesia and the counter-narrative agenda in Green Island, this chapter subtly addresses the witness/victim agency that negotiates the past, the present, and the future. The ultimate goal is to endorse the re-narration of historical trauma as an alternative approach to remembrance and reconciliation in a transgenerational and transpacific context. A theoretically and translocally driven gem, this chapter offers a forward-looking view of Taiwan literature in the age of globalization. This volume concludes with Sophia Huei-Ling Chen’s chapter on Li Kotomi, a Taiwanese-born Japanese author. Unpacking the notion of cosmopolitanism, this chapter winds up focusing on Li Kotomi’s fictional work Count Down to Five Seconds

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of Crescent Moon (2019/2021), which features the compelling parallel between a female/lesbian Taiwanese immigrant in Japan and Mio, a female/straight Japanese immigrant in Taiwan. In addition to a lively discussion of sexual/queer and cultural others in foreign settings, this chapter takes up the theory of “minor transnationalism” by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih as a critical way of coming to terms with the practices of immigration and acculturation and with the discourses of nationalism and transnationalism. Proficiently, this chapter not only concentrates on the relationship between the two female protagonists and their compromised situatedness in their host countries, but it also rethinks Li’s blueprint of the ethnic-Chinese Hui restaurant and Teresa Teng’s vocal performance that background the two characters’ long-awaited encounter in a trans-Asian context, thus envisaging the two-way traffic between Taiwan literature and Japanese literature. In recent years, there are more and more English-language anthologies and volumes on Taiwan studies; still, Taiwan literature is normally overshadowed by social and political sciences and international relations in such endeavors. In addition to David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas’s edited volume, Writing Taiwan (2007), a masterful source in the field is The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan (2014), edited by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-ju Fan. It is important to consider that The Columbia Sourcebook is a compilation that engages with the colonial period and the Cold War under Taiwan’s martial law. As Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang (2014) argues, The Columbia Sourcebook is tasked “to enrich the taxonomy of modern East Asian traditions, a foundation for studying the underexplored component of world literature” (p. 30). Moving forward from the Cold War discourse, our collaborative volume not only offers a historical and theoretical overview of contemporary Taiwan, but also explores new trends in the literary production in Taiwan and beyond. Due to unexpected issues, this volume is unable to include chapters on such important writers like Xiang Yang, Hong Hong, and Luo Yijun. Still, the chapters in this volume recognize the unique historical and sociopolitical backdrop of Taiwan and aim to promote its literature and scholarship in a link with the global network. Taiwan literature, therefore, can be considered a literature of its own as well as part of world literature, rather than a subgroup under any other hegemonic state or literature.

References Chang, S. Y. (2014). Introduction: literary Taiwan—An East Asian contextual perspective. In S. Y. Chang, M. Yeh, & F. Ming-ju (Eds.), The Columbia sourcebook of literary Taiwan (pp. 1–36). Columbia University Press. Chen, F.-M. (2010). 葉石濤與陳映真: 八◯年代台灣左翼小說的兩個面向 [Yeh Shih-Tao and Chen Ying-Chen: Two Aspects of Leftist Fiction in 1980s Taiwan]. Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature, 17, 27–43. Morris, P. (1996). Asia’s four little tigers: A comparison of the role of education in their development. Comparative Education, 32(1), 95–109. Rojas, C. (2007). Introduction. In D. D. Wang & C. Rojas (Eds.), Writing Taiwan: A new literary history (pp. 1–14). Duke University Press. Wang, D. D. (2007). Preface. In D. D. Wang & C. Rojas (Eds.), Writing Taiwan: A new literary history (pp. vii–x). Duke University Press.

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Chia-rong Wu is an associate professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published with such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the authors of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women’s Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan

The Reconstruction of History and Politics

Democracy Detoured and a Narrator Detached in the Political Fiction of Lai Xiangyin Ming-ju Fan

Abstract This chapter will explore the various layers Lai Xiangyin (Lai Hsiang-yin 賴香吟) portrays in her collection of short stories entitled The Translator (翻譯者) that maps out several turning points in the post-martial law era. These stories are listed mainly in chronological order and divided into four series, the first dealing with the progression that emerged after martial law was lifted, and the second the frustrations of the reform process. Series three moves away from the democracy movement in Taipei to the perspective of Tainan, an ancient city in south Taiwan. The fourth series offers a metanarrative to Lai’s fictions as well as a historiography of our time. Lai’s texts offer inspiring observations on Taiwan’s democratic movement: the history of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy; the history and internal conflicts of the opposition movement; and how the period looks when viewed from a different geographical vantage point. Most importantly, they show how literature, when done right, preserves time, and how a novelist can come to represent historical “truth.” Keywords Lai Xiangyin · Democracy · Historiography · Metanarrative · Post-martial law For 50 years after Imperial Japan relinquished control of Taiwan to the Kuomintang (KMT), the Nationalist government of the Republic of China, China and Taiwan remained disconnected. Two years into the KMT rule, the Nationalists killed many native Taiwanese in what would become known as the 228 Incident1 (or Massacre), an event the KMT forbade the press from reporting on and withheld from the history books for decades. In 1949, when the KMT fled to Taiwan after their defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Mainland during the Chinese Civil War, they declared martial law to fortify their rule over the island. For the next 40 years, a period known as the White Terror, the KMT arrested and charged citizens indiscriminately, without trial or evidence, and prohibited the Taiwanese people from criticizing the KMT or discussing any subjects the Party deemed verboten, never mind M. Fan (B) National Chengchi University, Taipei City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] 1

The 228 Incident refers to the February 28 Incident in 1947.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_2

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organizing an oppositional political movement. Although the KMT declared Taiwan a democracy, the island was clearly ruled by an authoritarian regime. The lifting of martial law in 1987 marked a milestone in Taiwan’s transition towards establishing an open society and the first step towards the country’s pursuit of democracy, free speech, and cultural plurality. Founded in 1986, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the presidency in 2000, ending the KMT’s 55-year dictatorship and marking the first peaceful transition of power in the nation’s history. Eight years later, the KMT returned to the presidency, and, eight years after that, in 2016, the DPP won it back. While two rounds of party turnover may indicate Taiwan’s transformation into a mature democracy, concomitantly, such loosening of authority opened a Pandora’s box of long-repressed political conflicts based on different ethnical experiences, social status, or political positions. Public policies related to everything from human rights, social welfare, the economy, diplomacy, and the ever-taboo topic of national identity have surfaced and are now open to fierce debate. Today, Taiwan is praised as one of the few states ever to transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Contrary to popular belief, however, the road to democracy is never smooth—or ideal. That the amount of political literature published in Taiwan has increased exponentially since the late 1980s should come as no surprise. To a society newly granted free speech, political literature becomes a sounding board for newfound freedoms as well as a tool with which to shape perceptions about a past distorted by authoritarian censorship. Naturally, those who are deeply invested in politics find they have the greatest stake in the rewriting of history. How a writer approaches the past often reveals his or her political leanings. In post-martial law Taiwan, a large group of writers set their sights on the brutality of the KMT’s rule, focusing on the 228 Incident and White Terror, and celebrated Taiwan’s transition to democracy, while a smaller group chose to stress the contributions the KMT had made to the country and expressed discontent with the effect the various policies and national narratives promoted by the DPP and other opposition groups, the likes of which they considered revisionist, had on society. If critics categorize the larger group as anti-KMT or pro-DPP, and the smaller as pro-KMT or anti-DPP, the sympathy Lai Xiangyin (Lai Hsiang-yin 賴香吟; b. 1996) has for civilian and local cultures suppressed by authoritarian rule and her curiosity for untold stories places her firmly in the first camp. What sets her apart, however, is that, in addition to confronting the sordid history of the pre-martial law period, she also manages to put forth a sense that the “progress” of the post-martial law period is itself history per se. Though not her sole focus, every few years Lai contributes a piece of fiction that touches on an important event in Taiwan’s political progress as part of her collections of short stories. In 2017, to mark the 30th anniversary of the lifting of martial law, Lai combined seven of her previously published works with five new fictions for a collection entitled The Translator (Fanyizhe 翻譯者) that mapped out several turning points in the post-martial law era. Lai’s texts offer an interesting yet inspiring perspective from which to trace the development of reforms over the past three decades.

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Lai Xiangyin started her career in fiction when, coincidentally, she entered college the same year martial law was lifted. Her first collection of short stories, Walking to Somewhere Else (Sandu dao tafang 散步到他方), was published in 1996, followed by 2000’s The Island (Dao 島), The Scenery in the Fog (Wuzhong fengjing 霧中風景) in 2007, Afterwards (Qihou 其後) in 2012, and The Death of a Young Literati (Wenqing zhisi 文青之死) in 2016. Along the way, Lai has also published several books of prose and literary criticism. Though not prolific, Lai’s works cover a range of topics from gender, LGBTQ+, ethnicity, identity, and social movements, to historiography and metanarratives. Her penetrating insights coupled with her unique style of prose have won her numerous literary prizes and the respect of her peers in academia. A writer who earned her master’s degree in Japan, Lai excels at evoking the shared currents of history running through the relationships among Taiwan, China, and Japan. Lai’s skepticism of the democracy movement she ardently supports further distinguishes her from her peers. Far from homogenous, the opposition movement consisted of people from various backgrounds, thus making it prone to internal strife that, when coupled with the task of opposing the pro-authoritarian conservative forces on the other side of the political spectrum, eventually led to the group fracturing. As Liou Liang-ya notes, Lai refuses to “make heroes of the opposition and student movements” she supports. This she achieves by focusing on the diversity and internal schisms of the movements, thus humanizing its members (Liou, 2010, p11). The result is that Lai unmasks the realities of the struggle towards democracy, where advocates often find themselves taking two steps forward only to take one step back. There exist no heroes or glory in Lai’s fiction. Rather, the ideals, hopes, and preconceptions of characters towards democracy are confronted with the harsh realities of the political process, juxtaposing what they once hoped for with what they eventually settled on. Each of the 12 fictions in The Translator take place on dates critical to the political transitions Taiwan has undergone the past 30 years, revealing Lai’s historian bent. Except for the last piece, the stories are listed in chronological order and divided into four series. The first two series contrast one another, with the first dealing with the social forces and energy that emerged after martial law was lifted, and the second the frustrations and setbacks of the reform process. Series three moves away from the democracy movement in the country’s political centers to the perspective of Tainan, an ancient city in south Taiwan. The fourth series offers a metanarrative to Lai’s fictions as well as a historiography of our time. This chapter will explore the various layers Lai Xiangyin portrays in her observations on Taiwan’s democratic movement: the history of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy; the history and internal conflicts of the opposition movement; and how the period looks when viewed from a different geographical vantage point. Most importantly, it explores how literature, when done right, preserves time, and how a novelist can come to represent historical “truth”.

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1 Progression and Regression Covering the period spanning from the lifting of martial law to Lee Teng-hui’s victory in Taiwan’s first presidential election, the first series contains five stories. To clear up the turmoil of what was clearly a very unstable period of transition, Lai includes the years of the events in the chapters’ titles. “Fiction and Document” (xugou yu jishi 虛構與紀實), the original title for the first chapter, became “Fiction 1987” (虛 構1987), a prelude to the new era of post-martial law. The protagonist of the story is a college freshman who has just begun to study creative writing. As her classmates celebrate the lifting of martial law and the coming of free speech, the girl struggles to write a fictional tale about a deceased high school classmate whom she barely knew. Topics like the 228 Incident and the White Terror go from taboo to highly contested and researched. Rather than liberate the protagonist, such transitions only serve to make her more and more confused—as she struggles to recall the life of her distant, the deceased high school classmate, so too does she struggle to piece together the history of a country whose past she seemingly barely knew. Although this shatters her confidence, she refuses to give up on revealing the past, digging deeper and deeper into Taiwan’s hidden history to fulfill her sense of what is right. As 1987 concludes, her friends and the public remain adamant in their resolve to uncover the past on their march towards a democratic future. While the narrator of the first fiction is a young girl whose political enlightenment starts after the lifting of martial law, the second fiction tells its story from the perspective of the “student movement generation” (學運世代), centering around a group of friends who join social movements during college, but gradually drift apart in their 30s. This point in the chronology of Lai’s works sees the emergence of the oldest revolutionary generation of “Beauty Island” (美麗島世代) and that of the “defense lawyers” (美麗島辯護律師世代). Here Lai skillfully uses the naivete of youth to examine the opposition movement more objectively. The second story “Wild Land 1989” (野地1989) examines several of the period’s most well-known protests, including the Peasant Movement (農民運動)2 and the Shell-less Snail Movement (無殼蝸牛運動),3 as well as the impactful support Taiwanese students offered to the innocent student protestors slaughtered by the Chinese Communist Party at the 2

According to Hsiao Xinhung’s study, the first peasant movement in 1987 was organized and mobilized by professional fruit farmers before expanding to include professional rice farmers in the years that followed. On the day of May 20, 1988, thousands of farmers gathered at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial to march in protest. Clashes between the police and protestors began in the afternoon and would escalate into street violence. The day saw the arrest of numerous peasant activists, ordinary citizens, homeless people, and university students in what would become known as the “520 Incident.” See Hsin-hung, Hsiao (1991). 3 The Shell-less Snail Movement was a social movement against high housing prices in Taiwan in the late 1980s. To protest rapidly raising housing price, some activists formed the “Housing-less Solidarity Organization” at the end of June 1989 and carried out a series of acts known as the Shell-less Snail Movement. One such act called on the masses to spend the night at Zhongxiao East Road, the home of Taipei’s priciest real estate, on August 26. Shell-less Snail was considered the first social movement to focus on urban issues in Taiwan.

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Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing in 1989. The third story, “Love Letter 1991” (qingshu 情書1991), revolves around the Wild Lily Student Movement (野百合學 運) of 1990 and the rise and fall of youthful passion.4 The next story, “Noisy 1994” (Xuanhua 喧嘩1994), depicts the period of Chen Shui-bian’s election as mayor of Taipei in 1994, a period marked by increased ethnic tensions and the emergence of the divisions within the KMT that led to the birth of the New Party (新黨), the most pro-China party in Taiwan. Here Lai’s fiction foreshadows the shaping of a new style of democracy and a group of young activists from the student movement’s rise to power as a new force in politics she offsets with a subtle criticism that betrays the fractures that will occur within the student movement in the coming years. In the fifth chapter, “Wedding 1996” (Hunli 婚禮1996), the people of Taiwan, in defiance of Chinese threats to missile the island, vote in Lee Teng-hui, an outspoken critic of China, as the country’s first democratically elected president in a demonstration of the Taiwanese people’s determination to be the masters of their own country. Where the first series details the origins of Taiwanese democracy and the opportunity of newfound hope, the three stories of the second series cover the setbacks of the democratic movement and the frustrations brought by idealism. “The Taste of Taipei” (Taibei de ziwei 台北的滋味) uses Chen Shui-bian’s failed bid for reelection in 1998 to reveal the façade of Taipei’s openness. Originally titled simply “The Taste,” Lai’s addition of the word Taipei was one steeped in cynicism. Under the banner of modernization and racial equality lay struggles among ethnic groups, classes, and generations that remained rooted in citizens’ minds. Although he admires the vibrancy and culture of Taipei, the story’s protagonist, like Chen Shui-bian and southern Taiwanese, finds the Mainland Chinese heritage of the capital’s inhabitants, and the sense of privilege that comes with it, precludes them from ever truly accepting him as one of their own. It was this cultural divide, many believe, that led to Chen losing his bid for reelection to his Mainlander counterpart, Ma Ying-jeou, despite Chen enjoying an approval rating of over 70% during his time in office. Unfortunately, even when Chen Shui-bian and the DPP won the presidency in 2000, the fight against authoritarianism proved short-lived. Chen’s tenure itself was marred in the kind of corruption typical of authoritarian regimes, amplifying divisions in the opposition movement and leaving many to wonder if their idealistic pursuit of democracy had not only all been in vain, but had imperiled Taiwan’s future as well, as exposed in “The Dawn is Coming” (Muse jiangzhi 暮色將至). It thus came as no surprise that the KMT returned to power in 2008, seeking to revive their conservative platform and ties to China. Dafydd Fell’s chronicling of Taiwan’s social movements makes clear the complexities abounding in 2008. Fell declares that, although the reformist camps had allied with the opposition party, the DPP, since 4

From March 16 to March 22, 1990, college students from all over Taiwan gathered at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to launch a series of protests demanding constitutional reform. President Lee Teng-hui met with the student representatives and agreed to the reform demands, followed by direct presidential elections and electoral reforms, which catalyzed Taiwan’s democracy to move towards another stage. This student movement was not only the first large-scale student protest since 1949, but also a landmark that accelerated the speed of Taiwan’s democratic movement. It is generally referred to as the Wild Lily Student Movement or the March Student Movement.

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the lifting of martial law, after the DPP came to power in 2000, ties between the government and reformists eventually strained. Shortly after 2000, the government did appoint a few activists to government posts as ministers and some were even invited to join advisory committees; however, cooperation gave way to conflict as the DPP performed an about face vis-à-vis the principles it shared with the reformist camps by increasingly courting big business interests and conservative groups. By the end of the DPP era in 2008, the frustration of the reformists with the government was palpable. Things went from bad to worse when the KMT took back power in 2008. Where the DPP had marginalized them, under the KMT, the reformists now found themselves completely excluded from government. Not only did the KMT’s policies not align with their own, but its ties to China also meant that Chinese influence over Taiwan threatened a return to the authoritarianism from which they had fought so hard to free themselves just decades ago. As Fell (2017) writes, “Near total control over local authorities and the national government gave the KMT the confidence to ignore protests. Perception of a return to authoritarian government practices played an important role in shaping activism at the time. The widespread employment of excessive police violence and even organized crime to quell protests were prominent features of this kind of authoritarianism” (pp. 2–3). As a result, the social movements’ calls for increased plurality in government representation became particularly pronounced under the regime of Ma Ying-jeou. It was in this tense political environment, one that witnessed the increased suppression of social activists and intellectuals, that Lai sets her story “Four Days Later” (Huo siri 後四日), when Ma Ying-jeou was re-elected in 2012. The protagonist of the story is an elderly professor of Taiwanese history and culture who is in poor health. His daughter and son-in law are both well-educated intellectuals struggling to make ends meet in a highly competitive job market. The young couple’s financial woes lead them to seek help from their parents in raising their children. Their worries are compounded by the result of the election, one that jeopardizes the future of their generation in that the CCP clearly has the ability to force or intimidate the Taiwanese into electing a CCP-approved candidate who turns his back on local business owners. Unable to help his daughter support her family, the protagonist is left frustrated with the current state of the country. The father–daughter dynamic and the inability of the older generation to help the younger may allude to former President Lee Teng-hui publicly endorsing Tsai Ing-wen in the 2012 election. Unfortunately for Tsai and the reformist camp, not even an endorsement from the man known as Mr. Democracy, who himself had survived the missile threat attempt in 1996 by the CCP, could halt China’s influence over Taiwan’s highest office.

2 Historiography and Metanarrative Also chronological, Lai depicts the third series from a different geographical perspective, going from the political and economic capital of Taipei to Tainan, the birthplace of President Chen Shui-bian. The series’ first two stories, “Island” (Dao 島) and

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“Zeelandia” (Relanzhe 熱蘭遮), take place in the year 2000, when the DPP first came to power, and the third, “The Rain Tree” (Yudou shu雨豆樹), Lai sets in 2016, the year the DPP returned to power. Choosing Tainan, for Lai, is a way to show how, in both 2000 and 2016, democracy had succeeded in disseminating power to parts of Taiwan that had hitherto been historically marginalized. Lai’s use of Tainan goes deeper than politics, however, as it represents the return to prominence of a city considered the cultural capital of Taiwan since antiquity, and thus, a resurrection of the native Taiwanese spirit. The twin pieces, “Island” and “Zeelandia,” are narrated by the same female protagonist, with the former taking its title from the name of her boyfriend, a disaffected Taipei native attracted to the historical heritage of Tainan, who mysteriously disappears one day without telling anyone. Stunned, the narrator can only guess Island has gone to see Tainan with his own eyes. She returns to her hometown to look for him, only to find herself lost in the city she once knew, now undergoing massive urbanization. “Zeelandia” opens with twin revelations: Island is dead, and the narrator is pregnant. Rather than return to Taipei, she decides to raise the child amid Tainan’s urban transformation, as despite losing parts of its storied landscape to reconstruction, the city, she finds, is experiencing a spiritual revival that, thanks to modernization, makes for comfortable living equal to Taipei. The story concludes with the heroine naming her unborn baby after her father, symbolizing south Taiwan’s rebirth. Fueled by a desire to get back in touch with their roots, the journeys of the characters in “Island” and “Zeelandia” recall James Clifford’s discourse on the indigeneity of culture. When one speaks of locality, the tendency is to assume traditions never change, that the culture of the particular peoples in a particular place is frozen in time. This, Clifford argues, is more romanticized than reality. In fact, even those cultures who choose to isolate themselves still have ample access to the outside world through media, people, and the exchange of goods: “We need to think comparatively about the distinct routes/roots of tribes, barrios, favelas, immigrant neighborhoods—embattled histories with critical community ‘insides’ and regulated traveling ‘outsides’. What does it take to define and defend a homeland?” (Clifford, 1997, p. 36). Since route and root are ongoing processes of constructing culture, arriving at an unchanged origin story is impossible. Even the most ancient city and its residents are undergoing constant transformation, with Taiwan serving as no exception. In “The Rain Tree,” Lai delicately weaves together history, topography, politics, representation, and translation to deliver a meta-fiction that serves as the keystone of the series. The story’s first-person narrator is the author of “Island” and “Zeelandia,” who, like the heroine of her two works, has just moved back to her hometown of Tainan after years away. Walking through the ancient city of her birth, she cannot help but lament over how little she knows about its rapidly vanishing history and geography, and the role it played in shaping the lives of her late father and family. One day, a friend attempting to translate “Zeelandia” calls her, asking to meet to discuss the text. The two arrange to meet in Tainan on the eve of the presidential election. During their meeting, the translator asks the writer about the name of the unborn child at the end of “Zeelandia,” to which she replies, “It was the vision at that time,” a vision that in today’s world seems “too naïve” (Lai, 2017, p. 245). The

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translator then reveals to the writer (and in so doing, indeed the reader) the hidden devices behind her fictions: “I return to a home rendered unfamiliar—the impression I once had of it, unreliable; the new one, I am yet to become acquainted with” (p. 238). To find the Island, therefore, is not a matter of remembering, but rather one of searching. Since the future remains uncertain, the writer devises that the circle, Tainan’s traditional landscape pattern, will serve as the first setting for her fictions, a symbol both indefinite and infinite. Lai then proceeds to sprinkle in some optimism to offset the uncertain future and misty past she paints. Young people, once indifferent to politics, now flock to the polls on election day, with some even returning home from abroad to take part in shaping Taiwan’s future. This results in the election of DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen, whose victory speech Lai quotes to shed light on the road ahead: “I’ll be strong. In the face of Taiwan’s challenges, I will be strong every minute” (p. 242). The recurrence of the phrase “Be strong,” is one uttered by Tsai in her concession speech four years earlier and one Lai quoted in the chronologically earlier “Four Days Later,” a symbol of the value of perseverance for the newly elected president and the Taiwanese people alike. With a bright future lighting the way, Lai then braves herself for unveiling the past. “The Rain Tree” concludes with the author leaving a celebration on the night of election to instead walk the streets of Tainan’s historic university. The old buildings have survived urbanization, seemingly frozen in time. But just as they are “ghosts of the city,” as Michel de Certeau (1998, p. 133) describes them, they are also keyholes into another world, uncanny sore thumbs that burst forth in a massive, homogenous modern city, like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps subconscious, language. To do them justice Lai turns to metaphor: like a bird pulling worms from the grass in the dark of night, so, too, is their presence in the city. Watch the grass long enough and a worm the bird will find; watch the bird long enough and a worm he will catch. Lai concludes The Translator with a story of the same name. Here she abandons chronology, setting the book’s final piece at its earliest date, 1995. Like “The Rain Tree,” the story’s protagonist is the child of opposition activists struggling to find the words to translate her parents’ story. How, she wonders, can something so imperceptible be translated into another language when it can hardly be put into words to begin with? “We are all living in a process of translation,” she laments, “a process that includes not merely language, but acts, values, and ideals that are incapable of accurately expressing what the mind perceives” (Lai, 2017, p. 304). Here, in 1995, the protagonist foretells the struggles of those who will follow: how can transitions so great be put into words, be communicated, when language itself is bound by limitations? The book’s final chapter is thus at once a prologue, a postscript, and a pivot for the entire collection. Though she aspires to create a documentary of the 30 years of the democratic movement, Lai is all too aware of how numerous the doors of perception are and the ambiguity that results. Ultimately, she concludes, a meta-fiction of her own political works that employs the dialectics of language and the prose of postmodern literary theory offers the most accurate portrayal of reality.

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Lai’s postmodernist approach to recreating the past is only fitting when one considers the sway postmodernism held over Taiwan’s literati at this point in the chronology, but that she would stick with it three decades later reveals a hesitation to present her works as documentary and a recognition that, though an author and a citizen, she, first and foremost, is an artist. Still, she invariably grapples with the classic conundrum of postmodernist authors: how to offer a narrative on the past both different and relevant to the present. To quote Linda Hutcheon (1989), the struggle lies in: “on the one hand, between the pastness (and absence) of the past and the presentness (and presence) of the present, and on the other hand, between the actual events of the past and the historian’s act of processing them into fact” (p. 73). Throughout the book, Lai’s awareness of this dialectic dilemma is palpable: is what she is writing fact or fiction? To come to terms, she resolves to tell not just one individual story but everyone’s, focusing on the different interest groups among the opposition movements to (in true democratic fashion) increase representation and de-totalize the narrative of the history of the democracy movement. In addition to detotalization, Lai employs two other skills in her writing of history. One, she relegates the historical event to the background, leaving the forefront to character development. This ensures that any attempt to reference her work politically or historically will likely prove troublesome. To the watershed of the lifting of martial law Lai assigns a single sentence, “My 1987, began with a rumored funeral.” For the Peasant Movement of 1988, she mentions only the date, May 20; and the Wild Lily student movement, she alludes to as “the azaleas blooming season.” The years of Tsai Ing-wen’s defeat and victory she indicates with quotes from Tsai’s speeches. Her fictions are thus like the title of her book The Scenery in the Fog: without careful and patient interpretation, the stories—and their messages—scatter in the labyrinth. Unlike most novelists’ works which are centered around the victims, relatives, or descendants of political events, all of Lai’s protagonists are passerbys never at the core of political movements; they may attend rallies or tune in to campaign speeches, but their place is on the fringe, as mere witnesses to history. In “Island” and “Zeelandia,” rather than being active in the urbanization of her hometown, our heroine finds herself powerless, swept away by it. Like a tourist, she feels detached and isolated. What she witnesses is overwhelming, fragmented, and puzzling. Her frazzled brain is hardly the kind one would turn to for a historical recounting of the era. Lai does this to present herself to the reader as such: an artist struggling to interpret and construct a trajectory of Taiwan’s political, economic, democratic, interpersonal, and generational transformations. In this sense, she expresses solidarity with the average Taiwanese, someone who acutely experiences Taiwan’s transformation but perceives it from afar. The transformation influences us all; it changes us. But to piece together a panoramic view of its history from our infinite and varied perspectives remains, to this day, impossible. Those familiar with Lai Xiangyin’s works may say this indirect approach to history, her lyricism, and her ability to leave the reader to fill in the blanks mark her style. Minimizing the role of historical events and the use of unreliable narrators reflect how self-conscious she is when dealing with social issues. Lai’s approach thus deliberately resembles the democratic movement itself: an uncertain, swaying

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process that leaves more questions than answers. Does Taiwan’s trajectory tilt to the left or right? Is the past a history forgotten or invented? More importantly, how can Taiwanese get back in touch with our roots when the path to such enlightenment is obscured and the roots themselves are hardly recognizable? The tensions between north and south, incumbent and deposed, the indecisiveness of the past and future, and the dialectics between reality and fiction, history and literature are what makes Lai Xiangyin’s political novels truly her own.

3 Conclusion That Lai Xiangyin’s best and most representative anthology of short stories was banned one month after its publication due to copyright disputes is truly a tragedy. The result was that the greatest political fiction to depict Taiwan’s history since the lifting of martial law was reduced to nothing more than a casualty of a commercial dispute between rival publishing houses. Fortunately, a few copies remain to be found in libraries, private book collections, and second-hand and internet bookstores. People interested in Lai’s interpretation of Taiwan’s post-martial law democratic development, ironically, find themselves forced to adopt martial-law era tactics to procure her book. Equally fortunate for us all is that Lai has not stopped in her efforts to explore Taiwan’s past through political fiction. Five years after the ban of The Translator, she published White Portraits (Baise huaxiang 白色畫像), a depiction of ordinary people’s lives during the White Terror period. From historical events to people, from post-martial law to martial law, there is no stone Lai seems content with leaving unturned on her penetrating literary journey to expose the underlying political forces shaping the future of the island she loves.

References Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press. de Certeau, M., Giard, L., & Mayol, P. (1998). The practice of everyday life (Vol. 2). (T. Tomasik, trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Fell, D. (2017). Social movement in Taiwan after 2008: From the strawberries to the sunflowers and beyond. In D. Fell (Ed.), Taiwan’s social movement under Ma Ying-jeou. Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (1989). The politics of postmodernism. Routledge. Hsiao, H. (1991). 1980年代末期台灣的農民運動:事實與解釋 [The peasant movement in Taiwan in the late 1980s: Facts and explanations]. 中央研究院民族學研究所集刊 [Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica] 70(3), 67–93. Liou, L.-Y. (2010). 遲來的後殖民: 賴香吟解嚴小說 中的知識菁英和底層人民 [Belated Postcoloniality: Intellectuals and the Subaltern in Lai Hsiang-yin’s Post-Martial Law Fictions]. 中外 文學 [Chung-Wai Literary Monthly], 39(4), 7–43. Xiangyin, L. 賴香吟. (1996). 散步到他方 [Walking to Somewhere Else]. Unitas Publishing. Xiangyin, L. (2000). 島 [The Island]. Unitas Publishing.

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Xiangyin, L. (2007). 霧中風景 [The Scenery in Fog]. Ink Publishing. Xiangyin, L. (2011). 其後 [Afterwards]. Ink Publishing. Xiangyin, L. (2016). 文青之死 [The Death of a Young Literati]. Ink Publishing. Xiangyin, L. (2017). 翻譯者 [The Translator]. Ink Publishing. Xiangyin, L. (2022). 白色畫像 [White Portraits]. Ink Publishing.

Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the authors of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women’s Fiction and Critic Artisan , Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan

A Venture into Taiwan’s Political Changes and Historical Memories Through Li Ang’s “Beef Noodle Soup” Yenna Wu

Abstract Politics and food are skillfully intertwined in renowned Taiwanese author Li Ang’s 李昂 (Shih Shu-tuan 施淑端; 1952–) “Beef Noodle Soup” (牛肉麵), a story in her unique food novel, An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds (鴛鴦春膳, 2007). This chapter examines how Li Ang revives a lesser-known part of historical memory—the political prisoners in the 1960s Taiwan—and reimagines their visceral, gustatory, and related psychological trauma through the nexus of beef noodle soup, prison food, and execution. It is argued that in problematizing our understanding of beef noodle soup, this story continues Li Ang’s critical reflections on Taiwan’s colonial past, historical trauma, resistance to repressions, cultural hybridity, and nationhood. Keywords Li Ang · “Beef Noodle Soup” · White terror · Political prisoners · Historical trauma · Cultural hybridity For over five decades, internationally renowned Taiwanese author Li Ang 李昂 (Shih Shu-tuan 施淑端; b. 1952) has been steadily producing innovative works that examine women’s issues, gender relations, and sexuality, in addition to Taiwan’s political and socioeconomic changes, historical memories, and cultural and national identities. As she has personally experienced various changes in Taiwan and focused so much of her attention on her home country, Li Ang can surely be deemed “an authentically Taiwanese writer” (Wu, 2014, p. 2).

1 Exploring the Historical Memories of the Homeland In Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Chang, 1993), when discussing the Nativist (xiangtu or hsiang-t’u) literary debate in the late 1970s (pp. 149–153), Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang states that, in the early 1980s Li Ang was one of several “former Modernist writers” who “turned Y. Wu (B) University of California, Riverside, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_3

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consciously to folk traditions and native subject matter in their writing” (p. 179). However, Li Ang has actually started writing about “native subject matter” well before the early 1980s, as evidenced by the short stories set in her hometown Lugang 鹿港, Stories of Lucheng (Lucheng gushi 鹿城故事)—six of which were written between 1972 and 1974 (Wu, 2014, p. 6). For Li Ang, her xiangtu (hsiang-tu; native soil or homeland) is not limited to Lugang, but includes the whole of Taiwan. Noticing that since 2000 some Taiwanese women writers’ xiangtu fictional works have shifted the emphasis to “topographical writing” and historical writing, Liangya Liou (2009) expands the notion of xiangtu from referring only to “homeland” to encompassing the historical memories of Taiwan (pp. 7–12). Liou (2009) insightfully argues that Li Ang’s novel Visible Ghosts (Kandejian de gui 看得見的鬼, 2004), which depicts Taiwan’s history in the past three or four hundred years through the stories of five female ghosts, can be read as a “national allegory about Taiwan” (pp. 22–23). Understood in this light, Li Ang’s unique food novel, An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds (Yuanyang chunshan 鴛鴦春膳, 2007), can be seen, to some extent, as continuing her explorations into Taiwan’s historical memories through the stories about food and places. One of the stories, “Beef Noodle Soup” (Niuroumian 牛肉 麵; also translated as “Beef Noodles,” Li, 2011), probes into the traumatic memories about the White Terror era (1949–1987), specifically the persecution of political prisoners, through an ex-inmate’s reminiscence of a missed bowl of beef noodle soup. Li Ang has been exploring the traumatic memories of the political repression during the White Terror since her 1991 novel, The Lost Garden (Miyuan 迷園). Politically sensitive topics were still censored by the KMT1 government when Li started writing this novel back in 1986, one year before the martial law (1949–1987) was lifted. In the novel, the protagonist Zhu Yinghong remembers how her father was suddenly arrested one night in the 1950s when she was still a little girl (Li, 2006, pp. 55–56). Devastated but later released from prison due to a supposedly infectious and incurable illness, her father explains to her that he was found “guilty” simply because of his identity as an intellectual (Li, 2006, p. 63). Ironically, her father, who used to identify passionately with Han Chinese culture when living under Japanese occupation, turned against Han Chinese after being incarcerated by the KMT regime under President Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership. In Li Ang’s Beigang Incense Burner of Lust (Beigang xianglu renren cha 北 港香爐人人插, 1997), the fourth story, “Bloody Sacrifice with Color Make-up” (“Caizhuang xieji” 彩妝血祭), reveals, through the account of the complex traumatization of a widow and her son, how families of the February 28 Incident (1947) victims suffered from persecution during the White Terror. By comparison, Li Ang’s novel Visible Ghosts goes back further in time to Taiwan’s earlier colonial history, including accounts of Taiwanese rebels against the Qing rule. In Story One, “East of the Country—The Mountain-pass Ghost”

1

KMT refers to Kuomintang or the Chinese Nationalist Party.

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(“Guoyu zhi dong Dingfanpo de gui” 國域之東頂番婆的鬼), Li Ang’s representation of the tortured aboriginal heroine and her ghost implicitly subverts “the Sinocentric, mainland-centered, male official perspective of and discourse on Taiwan” (Wu, 2014, p. 163). Liang-ya Liou (2009) proposes that, from the aboriginals’ perspective, the Qing dynasty, Japan, and the KMT government were all colonizers, and from the perspective of early Han settlers and their descendants, the Qing government never permitted “the Taiwanese to govern Taiwan” (p. 25). As argued by Ming-ju Fan (2006), this novel discloses Li Ang’s ultimate concerns about Taiwan’s relationship with mainland China (The People’s Republic of China; PRC) and advocates the concept of “One Country on Each Side” (yibian yiguo 一邊一國; i.e. “One China, one Taiwan”) (p. 127). In this chapter, I examine how Li Ang, in her somewhat mysterious and enigmatic fashion, combines discussions on food with narratives about political prisoners in “Beef Noodle Soup,” and how she revives a lesser-known part of historical memory about prisoners in the 1960s, and reimagines their visceral, gustatory, and related psychological trauma through the nexus of beef noodle soup, prison food, and execution. I argue that in problematizing our understanding of “Taiwanese” food, this story continues Li Ang’s critical reflections on Taiwan’s colonial past, historical trauma, resistance to repressions, cultural hybridity, and nationhood.

2 “Beef Noodle Soup” in An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds Li Ang’s novel on food and eating, An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds, consists of four units: qi (beginning), cheng (continuation), zhuan (turning), and he (concluding or combining). Each unit includes two stories. Traditionally, the four-unit structure, “qi cheng zhuan he” (起承轉合), is the fundamental organizational guideline in composition, be it prose or poetry. However, the English translation for these four characters in this novel’s bilingual table of contents has an interesting twist: “The Beginning,” “The Middle,” “Entremets,” and “The End.” In translating the third unit, zhuan (turning), into “entremets”—a term usually referring to small dishes “between courses” in French cuisine—the translation transfers the term qi cheng zhuan he from its conventional context of a writing structure to the new context of a dining structure. The eight stories in this novel connect food, cooking, eating, and drinking with such diverse topics as human relationships, ethnic and cultural identity, sexuality and power dynamics, national politics, life, death, and karma. To make these connections, Li Ang creates a fictional alter ego, Wang Qifang, also a female author, as the protagonist in most of the stories in the novel. Li Ang’s “Beef Noodle Soup” is one of the two stories that make up “The Middle” (cheng) unit of the novel. The simple title “Beef Noodle Soup” may mislead the reader into thinking it is a piece of food writing that recounts the author’s experience in eating delicious beef noodle soup or her exploration of the dish’s origin and history. In fact, the story features an anonymous political prisoner as the protagonist, and delves into a lesser-known historical trauma during the White Terror period. How does Li

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Ang intertwine the two topics—food and politics—that at first glance seem to be an unlikely pairing? To answer this question, I propose we first look at the story’s plot and structure. Interestingly, Li Ang appears to adopt the qi cheng zhuan he structuring technique in writing this story as well, using three subheadings to divide the text into four major sections of unequal length. For the ease of our analysis, however, by following Li’s three subheadings and other double-space segmenting within the text in Chinese, I divide the story into 10 parts. Part One, serving as the first unit “qi (beginning),” recounts a political prisoner’s (protagonist) regret in failing to order a bowl of beef noodle soup for a fellow inmate on the evening before the latter’s execution (pp. 68–69). Heralding the second unit “cheng (continuation),” Part Two starts with Li Ang’s first subheading “Beef Noodle Soup,” followed by a full description of the content, ingredients, cooking, appearance, and aroma of beef noodle soup (p. 69), and then transitions to discuss the mainland Chinese practice of giving liquor and meat to condemned prisoners before their execution (pp. 70–71). Part Three unveils the secrecy of the prison—the Garrison Command’s Military Court in Taipei (pp. 71– 73). Part Four reveals the prisoners’ usual meager, miserable fare except for the dinner on Thursdays when each of them would receive a three-inch piece of meat and some tofu in addition—because the execution of prisoners would typically take place early on Fridays (pp. 73–75). Part Five ponders whether the policy of delivering the specially ordered beef noodle soup only at nine o’clock at night was to further ensure the paying prisoner would not die hungry if they were executed the next morning (pp. 75–76). Part Six distinguishes two types of ideologically different political prisoners by their taste—specifically, whether they prefer or dislike spicy, hot food (pp. 76–78). The third unit “zhuan (turning)” begins with Part Seven. Headed by Li Ang’s second subheading, “Clear-broth Stewed Beef Noodle Soup and Braised Beef Noodle Soup,” Part Seven describes the differences between these two types of beef noodle soup (p. 79). Part Eight interrogates why beef noodle soup was the only option for the prisoners to purchase, even though most of them were Taiwanese, many of whom might regard eating beef as a taboo (pp. 79–81). Part Nine relates the protagonist’s reversal of status 30 years later, when he has been released and become a powerful figure, as well as his surprise discovery that beef noodle soup actually did not originate from Sichuan province in mainland China (pp. 81–84). Part Ten serves as the fourth and last unit “he (concluding).” Prefaced by Li Ang’s third subheading, “Taiwan Beef Noodle Soup or Sichuan-flavor Beef Noodle Soup,” Part Ten is supposedly Wang Qifang’s summary report, based on her research and the consensus of various food critics. It goes into detail about the genealogy, development, varieties, refinement, and special recipes of beef noodle soup, and its various designations as it started to be sold in mainland China and other countries. From this overview, we can see that beef noodle soup, as the title of the story, appears in all three subheadings and serves as a leitmotif or theme that recurs throughout the entire story. Nevertheless, it only receives concentrated scrutiny in three out of the ten parts—namely, Parts Two, Seven, and Ten. The parts discussing the prison and prisoners far outweigh the parts discussing beef noodle soup per se.

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Structurally speaking, however, the theme of beef noodle soup, embedded in the protagonist’s traumatic memory (Part One), becomes intertwined with the theme of political repression in the Chiang regime. Then the two interwoven themes or strands spiral and develop together until Part Nine, when the protagonist is struck by his discovery. Only in Part Ten do we find the two strands somewhat decoupled, wherein the discussion is mostly devoted to the origins and culinary and socioeconomic aspects of beef noodle soup. If the mystery of the soup’s genesis is finally unraveled, how about the protagonist’s identity?

3 Between Fact and Fiction At the beginning of the third-person narrative in “Beef Noodle Soup,” a seemingly omniscient narrator is relating the former prisoner’s account of how he once intended to order beef noodle soup for a fellow inmate, but failed. The narrative is shrouded in mystery and suspense, revealing neither the identity of the prisoner, nor the time of this incident or the location of the prison. The narrative’s secrecy about the location of the prison is actually a truthful reflection of the secretive, repressive operations during the White Terror, wherein numerous people, suspected of being seditious by the regime, were arbitrarily arrested, detained, and kept in the dark regarding the location of their detention. The location of the prison is revealed many years later through the voices of the interlocuters (including the protagonist’s political enemies) who question the protagonist buying such a delicacy as beef noodle soup in prison, which implies doubts about the level of his self-claimed suffering during incarceration (p. 70). The location was the Garrison Command’s Military Court, where the sentencing and execution of prisoners took place. Only when the protagonist was detained there was he able to purchase beef noodle soup. The disclosure of the prison’s name helps establish the veracity of the narrated incident and political prison witnessed and experienced by the protagonist. An informed reader can surmise from the various hints in the text that the conceptualization of the protagonist is likely based on an actual historical figure, Shih Ming-teh 施明德 (1941–), the iconic activist for Taiwan Independence Movement. After graduating from military school, Shih Ming-teh served as a young officer in an artillery unit until he was arrested and imprisoned from 1962 to 1977. Later he was imprisoned again from 1980 to 1990. After a total of over 25 years as a political prisoner, he became an influential leader of the opposition party against the KMT soon after his release and later served as the Chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party from 1994 to 1996. The hints scattered in the text include the political dissident having been incarcerated for 23 years, later becoming a powerful politician, and the female author Wang Qifang writing a biography of him. The last hint extradiegetically points to this prisoner’s secret identity: it is widely known that Li Ang wrote a biography of Shih Ming-teh, entitled The First Part of Shih Ming-teh’s Biography (Shih Ming-teh

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qianzhuan 施明德前傳, 1993). Moreover, the story hints at the temporal background in stating that the dissident suffered “about two years of interrogation” (Li, 2007, p.71) before being transferred to the Garrison Command’s Military Court to await sentencing. Since historically Shih Ming-teh was arrested in 1962, we can assume the incident probably took place in 1964. As Li Ang has confirmed (personal communication, October 3, 2021), it is indeed Shih Ming-teh’s story, and the incident of (someone) desiring to eat a bowl of beef noodle soup “came from a true story.” Nevertheless, when we compare the accounts in Shih Ming-teh’s biography with those in the story, we notice some discrepancies. While the prototype of this anonymous protagonist is Shih Ming-teh, Li Ang appears to deliberately depart from some of the historical facts about Shih when recounting the events in the story. For example, the story mentions the prisoner’s 23-year incarceration several times (Li, 2007, pp. 68, 81, 83), yet in her biography of Shih Ming-teh, Li repeatedly reminds the readers of the length of his imprisonment, which is 25 years and five months (Li, 1993, pp. 1–2, 383). In addition, in Shih’s case, it was in May 1963, that is, about one year—not “two years,” as the story says—after his arrest in June 1962 that he was transferred to the Garrison Command’s Military Court, and he was detained there until April 1964 (Li, 1993, pp. 62–63, 401). Moreover, in the biography, the account about Shih’s failure to order beef noodle soup for the other inmate is very brief (Li, 1993, p. 86), and the other inmate, whose name appears in the biography, was not a mainlander who had followed Chiang Kai-shek’s troops to Taiwan in 1949, as depicted in the story, but was actually an overseas Chinese (from Vietnam) working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a military agent in Hong Kong (Li, 1993, p. 84). Furthermore, as confirmed by Li Ang (personal communication, March 20, 2022), unlike the protagonist in the story, Shih Ming-teh did not visit mainland China, nor did he take a trip to Sichuan to look for beef noodle soup after he was released from prison and became politically influential. Clearly, while inspired by Shih Ming-teh’s anecdotal account, Li Ang insists on her creative freedom in producing an original story. In doing so, Li is walking a fine line between fact and fiction. On the one hand, the initial atmosphere of secrecy surrounding the prison and the later mention of its name, as well as the hints referring to Shih Ming-teh, establish, to a certain extent, the authenticity of the historical background and the credibility of the narrative regarding the prisoners and the beef noodle soup in the prison. On the other hand, keeping the story’s characters and background somewhat vague and ambiguous allows Li to emphasize the fictionality of the story so as to freely revise certain factual details, invent a dramatic plot, elaborate on the themes, and achieve her purposes. This also keeps readers in suspense and enhances their interest in reading, speculating, and contemplating.

4 Visceral, Gustatory, and Psychological Trauma Political prisoners during the White Terror already suffered from bodily and mental trauma due to such mistreatments as confinement, intimidation, and torture. This story

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employs the topic of beef noodle soup to examine the interiority of the prisoner’s body and mind even further. Upon the protagonist’s answer to the question about the availability of beef noodle soup in prison, his interlocuters become quiet, because they know the Garrison Command’s Military Court was a place for prisoners to wait for sentencing and execution (Li, 2007, p. 70). However, instead of letting the matter rest there, the narrator begins to investigate why beef noodle soup was offered in that prison. Probing deeply into this issue then indirectly reveals the prisoners’ visceral, gustatory, and related psychological trauma. Regarding the correlation between execution and beef noodle soup (Part Two), the narrator first discusses a practice introduced by the Han Chinese from Mainland China—“the people who had come a long way from mainland China to rule [Taiwan]” (p. 70): It is a traditional custom of the mainlanders to give condemned prisoners a decent meal—including meat and liquor— before executing them. In Part Five, the narrator further explains it was believed that if the condemned prisoners did not eat a full meal before death and thus became hungry ghosts who could not be reborn, these ghosts would wreak vengeance on the living (p. 75). The story’s ambiguity may mislead readers into equating beef noodle soup with prisoners’ last meals. However, as Li Ang (personal communication, May 1, 2022) clarifies, at the time of this story, if a condemned prisoner would indeed receive a last meal at all, it would most likely be very simple, consisting of some pork, liquor, and a soy-marinated egg. Moreover, the practice of not letting the prisoner starve before his execution might have affected the usual prison fare to some extent. Understandably, inmates waiting anxiously for sentencing and execution already suffered from psychological trauma. Meanwhile, they had to endure visceral and gustatory trauma as well. Emphasizing that the typical prison food lacked “oil or grease,” the narrator further describes it as consisting of “darkened [moldy] rice, maggoty flour, vegetable stalks so rough that they could choke one to death…” (p. 74)—a refrain to be repeated several times to underline the unsavory, repulsive, barely edible, and even potentially dangerous diet in the prison. Horrible food thus became the regime’s weapon to punish prisoners. Conceivably, the inmates suffered from semi-hunger, malnutrition, and deprivation of gustatory pleasure. However, possibly because some of them would be taken out to be executed at dawn on Fridays, all prisoners would receive additional food—a three-inch piece of meat (pork) and some tofu at their Thursday dinner at five o’clock (p. 73); presumably, the serving of meat would make the prisoners less hungry before being executed the next morning (p. 74). Besides the meat serving on Thursday, a condemned prisoner unsure of his execution date could purchase a bowl of beef noodle soup for himself (p. 75). The narrator surmises that, even though the prisoner might receive some liquor and meat right before his execution on Friday, he could lose his appetite at that last moment; yet, if the prisoner purchased beef noodle soup on Thursday night without knowing of an imminent execution, he would likely enjoy eating it (pp. 75–76). Delicious and rich in protein and fat, beef noodle soup presented a sharp contrast to the usual prison diet. However, it was the only food available for purchase in that prison (p. 79), very expensive, and by no means affordable for prisoners whose families were not affluent, especially for those mainlander-prisoners who had no

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family in Taiwan. According to Li Ang (personal communication, May 1, 2022), beef was hard to come by and very costly at that time; beef noodle soup was probably unofficially offered by that prison’s staff and cooks in order to earn extra income from prisoners, and possibly happened to be offered during the time when Shih Ming-teh was incarcerated there. As beef noodle soup could only be ordered at five o’clock in the evening and delivered at nine o’clock, a death-row prisoner who consumed it after nine o’clock on Thursday night would not feel hungry if he happened to be executed at dawn the following day (p. 76). Through questioning and by considering the prisoner’s mental state, the narrator speculates that this might have been the reason for beef noodle soup to be delivered only at nine o’clock in the evening (pp. 75–76). The timing issue is directly related to the protagonist’s heartfelt regret for failing to order a bowl of beef noodle soup for a fellow inmate on the night before the latter was taken away to the execution grounds. With the money brought to him by his wife, the protagonist could afford to order one or two bowls of beef noodle soup per week (p. 75) to supplement the paltry, loathsome prison diet. Noticing this fellow inmate’s covetous looks and salivating while watching him eat beef noodle soup, he understood it was because this inmate craved spicy-hot food and one could request spicy-hot pepper sauce to be added to the soup (p. 76). Deprived of spicy-hot food and financial support, this inmate thus suffered from much greater gustatory and visceral trauma than the protagonist. The narrator then distinguishes two ideologically different types of political prisoners by their gustatory preferences. The Taiwanese prisoners, who made up the majority in prison, were incarcerated for allegedly supporting Taiwan independence, and they seldom or never cared for spicy-hot food. By contrast, the prisoners who exhibited a predilection for spicy-hot food were the mainlanders who retreated to the island with the KMT regime in 1949, and jailed for supporting the CCP and the PRC. Other than some rare exceptions, these two types of prisoners held opposite political ideals. However, as fellow victims, they were united in resisting their common victimizer—the Chiang regime (pp. 77–78). The costliness of beef noodle soup would mean that prisoners who could not afford it on the Thursday evening before their execution the following morning might die with a near-empty stomach. Aside from economic reasons, there is a crucial factor that beef noodle soup, which suited the need and taste of mainlander-prisoners, might not necessarily suit Taiwanese prisoners. In Part Eight, the narrator interrogates why beef noodle soup was the only option for the prisoners, even though most of them were Taiwanese, and for whom eating beef could be a taboo (pp. 79–81); and why the prison’s mainland kitchen staff would not use other types of meat (pork or chicken) or fish instead—after all, large saltwater fish with few tiny bones were plentiful and inexpensive in Taiwan, easy to cook, delicious, and familiar to the Taiwanese (pp. 80–81). The narrator further relates in detail how early Taiwanese were so grateful to the oxen for helping them till the land and earn their livelihood that they regarded the ox as part of the family and could not bear to eat beef, and how they believed that, had they eaten beef, they would go to hell (p. 80). Of course, not all Taiwanese refrained from eating beef. Still, the narrator’s argument satirizes at least

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two aspects: on the one hand, it indirectly exposes the mainland prison staff’s—and by extension, the Chiang regime’s—complete disregard of Taiwanese people’s needs, preferences, and customs; and on the other hand, in juxtaposing the mainlanders’ customary butchering, cooking, and eating of beef with the love and gratitude for oxen expressed by many Taiwanese, it implies some degree of censure of the former and praise for the latter. Given the circumstances, letting a Taiwanese prisoner have no choice but to eat beef when his execution was near “turns out to be exactly a curse,” since it would make the deceased “carry even more crimes” with him, and thereby “unable to be reborn for all eternity” (p. 81). The narrative implies that some condemned Taiwanese prisoners might not have eaten beef noodle soup—either because they could not afford it or because they refused to eat beef—and therefore became hungry ghosts, while some others might have consumed it due to hunger and therefore committed a crime so terrible they could never be reborn. Either way, they would be deprived of the possibility of redemption and rebirth. As insinuated by the narrator, the Chiang regime’s spatial and temporal dominion seemed so vast and absolute that it could dictate Taiwanese people’s “stomachs and intestines” (p. 81), life, death, and even afterlife. In the sense of possibly causing further visceral and psychological trauma to a number of condemned Taiwanese prisoners, beef noodle soup became indirectly associated with, and complicit in, the regime’s repression of the Taiwanese.

5 Recognition, Reflections, and Ironies The protagonist was “resentful” of the Chiang regime for “butchering Taiwanese people” and for unjustly arresting him and later sentencing him to life in prison (p. 79). His resentment was no doubt aggravated by the fact that he had no choice but to buy the expensive, un-Taiwanese beef noodle soup to allay his hunger. Since braised beef noodle soup was cooked by mainlander-staff in the prison, clearly suited the mainlander-prisoners’ palates, and was often called “Sichuan beef noodle soup” in Taiwan (p. 82), the protagonist assumed it to be a mainland Chinese dish from Sichuan, and quite likely associated it with the Chiang regime’s dictatorship subconsciously. The pivotal “turning” point emerges when, about 30 years later (in the early 1990s), the protagonist, having been released and transformed into a powerful politician after the fall of the Chiang regime, went to the PRC to seek reconciliation, while paying a visit to Sichuan in search of beef noodle soup (p. 82). To his surprise, he could not find any beef noodle soup in Sichuan. All he could find was a dish called “Red Beef Soup,” which differed from Taiwan’s “Sichuan beef noodle soup” in that it did not have boiled noodles in the soup, did not include fermented broad-bean paste, and used Sichuan peppercorn (which is both spicy hot and numbing) instead of chili peppers (spicy hot but not numbing) (pp. 82–83). He then realized the beef noodle soup he had long been familiar with in fact originated in Taiwan.

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As Wang Qifang reports in Part Ten, beef noodle soup was invented in Fengshan, Taiwan, by a few retired KMT army squad leaders who came to Taiwan in 1949. Being originally Sichuanese, they made—based on their memory of, and experience in, their homeland cuisine—fermented broad-bean paste and its spicy-hot variant, and further created beef noodle soup (p. 84). Beef noodle soup is thus a product of translocal culinary and cultural hybridity. It owes its genesis to the few Sichuanese officers who had migrated to Taiwan and tried to use locally available ingredients and spices to recreate or simulate the Sichuanese dishes and taste they were nostalgic for. Yet, for various reasons, it has evolved into a dish that has its distinct form, content, flavor, and variations. Taiwan’s socioeconomic developments have also helped it to become a more affordable, popular delicacy. Highlighting the cognitive dissonance experienced by the ex-prisoner 30 years later when discovering the true origin of beef noodle soup, Li Ang subtly prompts the reader to reflect on the historical trauma and political changes during those decades of turmoil. Had the Chiang government respected human rights and been truly humane from the start, many innocent people—would-be dissidents or otherwise, Taiwanese or mainlanders—would not have been executed, incarcerated, and traumatized, thereby wasting their talents and lives in vain. And if the KMT leadership had been willing to give up sooner their impractical illusion of “reclaiming the mainland” and accepted pragmatic proposals from Taiwanese dissidents—for example, the manifesto advocating democracy from Peng Ming-min 彭明敏 (1923– 2022) in 1964—and engaged in serious political reforms together with the Taiwanese in order to establish a democratic government, Taiwan might have become a free, democratic, and internationally recognized independent country even as early as the late 1960s or early 1970s. While memorializing especially those political prisoners, including the protagonist, who fought for Taiwan independence, the story also inspires reader to note some ironies—whether intended or not—that are both diegetic and extradiegetic. For example, diegetically, the narrator most likely implies admiration for the protagonist’s compassion for the mainlander-inmate, when relating the protagonist’s heartfelt regret for failing to order beef noodle soup for the latter in time. From his limited perspective, while feeling sorry for what he and other Taiwanese prisoners had to endure, the protagonist felt even “sadder” for the mainlander-prisoners, since he could not believe the Chiang regime would treat their own people so mercilessly (p. 78). The protagonist’s sympathy can be ironic because he and the mainlanderinmate would have been enemies had they been outside the prison: the Taiwanese prisoner did not support the CCP and the PRC, while the mainlander was against Taiwan independence. Based on the extradiegetical political reality at that time, had the PRC conquered Taiwan, the Mao regime would have decimated those Taiwanese who fought for independence. To some extent, the narrator also appears to satirize the protagonist’s unrealistic idea in attempting to seek a “grand reconciliation” (p. 82) with the PRC 30 years later; for example, the narrator briefly presents critical voices from his former fellow political prisoners, who accuse him of betraying his own people and the ideal of Taiwan independence (p. 82). While the meaning in reporting such criticism can

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be interpreted otherwise, I believe the narrator at least casts some doubt on the feasibility of the protagonist’s unrealistic maneuver. The political reality is that the PRC has wielded its military, economic, diplomatic hard power, and other sharp power tools to suppress and isolate Taiwan for many decades, and has manipulated or coerced the international community into depriving Taiwan of viability and the right to independent nationhood (Wu, 2019, p. 141). Moreover, both types of political prisoners in the story were either deceived by PRC propaganda or ignorant about what was actually happening in the PRC. Possibly, their anger about the Chiang regime led to their mistrust of its reports on the dire conditions in Mao’s China. Extradiegetically, for the readers who know about the truthful reality of the PRC in the 1950s and early 1960s—the repeated, ruthless purging campaigns as well as the CCP-made Great Leap Forward Famine that claimed over 45 million lives—the mainlander-prisoners’ loyalty to the CCP and the PRC gains another layer of irony. The Mao regime to which the mainlander-prisoners pledged allegiance was far crueller than the Chiang regime in Taiwan. And as writer Wang Ruowang (1918–2001) testifies in his Hunger Trilogy (Ji’e sanbuqu 飢餓三部 曲, 1980), based on his first-hand experience of being incarcerated by the KMT and the CCP across different historical periods but in the same prison in Shanghai, the food given to political prisoners by the CCP was much less and worse than that given by the KMT (Wang, 1987, p. 179; Wang, 1991, pp. 72–77). Had the mainlanderprisoners returned to mainland China under the rule of the PRC at that time, they most likely would have been suspected, criminalized, and even executed as KMT spies, or tortured and confined for being former KMT personnel.

6 Some Concluding Remarks Chia-rong Wu (2016) insightfully observes that “Li Ang’s novel Visible Ghosts points readers towards an older past and projects a signifying game of haunting and writing in an attempt to approach the unspeakable traumatic real through a psychoanalytical lens” (pp. 83–84). Although by no means as wide-ranging, complex, and fantastic as Visible Ghosts, “Beef Noodle Soup” performs a somewhat similar function. In this story, Li Ang revives a lesser-known part of historical memory—the political prisoners in 1960s Taiwan—and reimagines their visceral, gustatory, and related psychological trauma through the nexus of beef noodle soup, prison food, and execution. Delving into their interiority, different ideologies, tastes, and feelings, Li Ang subtly memorializes these traumatized prisoners in a critical light. With this story, she also commemorates the souls of the executed and deceased, especially the souls of the condemned Taiwanese political prisoners—understanding that a number of them might have been forced to suffer in hell or as hungry ghosts, unable to obtain redemption. While helping the reader understand and remember this part of Taiwan’s traumatic past, this story indirectly pays tribute to those who resisted the Chiang regime’s persecution and fought for freedom and democracy in Taiwan. It celebrates Taiwan’s

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democratization as well as the survival, and the reversal of fortune, of such prisoners as the protagonist. Also celebrated is the spontaneous creation of beef noodle soup— one of the products of culinary and cultural hybridity resulting from historical contingency. Despite its ambivalent reception among different types of prisoners described in this story, beef noodle soup has become one of Taiwan’s popular gourmet dishes. When marketed and advertised in restaurants in Europe and America as Taiwan Beef Noodle Soup (Taiwan niuroumian 台灣牛肉麵, p. 86), this delectable dish, transcending the PRC’s hegemonic suppression of Taiwan, helps spread the country name of Taiwan globally and enhances Taiwan’s visibility and soft power abroad.

References Chang, Y. S.-S. (1993). Modernism and the nativist resistance: Contemporary Chinese fiction from Taiwan. Duke University Press. Fan, M.-J. (2006). 另眼相看-當代台灣小說的鬼/地方 [Looking at it differently—ghost/place in contemporary Taiwanese fiction]. 臺灣文學研究學報 [Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies], 2, 115–130. Li Ang. 李昂. (1993). 施明德前傳 [The first part of Shih Ming-teh’s biography]. Avanguard Publishing House. Li Ang. (1997). 北港香爐人人插 [Beigang incense burner of lust]. Rye Field. Li Ang. (2004). 看得見的鬼 [Visible ghosts]. Unitas Publishing. Li Ang. (2006). 迷園 [The lost garden]. Rye Field Publications. (Original work published 1991). Li Ang. (2007). 牛肉麵 [Beef Noodle Soup]. In Li Ang, 鴛鴦春膳 [An erotic feast for lovebirds] (pp. 68–86). Unitas Publishing. Li Ang. (2011). “Beef Noodles” (Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Trans.). Chinese Literature Today, 2(1), 6–13. Liou, L.-Y. (2009). 女性、鄉土、國族 以ô香吟的}島{與}熱蘭遮{以及李昂的 《看得見的鬼》 為 例 [Women, Hsiang-Tu, and Nationalism: Lai Hsiang-Ying’s “Island” and “Fort Zeelandia” and Li Ang’s Visible Ghosts]. 台灣文學研究學報 [Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies], 9, 7–36. Wang, R. (1987). 飢餓三部曲 [Hunger Trilogy]. In R. Wang王若望選集 [Selected works of Wang Ruowang] (pp. 101–246). East West and Culture Co. (Original work published 1980). Wang, R. (1991). Hunger trilogy (Kyna Rubin, Trans.). Sharpe. (Original work published 1980). Wu, C.-R. (2016). Supernatural sinophone Taiwan and beyond. Cambria Press. Wu, Y. (2014). In the Vanguard: Li Ang’s Discourse on Gender and Politics. In Li Ang’s visionary challenges to gender, sex, and politics (pp.1–24). Lexington Books. Wu, Y. (2019). Recognizing and resisting China’s evolving sharp power. American Journal of Chinese Studies, 26(2), 129–153.

Yenna Wu is Professor of Chinese, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Chinese Program Director at the University of California, Riverside. Her research covers various aspects of MingQing fiction; Chinese women and literature; Chinese labor camp studies and aesthetics of political prison literature; Chinese language textbooks designed for non-heritage or heritage learners; and selected contemporary Sinophone narratives and films from Taiwan and China. Her numerous publications include The Chinese Virago (1995), The Lioness Roars (1995), Ameliorative Satire and the Seventeenth-Century Chinese Novel, Xingshi yinyuan zhuan—Marriage as Retribution, Awakening the World (1999), The Great Wall of Confinement (co-authored, 2004), Remolding and Resistance (co-edited, 2006), Me and China (co-authored, 2008), Mandarin Chinese the Easy Way (co-authored, 2008), Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics (co-edited, 2011), The Thought

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Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-State (co-translated, 2012), and Li Ang’s Visionary Challenges to Gender, Sex, and Politics (edited, 2014).

Homegrown Stories: Gan Yao-Ming’s Fiction Bert Scruggs

Abstract This chapter introduces short stories and novels written by Gan Yao-ming (甘耀明) vis-à-vis the genre of xiangtu fiction. I consider possible influences of the Hakka writer’s employment as a reporter and teacher on his fiction: especially the preponderance of youth in his novel Killing Ghosts (殺鬼) and selected short stories, and the surfeit of details and dialects found elsewhere. On dialect, I draw parallels with Paul Kingsnorth, Mark Twain, cinematography, and period piece films. On details, I note similarities to Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and bring to the table maximalist and encyclopedic novels. Furthermore, I suggest the idea of anime-realism partially to augment suggestions by Liou Liang-ya on the cartoonish qualities of Killing Ghosts and partially to augment arguments for reading Gan’s writing as Magical Realism by Chia-rong Wu and others. I conclude that these texts offer a growing body of xiangtu fiction to study with an evolving language and map of Taiwan; they offer a new critical and literary link to several historical moments including Japanese colonization, Retrocession, and martial law; and they offer impetus for overdue meditations on marginalized populations of women and Indigenous persons so often overlooked in research focused on local, homegrown, xiangtu culture. Keywords Gan Yao-ming · Killing Ghosts · Xiangtu fiction · Anime-realism · Magical realism I want to start this very brief introduction to the novels of Gan Yao-ming (Kan Yao-ming 甘耀明; b. 1972) with an untranslatable idea: xiangtu literature. Xiangtu (also hsiang-t’u) is usually translated as “native soil,” “hometown,” or “local,” but for writers, readers, and other stakeholders in Taiwan xiangtu literature means far more than simply stories, plays, or poems about the countryside. This is because, for one thing, xiangtu literature at home frequently suggests both historical and literary as well as popular and elite politics. It is a term that first appeared on the island in the 1920s and continues accruing nuance in the 2020s. And for another, in English B. Scruggs (B) University of California, Irvine, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_4

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language studies of Taiwan literature, such as this volume for example, xiangtu is often translated as “nativism,” an ideology that ordinarily connotes ethnocentrism and xenophobia. The short stories and novels written by Gan bring these two problems into sharp focus, because various scholars have called them “magical,” “new,” and “post-” xiangtu (Chen, 2014; Fan, 2007; Wu, 2016). Consequently, it becomes easy to spend too much time and waste too many words on translation and subgenre. For example, New Native-Soil Literature is cumbersome, New (and sometimes Neo) Nativism suggests the virulent populism currently warping national politics around the globe, and both Magical-Nativism or Post-Nativism add overdetermined modifiers to an already overdetermined signifier. A simpler solution, I think, is to suggest something as simple as the xiangtu literature of the 2020s. After all, the genre or mode now has a century-long history. In other words, rather than reconcile translations or offer yet another coinage, I suggest simply accepting xiangtu in lieu of “native soil,” as we have already accepted Bildungsroman and roman-fleuve in lieu of “growing up” or “river” novels. Xiangtu literature is in fact largely stories, plays, or poems about the countryside and, in Taiwan, Huang Chunming (b. 1935), who rose to prominence in the 1970s, is considered a master. Still, xiangtu as a genre or mode first appeared in literary debates in Taiwan in the 1920s and 1930s. On the first moment, June Yip (2004) has written, Taiwanese hsiang-t’u literature (the term … literally means something like “country soil”) is generally associated with works by Taiwanese authors written in the late 1960s and 1970s, but it actually originated during the period of the Japanese Occupation (1895–1945) and the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when Taiwan was being absorbed both economically and culturally by the Japanese regime. Conceived of by patriotic Taiwanese intellectuals as a nationalistic effort to resist forced assimilation into Japanese culture and to preserve the local tradition, the hsiang-t’u literature of this period sought to realistically depict the social and economic conflicts precipitated by the clash of traditional Chinese feudalism with the capitalist modes of production introduced by the Japanese colonizers. … The discourse that emerged from these dynamics of interaction and reaction was characterized by those narrative structures of exclusion and inclusion and idioms of dichotomy that are so often associated with nationalism: we, the Taiwanese, versus them, the Japanese enemy; Taiwanese dialect versus Japanese language; and the authentic indigenous culture of the rural village versus the foreign influences in the metropolitan city — critical binary structures that would reappear in the hsiang-t’u movement of the 1960s and 1970s. (pp. 19–20)

Eventually, the comparatively simple discourse of the Japanese colonial era was replaced by the confusing realities of the Kuomintang (KMT) émigrés who arrived in Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and Communists, the White Terror (a period of political oppression including secret arrests and murder, self-censorship, and martial law that lasted from 1947 to 1987), the contingencies of a rising and falling US military presence, and the on-going Cold War. The discourse that emerged was multivalent at best; therefore, on this xiangtu moment Yip (2004) adds the following: When the hsiang-t’u literary movement reemerged under the KMT regime during the 1960s and 1970s, it drew on the heritage of its anti-Japanese origins, particularly its adoption of the idiom of dichotomy. Once again, Taiwanese writers sought to preserve the experiences

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and voices of native culture in the face of domination by a foreign other. By the 1970s, however, the sociocultural situation in Taiwan had been complicated by multiple phenomena — political, economic, social, and cultural. Rather than a singular other, there were now multiple foreign cultural presences threatening to overshadow indigenous culture. On the one hand, there was the official Mandarin-language culture of the KMT government, which continued to dominate Taiwanese society. On the other hand, there were lingering cultural remnants from the Japanese Occupation whose persistent influence on Taiwanese culture was further compounded by the increasing influx of Japanese capital and consumer products into the local economy. Perhaps most problematically, the postwar American presence in Taiwan — through so-called military and economic cooperation — helped to spur rapid industrial growth and modernization on the island, which culminated in the “economic miracle” of the 1970s that earned Taiwan its reputation as one of Asia’s “Four Dragons.” (pp. 20–21)

I quote Yip extensively, because she provides a thoroughgoing lay of the xiangtu land in 20th-century Taiwan, especially the political dichotomies, which perhaps explains the use of nativist and nativism in some turn-of-the-century studies. However, what is more important in reading Gan’s short stories and novels are the other facets of xiangtu Yip underscores. In both the Japanese and KMT halves of the twentieth century Taiwanese writers celebrated and preserved the voices and experiences of agrarian, fishing, and montane settlements as well as simple townsfolk and villagers in the cities of the archipelago. Moreover, such celebrations and preservations are formal as well as thematic. Writers in both moments sought to capture the so-called Taiwanese dialect that is referred to variously as Taiwanese, Southern Min, Fulao, Hokkien, or Hoklo. Furthermore, in the early 21st-century stories by Gan, Hakka especially, but also Indigenous languages, Japanese, and bits of English appear too.

1 Gan Yao-Ming Gan Yao-ming was born on February 29, 1972 in Miaoli County: a region well known for its large Hakka population. The Hakka are one of the three Han Chinese ethnic groups in Taiwan who are markedly distinct from the Indigenous peoples: the other two Han Chinese groups are the speakers of Southern Min Chinese who began arriving on Taiwan in large numbers in the seventeenth century and the Chinese Nationalist emigres who arrived in the late 1940s and speak various Chinese dialects in addition to Modern Standard Mandarin, which they installed as the “national language” (guoyu) in Taiwan when they arrived as the Japanese departed following the end of the Second World War. Spoken Hakka, a Chinese dialect, differs dramatically from both Mandarin and Southern Min. Furthermore, the Hakka are well known for unique folk customs, cuisine, political activism, and contributions to Taiwan literature. Gan is himself Hakka, and many critics argue that his fiction incorporates their culture and language. Perhaps the most important tradition his fiction evokes is that of storytelling, a skill he has claimed to have learned from elders as he grew up in Miaoli County. Moreover, many of his narratives are of grandfatherly men and young boys, so it is possible his fiction not only stems from this tradition but perpetuates it.

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In elementary school Gan began voraciously reading and by the time he was in high school he had completed several young adult series and moved on to works as divergent as the continental Chinese émigré writer Mei Jimin’s stories of his northeast China homeland, The Great Northern Wasteland (1968), and Wu Cheng’en’s classic tale of a Buddhist pilgrimage, Journey to the West (sixteenth century). In 1990 Gan began study at Tunghai University in the city of Taichung and focused on classical texts as a Chinese Literature major. Years later Gan settled in Taichung; the city is the location for his third novel, The Summer Winter General Came (Dongjiangjun laide xiatian 冬將軍來的夏天, 2017a). Moreover, occasionally his background in classical and late imperial texts seeps into his contemporary stories. The village of Daguanyuan in The Girl and the Woodcutter (Bangcha nühai 邦查女孩, 2015a), his second novel, shares its name with a garden in the monumental novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (eighteenth century). Additionally, the strategy of Han soldiers who sing songs of Chu to unnerve Chu soldiers told in stories of the battle between the two famous military generals Liu Bang and Xiang Yu is explicitly mentioned as the villagers in Gan’s first novel, Killing Ghosts (Shagui 殺鬼, 2009), sing the American national anthem to unnerve a downed American pilot. Beyond these two readily identifiable examples, the long tradition of zhiguai fiction as noted by Wu is important to understanding novels such as Killing Ghosts (Wu, 2016). After completing compulsory military service in 1997, Gan worked for two years as a reporter in a local Miaoli television station. His experiences and the stories he covered during this period would later serve as material and inspiration. Furthermore, his language skills were quite likely sharpened during this era, and it seems equally likely the maximalist attention to detail found in all his narratives probably came from reporting. In 1999 one of his early short stories, “Hanged Cat,” won the Taiwan Provincial Excellence in Novellas Award. Opening with a Hakka folk practice of hanging dead cats in trees to ward off problems, the narrative follows a preschooler charged by his grandfather with the task of hanging a dead cat in a tree. The child who is simply “he” encounters a teacher, a bus driver, his older brother’s classroom politics, and eventually memories of an aunt, his father’s terminal illness, and the fact that his father hung himself. In 1999, Gan also left the world of journalism and began teaching at an alternative high school in Miaoli. It is quite possible his experiences as a schoolteacher explain his common use of young children, especially groups of boys, in short stories and novels. Moreover, his experience with youth may be a factor in his use of realism that seems to come from the pages of manga or the frames of anime. The hero Pajilu in the opening chapter of The Girl and the Woodcutter defeats the ruses of scheming ice cream vendors and is celebrated by all the boys who are treated to ice cream with his victory. The antics of children in the mountain village and gondola in the same novel also suggest as much. Moreover, the White Tiger troop of boys led by Pa in Killing Ghosts similarly makes the case. Naturally, the clearest example is one of his earliest stories about an imaginary school established by a group of boys whose cruelty indirectly led to the drowning of a school mate: “The School of Water Phantoms and the Otter who Lost His Mother” (2005a).

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In 2001 “Mystery Radio Station” won third prize for novellas from the Central Daily News. Set in the years shortly after the lifting of martial law in 1987, the terse story of a reunion and affair between two high school classmates who worked at the campus radio station is filled with ellipses and flashbacks. It includes themes of cynicism or simply the loss of innocence, underground and backdoor politics, and the luxuries of power and wealth, but ends with the interview of a former political insider now living on the margins of society who cannot speak because his tongue was cut out by the secret police during the White Terror era. The beginning of the era, particularly the 228 Incident, is an important moment in Killing Ghosts, and the body of the protagonist Pa, like the body of the activist, is the site of violence. In 2002 Gan stopped teaching, moved to Hualian County on the east coast, and began work on an MA in creative writing and English Literature at National Dong Hwa University. While there he won still more awards including one from the United Daily News for “Granduncle Takes a Second Wife” and the Formosa Literary Award for “Mystery Train.” The former is a playful narrative wherein a wife from the mainland is arranged for the god in a local temple: a sly satire or exposure of the practice by some Taiwanese businessmen of taking Chinese mistresses or “second wives.” The latter tells the story of a youth who sneaks out in the middle of the night to find a ghostly train his grandfather claims to have ridden deep in the night long ago. Filled with minute details about Taiwanese rail lines, suggestive imagery, and whimsical and bittersweet flashbacks it eventually becomes clear the mysterious train the grandfather had ridden was in fact the train the secret police put him on after luring him out of hiding with a story that his wife was ill. Adding to the pathos of the story, though she was not ill at the time the grandfather was arrested, the protagonist’s grandmother dies before his grandfather’s political imprisonment ends. In Gan’s (2003) first collection of short stories Mystery Train was published. Six of the 11 works included in the anthology were award winning, which probably in part led to a grant from the National Culture and Arts Foundation to write the novel that would eventually become Killing Ghosts. In 2004, Gan established a creative writing program for children and two of his short stories, “Granduncle Takes a Second Wife” and “Hanged Cat,” were adapted for television dramas. Between 2007 and 2009, Gan worked on Killing Ghosts, was diagnosed with Lymphoma, and married. During this time “Mystery Train” was adapted for a Hakka language television drama. In 2009 Killing Ghosts, his first fulllength novel, was published and was named one of the top 10 books of the year by China Times Book Review. In 2009, as writer in residence at Providence University in Taichung, he wrote Stories at a Funeral (Sangli shang de gushi 喪禮上的故事) with subsidies from the National Culture and Arts Council. Eventually published in 2010, Stories at a Funeral is a collection of 16 stories about or directly related to the narrator’s grandmother, whose dying wish was that everyone would tell a story at her funeral. In 2010, Killing Ghosts won the Taipei International Book Exhibition Award. The novel has also been published in China in a simplified Chinese version and translated into Japanese. In 2011, Gan spent one month in Berlin and began work on The Girl and the Woodcutter. In 2013, he joined an international writers’ workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University and in 2014 he returned to Germany. In

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2015 The Girl and the Woodcutter was published and won the Novel Award from the Taiwan Literature Awards, and he returned to the east coast as writer in residence at Tzu Chi University. In 2016, he won the 40th annual Golden Tripod Award, one of the most prestigious awards for literature in Taiwan, for The Girl and the Woodcutter. In 2017 The Summer General Winter Came was published, and in 2021 Becoming Bunun (Chengwei zhenzheng de ren 成為真正的人), his fourth novel, was published. Gan’s four novels describe an often violent, 20th-century Taiwan from an array of perspectives. Set in rural Taiwan during the waning years of Japanese colonization and early years of the Nationalist Chinese rule, Killing Ghosts revolves around the boy Pa, who is superhumanly strong and because of his sincerity often falls victim to those who supposedly have his best interests in mind. Pa loses an eye as well as a limb during the story. Set in the 1970s, The Girl and the Woodcutter is the story of Gu Axia, whose mother was a member of the Pangcah Indigenous peoples and whose father was an African-American GI who visited Taiwan during the Vietnam War, and Pajilu, a woodcutter whose mother was Hakka and whose father was a Japanese forestry expert sent to Taiwan during the colonial era. Pajilu dies trapped under a fallen tree. The Summer General Winter Came begins with a first-person narration by the protagonist, a young female kindergarten teacher in Taichung who tells the reader, “Three days before I was sexually assaulted, my dead grandmother came looking for me” (Gan, 2017a, p. 12). Becoming Bunun is a story of Indigenous peoples, a lingering Japanese colonial presence in disarray, and how their fates intertwine with American soldiers who die in a plane crash in the mountains above Taitung in southeastern Taiwan. In fact, violence is not unusual in Gan’s works, as the Taiwanese man whose tongue is cut out, the African-American pilot who dies from wounds in a plane crash, the death of an Indigenous daughter and the father she hoped to save, and the repeated violence to Pa’s body among many instances demonstrate. There is much of the fantastic and weird as well as the whimsical in these novels; nonetheless, the severity and pervasiveness of violence is often overlooked. If there is anything unusual about the violence, it is the matter-of-fact way such moments come and go in Gan’s work. Unlike the uses of violence and discomfort of Yang Kui and others in the Japanese colonial period (Scruggs, 2006), it seems that violence is simply part of the stories Gan’s narrators tell. Beyond the violence in the short-stories and novels written by Gan, there remains much to untangle thematically and formally. As noted earlier, genres and ideas such as Magical Xiangtu, Postxiangtu, and New Xiangtu appear in a wide spectrum of criticism. Indeed, the interest scholars and graduate students have in Gan’s texts in addition to critical acclaim and awards suggest these short stories and novels are fast becoming milestones in Taiwanese literary history in addition to his own oeuvre. Even a cursory glance at the awards and other funding Gan has received over the years seems to confirm the ideas advanced by Fan (2007) in her deliberation on paradoxes arising between early twenty-first century xiangtu fiction, which she calls post-regional literature (houxiangtu) and contemporary cultural discourse in Taiwan. Finally, as he compared Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon to works such as Moby Dick by Herman Melville or Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edward Mendelson (1976) coined the term Encyclopedic Narrative and noted the importance

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of scholarly treatment, explicatory traditions, and the probability that such works took on lives after their publication that their authors could not have imagined. It is too early to predict if either Killing Ghosts or perhaps The Girl and the Woodcutter will become recognized as a “literary monument, surrounded by curators and guides” (Mendelson, 1976, p. 1268). However, studies of the novels in Taiwan and elsewhere continue to multiply. At home in Taiwan, Lin Shu-hui (2019) argues The Girl and the Woodcutter is a bildungsroman and that there are two journeys undertaken by Gu Axia: travel around the island of Taiwan and the journey of maturation. Similarly, Gan himself has stated the story has two axes: the first is the love that grows between Pajilu, the woodcutter, and Gu Axia, the girl, and the second is a tale of logging in 1970s Taiwan. On The Summer General Winter Came, Wang Kuo-an (2020) asserts that Gan moves from his previous experiments in magical realism to a simpler, more direct realism, and that the novel lacks the spatiotemporal de-familiarization technique commonly used to describe rural settings, legends, fantasy, and the imaginary in his previous works. Instead, Wang asserts, the novel uses realism with just a little magic to tell the story of women in contemporary Taichung. As I note below, Killing Ghosts does indeed display the Magical Realism scholars such as Chen and Wu have already explored; furthermore, the narration and detail of the novel, indeed of all the novels written by Gan, provide other opportunities for exploration or curation. In any case, Gan’s fiction seems to be evidence of a new moment in Taiwanese fiction, and his stories and novels reveal a nuanced history of Taiwan that has for decades been overlooked. Gan may indeed force readers to pay close attention to each text as it shifts from Hakka to Mandarin to Southern Min and so on. The texts delight or confuse with his Magical Realism and often flashback rich non-linear narrations filled with characters either endowed with superhuman powers or broken due to their all too human frailties. They impress with his accounts of locations as disparate as logging camps in the hills above Hualien or an underground radio station on the 15th floor of an expensive high-rise or the sonic details of train ticket vending machines. Finally, they astound with his ability to weave narratives from popular music, old television, folklore, mythology, and tall tales. However, in the end, the power of his narratives probably stems from the fact that all these are part of the collective consciousness and memories of the Taiwanese and it is this style of writing that proves rewarding to scholars and critics alike. As such, it is no surprise he has won so many awards. Moreover, the density and Taiwanese particularity of his writing also may explain the relative lack of translations into languages other than Japanese. Certainly, the language found in novels such as Killing Ghosts and The Girl and the Woodcutter stand apart from many novels from twenty-first century Taiwan, and language and location are perhaps the central reasons the novels are usually considered examples of xiangtu literature.

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2 Contemporary Voices and the Magic of Realism In the “A Note on Language” appendix of The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (2014) explains how he created a “shadow tongue” for Buccmaster, the first-person narrator, who describes the aftermath of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. The shadow tongue is “a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today” (Kingsnorth, 2014, p. 353). On this shadow-tongue or pseudo-language, Anita Sethi (2015) writes, “It demands patience to decipher and varies between opacity and moments of intense lucidity as in Buccmaster’s lament for ‘a world brocen apart’, a time when ‘all is open lic a wound unhealen’.” In another explanatory note, Mark Twain (1884 [1994]) claims in the preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that the novel contains “a number of dialects” and adds that, “I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding” (p. 5). The language in which the narrator of Killing Ghosts tells his story is more or less contemporary Mandarin as it is now spoken in Taiwan (albeit with significant uses of Hakka, and sprinklings of Hoklo, Indigenous languages, Japanese, and English) and therefore is likely more transparent for readers of modern standard Mandarin today than are the utterances of either Huckleberry Finn or Buccmaster for 21st-century readers of English. Yet, although the narrator speaks in a language markedly less opaque than the utterances of Huck and Buccmaster, he still speaks from a far different position. A third-person omniscient narrator tells the story of Pa and the village of Guanniuwo in Killing Ghosts. He himself is not part of the narrative; however, he is able to step in and out of the storyworld, and at least once update the reader on the vernacular of 1940s Taiwan. A similar narrator can be found in Rose, Rose, I Love You by Wang Zhenhe (1984). In addition to a running commentary on Taiwan and the people of Hualien in the novel, Wang’s narrator repeatedly compares the time of the storytelling, 1984, to the time of the story, the 1960s. The narrator of Killing Ghost, on the contrary, is far less concerned with bringing his reader up to speed. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, his first description of Pa: “Though still in elementary school, Pa was nearly six feet tall. He was immensely strong and ran so fast that he even left his shadow behind. Those two traits alone earned him the title choudokyuujin, meaning those with immeasurable power, or, as you might say today, a superman” (Gan, p. 20; trans. Lin and Goldblatt). With a narrator established as such, the reader follows the story, in short, from the perspective of a contemporary third-person omniscient narrator—a contemporary of the 2010s and the 1940s. This narrator, I want to suggest, can be likened to a cinematographer, and Killing Ghosts to the costume drama or period piece. For the 1975 Stanley Kubrick directed film Barry Lyndon, Milena Canonero and Ulla-Britt Söderlund crafted meticulous costumes for which they won the Oscar for best costume design. Similarly, John Alcott won the Oscar for best cinematography, because he shot the film with an extraordinary lens that allowed him to work only with natural light, including candlelight in old English castles, and thereby (re)produce

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the light of 18th-century Europe on the screen (DiGiulio, 1976). Similarly, the long queue that Pa’s grandfather, Liu Jinfu, maintains to protest Japanese colonization, news posters pasted on the side of train cars announcing the success of the Japanese military at Pearl Harbor, the train itself, and various warplanes function in Killing Ghosts as do the costumes, furniture, and carriages in Barry Lyndon. A closer look at the grain of forms leads to the idea that, figuratively speaking, Gan writes as Alcott films; in a manner akin to Kingsnorth and Twain. Moreover, in each instance it seems that precise attention to detail evokes something magical in the same manner Franz Roh (1925) wrote of when he described the magic of realism found in postexpressionist artists who would be later associated with German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in Post-Expressionism: Magic Realism (Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus). Consider the speech of the characters, including the narrator, in Killing Ghosts against that of characters in a costume drama such as Barry Lyndon. Dialogue in a novel certainly compares to actors’ lines in a screenplay, and in novels by Gan they reflect eras: the 1940s in Killing Ghosts and Becoming Bunun, the 1970s in The Girl and the Woodcutter, and the 2010s in The Summer General Winter Came. However, the utterances of a narrator differ significantly from character dialogue, monologue, or stream of consciousness. Furthermore, the narration in a novel is similar to but something more than “voice of God” voiceover-narrations so common to documentary films. The narrator’s power to share with the reader the thoughts, inner dialogues, and monologues of characters assigns the role unique qualities that naturally blur the line between narrator and author; however, though Gan himself may speak publicly or in interviews with Hakka-inflected Mandarin, he nonetheless would not refer to South Korea or North Korea, or the Korean peninsula for that matter, as Gaoli, as do both characters and the narrator in Killing Ghosts. The second chapter of the novel provides helpful examples. In a dialogue between Pa and his adopted father, Lieutenant Colonel Kano Takeo, Kano refers to China, Korea, and the now non-existent nation of Manchukuo as any Japanese or Taiwanese person would at the time: as they were then represented in Japanese kanji, shina, k¯ori, and mansh¯u (Ch: zhina, gaoli, and manzhou) (Gan, 2009). The use of these toponyms by Kano makes sense and because the Japanese language makes use of Chinese characters, Gan can avail himself of them as Kingsnorth makes use of Old English forms. However, a few pages later, the narrator speaks of military trainees from Taiwan, Korea, and Manchukuo with the same archaic toponyms Kano uses and uses them again to describe children pretending to be the people of America (bei/mi), England (ei/ying), China, Korea, and Manchukuo. The narration is in the local creole. In a manner of speaking, the reader hears Gan’s storyteller describing military training and children’s skits just as the audience member sees Kubrick’s characters play cards by candlelight and as Mark Twain’s and Paul Kingsnorth’s readers hear Huckleberry Finn or Buccmaster speak. In each instance the era is (re)produced in a contemporary text anachronistically: in the novels with language and in the film with light. Furthermore, in each case such (re)creations use artifacts of the era such as toponyms and candles to evoke the past—or automobiles to obtain the present. Early in The Summer General Winter Came, the narrator-protagonist Huang Lihua evokes the quotidian

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of early twenty-first century Taichung bourgeoise as she describes a line of Audis, BMWs, Benzes, and a Nissan in front of the kindergarten where she teaches and the amusing incident that plays out when a careless or unsuspecting mother crashes her four-million-New Taiwan Dollar BMW X6 into what appears to be a far cheaper car that turns out to be a Nissan GT-R worth six million NT (Gan, 2017). In each case a list turns literary. Lists, according to Theodore Martin (2017), serve an important function in period pieces; they allow for “sheer accumulation of period detail” (p. 35). In Martin’s (2017) study of contemporary literature, he demonstrates how lists of “toys” and “clothes” of class systems in novels by Brett Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith define the 1980s and 1990s. He quotes extensively from Jameson’s original essay on postmodernism and adds the following, which seems especially pertinent to The Summer General Winter Came, but also relevant to the other historical fiction novels of Gan: The list is not a narrative, though it is full of details. It is not meaningfully sequential, though it unfolds over time. It is not a period, though it is indispensable to periodization. The double edge of the list as literary form perfectly captures the double life of the contemporary, which both adopts and repels periodization, caught as it is between the flow of the present and the freeze frame of history. (Martin, 2017, p. 38)

3 Maximalist and Homegrown Narratives Lists as a literary device also serve maximalism, but maximalism is far more than lists. Reading a novel by Gan Yao-ming is work not only because of lists but also because each novel includes a latticework of linguistic idiosyncrasies and localisms to learn such as frequent glosses of Hakka turns of phrase or local landmarks in Killing Ghosts. For example, in one case a parenthetical Chinese character helps readers understand that when the old farmer utters kò (膏g¯ao—to lubricate or smooth) in Hakka, it is as if he had said tú (塗—to apply or smear) in more colloquial contemporary Mandarin. Along the same lines, localisms are sometimes explained with anecdotes. For example, “red hair mud” (hongmaoni) is the local vernacular for cement powder because it was the red-haired Dutch who first brought it to the area when they built a camphor-processing factory. Moreover, this anecdote is itself part of an explanation of the difference between cement powder and incense ash—even though the bridge the old locals are discussing is known as “Incense Ash Bridge” (xianghuiqiao) and not Red Hair Mud Bridge. Similarly, in The Girl and the Woodcutter, there is the etymological story behind Breadfruit Trees (pajilu). Pajilu, which is also the woodcutter’s nickname, is a Mandarin transcription of an Ami word. Furthermore, Gu Axia, who is half Ami and half African-American, explains to Pajilu that the Ami actually refer to themselves as the Pangcah. Adding still more to the latticework, historical figures like Wu Tangxing (1860–1895), who died fighting the Japanese for the stillborn Republic of Taiwan, factor into Killing Ghosts, and historical moments like the 1945 typhoon Ursula, which led to the Sancha Mountain crash of a B-24 bomber filled with newly released American prisoners of war on their way from Okinawa to the Philippines, set Becoming Bunun in motion.

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An intense attention to detail and creation of narrative tissues connected with historical realities seem to make it possible if not proper to consider Gan Yao-ming’s novels alongside works by Thomas Pynchon such as Gravity’s Rainbow, which is set in the world of rocket science in the waning years of the Second World War in Europe and includes historical figures such as Werner von Braun in addition to the fictional Slothrop, and Against the Day, which includes personages such as Nikolai Tesla and events like the 1893 Chicago world’s fair to which the fictional Chums of Chance fly their equally fictional Inconvenience. Or perhaps Infinte Jest by David Foster Wallace, which includes 388 footnotes and a bizarre microwave oven suicide, or Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which includes countless characters, fictional and historical, in a narrative of Indian and Pakistani history that contains brutal historical moments such as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Each of these novels has been noted as maximalist or as an encyclopedic narrative. These two discourses, I believe, offer us an elsewhere, or a somewhere, in which to consider Gan’s novels in addition to the xiangtu of home. A strong statement in support of maximalism is offered by Au O who began their 2015 blog on The Girl and the Woodcutter with “I, Finished, The, Girl, And, The, Woodcutter!” (Wo ba, bang, cha, nü, hai, kan, wan, le!) and then went on to compare the novel to the famous Song dynasty painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” by Zhang Zeduan. (Au) Indeed, maximalism does seem resonant with the tradition of scroll paintings both in terms of detail and how a world unrolls before the reader. Yet a still more positive if not sly take on the creative pleasure of reading comes from the narrator of Killing Ghosts himself as he describes Pa reading a book beyond his literacy level. He remarks that Pa can’t read every character in a copy he has found of Night on the Galactic Railroad by Miyazaki Kenji—perhaps it is for this reason his imagination is even more fully engaged, and this engagement obtains for Pa an even more fantastic tale than that contained in the original text of a train ride through the Milky Way (Gan, 2009, p. 38). Perhaps similarly the surfeit of details in novels such as The Girl and the Woodcutter or Killing Ghosts offers readers at home and elsewhere the opportunity to imagine an even more fantastic Taiwan than the waning years of Japanese colonialism, the arrival of the KMT, and the mountains above Hualien in the 1970s that is printed on the pages of the novels. On Killing Ghosts, Liou Liang-ya (2018) asserts that Gan departs from the “sad realism” characteristic of Taiwanese xiangtu fiction and instead uses magical realism, rural legends, fairy tales, and even cartoons to tell the story of the waning years of the Second World War, the 228 Incident, and its aftermath. She also adds in her study of Killing Ghosts as a historical romance (chuanqi) notes on the cartoonish qualities of the novel, especially physical exaggerations such as the qualities of Pa and a preponderance of trains and other railway items (Liou, 2018). I agree with Liou’s observations and would like to push her ideas further along with novelistic maximalism and develop the notion of “anime-realism.” Furthermore, I want to turn my attention to the aircraft in Killing Ghosts to provide examples of anime-realism. Magical realism as noted above was coined by the German art historian Franz Roh in order to describe the return to realism in 20th-century art following the expressionist moment of the earliest decades of the century. At that moment in the

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early twentieth century, “According to Roh, the ‘convulsive life’ and ‘fiery exaltation’ of Expressionism have yielded to the representation of vigorous life in a ‘civil, metallic, restrained’ manner” (Zamora & Faris, 1995, p. 15). This aspect of magical realism in addition to the Latin American Magical Realism that erupted from the translation of Roh into Spanish and Indigenous traditions of Latin America seem in the work of Gan to have merged with the mythology and realism of anime. Assuredly, the Magical Realism so many Taiwanese critics mention when reading Gan is that associated with Latin America and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tibet and Zhaxi Dawa, and even China and Mo Yan; however, Roh’s original idea that the magic lies below the surface and that only realistic portrayal can disclose such magic also seems relevant to Gan’s novels, especially in light of his maximalist tendencies. There are countless examples of a natural realism of plants, animals, and people in Gan’s writing that seem lifted from the frames of anime, and that echo both aspects of magical realism. An early example is the old school guard in “The School of Water Phantoms and the Otter who Lost his Mother”: He always mixes up “phantom” [gui] with “fruit” [guo] and ends up calling us “lil water fruits” because of his thick, odd accent. If anything, Uncle Ah-Tong is the REAL fruit ole freak; his blind left eye looks like a hazy peeled lychee. He often says he’ll lay drunk wherever he dies and grow the tallest, largest lychee tree in the village out of his left eye socket. The tiny roots of the lychee tree will wrap themselves around his body and absorb nutrients greedily. He even welcomes us lil water fruits to come pluck the eyes once they ripen. (Gan, 2005b, p. 110, H. Chiou Trans.)

There are also the mandala-like layers of flora and fauna in “The Banquet of the Orchid King,” which portrays a battle between the human and natural worlds (Gan, 2005b). In both cases, a comfortable comparison can be made between the worlds of Gan’s short stories and the worlds of Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke (Mononokehime) or Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi). Thickets of tree branches, spirits, and greedy humans entangle in the pages of Gan’s stories as they do on the screen in Miyazaki’s films. Reality and fantasy merge in something akin to A Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight’s Children; however, the images the texts evoke are of neither Latin America or the Subcontinent. Instead, they seem, literally in the case of the school guard, to stem from late 20th-century and early 21st-century anime. ¯ In Killing Ghosts, as Gan himself has pointed out, the anime of Otomo Katsuhiro, in particular Steam Boy (Such¯ımub¯oi), plays a role in the invention of the steam locomotive that travels without rails. Equally metallic and maximalist are aircraft. In chapter seven Pa succeeds in bringing down an American fighter plane attacking the village. And, as is the case with many passages in the novel, there is a decided degree of anime-realism and violence to the incident. To begin with, before the pilot and his aircraft is brought down, the narrator explains that Pa and his classmates, fellow members of the White Tiger troop, have been busy building airplane decoys out of bamboo to fool the Americans. Again, the motif of boisterous schoolboys fabricating a world. In this case it is airplanes woven from bamboo strips. With each air raid siren, the boys move the bamboo planes from one location to another hoping to draw the Americans’ attention from real aircraft and other bombing targets. Eventually,

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the Americans take notice and Guanniuwo is attacked by two waves of Grumman F6 Hellcats that have flown in high and cut their engines to drop in unannounced. Maximalist detail is shown not only with the Japanese nickname for the fighter planes, shrewish women (pofu), but the sounds of the time: it is noted in passing that the villagers can tell friend from foe by the sound of their engines. The detailed descriptions of the airplanes and their movement recall Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises (Kazetachinu) or the earlier Porco Rosso (Kurenainobuta). In the case of the former, it is perhaps ironic that the Hellcat was hailed as the American answer to the Japanese Zero, because the film is about Horikoshi Jiro, an engineer who helped design the Zero’s wing. Eventually, the two groups of three Hellcats depart and a lone fighter, which Pa succeeds in bringing down, arrives. The fighter is a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which because of its twin boom design is easily recognizable to Pa and other members of the child and adolescent-comprised White Tiger Troop, who all know it as the “Double Fuselage Demon” (shuangdong emo). As the plane carves a large arc through the air and sinks into a strafing run complete with bullets whizzing through the foliage, one trooper believes he is hit and cries out “I’m dead!” (121) but then discovers instead to have been burned by one of the hot, empty cartridges raining down on the White Tigers. As he makes this discovery, Pa hurls a large metal plate at the plane, breaking one of its propellors and bringing it down. Eventually, Pa and the other boys arrive at the crash site, where they find an African-American pilot with a large metal fragment piercing his torso that he cannot extract, crying piteously “Mami, heipomi (Help me)” (Gan, 2009, p. 122). It is this pilot who after escaping is later found when villagers begin singing the American national anthem after Pa and others recall the Han soldiers who sang Chu songs to the troops of Xiang Yu in ancient China. As this episode demonstrates, the novel is indeed maximalist, magically real, resonant with anime, and distinctly Taiwanese xiangtu fiction. Specific histories are an important part of Gan’s novels. In addition to the early establishment of Incense Ash Bridge, the compound surrounded by a bamboo fence Liu Jinfu calls his republic is a landmark; moreover, the cemetery where Pa encounters the ghost of Wu Tangxing adds to the geography of Guanniuwo. Adding to the moment as well as the neighborhood, and again resonating with anime, is the portion of fuselage from a crashed plane, upon which is painted a buxom woman named Iris. She appears early in the novel and is all but forgotten until she is taken away by Americans after the war 200 pages later in the novel. Guanniuwo is a product of the novel; it is not a generic pastoral. It might be argued that such locales have not really changed since the 1970s with the work of Huang Chunming, with an example like that of the well in the village in “The Drowning of an Old Cat.” (1967). Certainly, wartime artifacts such as plane-fragments, fences, and pill boxes can and could be found all around the island in addition to tombs, temples, and shrines. However, scholars such as Chen Wei-lin (2014) argue that 1970s’ authors such as Huang described a homogenized countryside that conformed to or stemmed from national, agrarian policies. On the contrary, Gan’s writing is detailed, maximalist, and very localized. In one recent trade magazine, there is an article detailing how Gan traveled to the site of the United States B-24 bomber crash on Sancha Mountain, including a photograph of the

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author squatting beside rusting wreckage, as part of his work on the novel Becoming Bunun (Teng, 2021). As is the case with the breadfruit trees of Hualien in The Girl and the Woodcutter and lonely apartment blocks in Taichung in The Summer General Winter Came, the novels are extraordinarily detailed and extraordinarily local. In a word, they are homegrown. The pleasantly vexing and anime-like detail in Gan Yao-ming’s novels that comprise the local tall tales and tragic narratives of worlds like Guanniuwo, Daguanyuan, and Taichung are vibrant offshoots of the xiangtu literary tradition so very deeply rooted in Taiwan. These narratives may resonate with postcolonialism, postmilitarism, and other “posts” and show signs of Magical Realism and thereby offer fertile fields for research that may lead to a better understanding of Taiwan literature and perhaps its literary establishment. As I hope this very short introduction to some stories written by Gan demonstrates, for many readers the detail and history that comprise his stories are like the story of a train traveling the Milky Way to Pa, beyond their comprehension and therefore more marvelous than the marvelous world on the page; however, for other readers, the abundance of detail in both form and content offers a surfeit of challenges and rewards. In either case, these texts offer a new generation of scholars a continually growing body of xiangtu fiction to study with its evolving language and map of Taiwan. They offer a new critical and literary link to several historical moments including Japanese colonization, Retrocession, martial law. Finally, they offer the impetus for long-overdue meditations on marginalized populations of women and Indigenous persons so often overlooked in research focused on local, homegrown, xiangtu culture.

References Au, O. (2015, August 22). [雜感] 《邦查女孩》 讀後感 [Reflection on The Girl and the Woodcutter]. 時光答錄機 [Time Answering Machine]. Retrieved from https://odieau.blogspot.com/2015/08/ blog-post_42.html. Chen, W. -L. (2014). 從「生產鄉土」到「科幻鄉土」-台灣新世代鄉土小說書寫類型的承繼 與衍異 [From “Homeland of Production” to “Scientific Homeland”—The inheritance and evolution of new generational homeland fiction writing styles in Taiwan]. 國文學報 [Bulletin of Chinese], 55, 259–296. https://doi.org/10.6239/BOC.201406.09. DiGiulio, E. (1976, March). Two special lenses for “Barry Lyndon”: How the stringent demands of a purist-perfectionist filmmaker led to the development of two valuable new cinematographic tools. American Cinematographer, 276–277, 318, 336–337 Fan, M. -J. (2007). 後鄉土小說初探 [A primary survey of post-regional literature]. 臺灣文學學報 [Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature], 11, 21–50. https://doi.org/10.30381/BTL.200712_(11).0002. Gan, Y. -M. 甘耀明. (2003). 神秘列車 [Mystery train]. Aquarius Publishing. Gan, Y. -M. (2005a). 水鬼學校和失去媽媽的水獺 [School of water phantoms and the Otter who lost his mother]. Aquarius Publishing. Gan, Y. -M. (2005b). School of water phantoms and the Otter who lost his mother (H. Chiou, Trans.). (Unpublished). (Original work published 2005b). Gan, Y. -M. (2009a). 殺鬼 [Killing ghosts]. Aquarius Publishing. Gan, Y. -M.(2009b). Killing ghosts (S. L. Lin & H. Goldblatt, Trans.). (Original work published 2009). (Unpublished).

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Gan, Y. -M. (2010). 喪禮上的故事 [Stories at a funeral]. Aquarius Publishing. Gan, Y. -M. (2015a). 邦查女孩 [The girl and the woodcutter]. Aquarius Publishing. Gan, Y. -M. (2017a). 冬將軍來的夏天 [The summer general winter came]. Aquarius Publishing. Gan, Y. -M. (2017b) The summer general winter came (J. Tiang, Trans.). (Unpublished). (Original work published 2017b). Kingsnorth, P. (2014). The Wake. Unbound. Liou, L. -Y. (2018). 重返1940年代台灣-甘耀明 《殺鬼》 中的歷史傳奇 [Revisiting 1940s Taiwan: The historical romance in Gan Yaoming’s the ghost slayer]. 臺灣文學研究學報 [Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies], 26, 221–250. Lin, S. -H. (2019). 成長之旅:《邦查女孩》 的生命敘事 [Journey of growth: Searching the meanings of life in Pangcah Girl]. 台灣文學學報 [Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature], 34, 33–60. Martin, T. (2017). Contemporary drift: Genre, historicism, and the problem of the present. Columbia University Press. Mendelson, E. (1976). Encyclopedic narrative: From Dante to Pynchon. MLN, 91, 1267–1275. Roh, F. (1925) Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus. Klinkhardt and Biermann. Scruggs, B. (2006). Narratives of discomfort and ideology: Yang Kui’s short fiction and postcolonial Taiwan Orthodox boundaries. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 14(2), 427–447. Sethi, A. (2015, May 10). The wake review—Paul Kingsnorth’s innovative, “shadow language” novel. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/10/thewake-review-paul-kingsnorth-innovative-shadow-language-novel-norman-hastings. Teng, C. (2021, August). History through the lens of fiction: Two authors reimagine Japanese-Era Taiwan (B. Humes, Trans.). Taiwan Panorama. Retrieved from https://www.taiwan-panorama. com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=44aec90a-21fb-47a4-a5a4-1a931fe8af03&CatId=8. Twain, M. (1994). The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Dover. Wang C.-H. 王禎和. (1984). 玫瑰玫瑰我愛你 [Rose, Rose, I Love You]. Taipei: Yuanjing. Wang, K.-A. (2020). 甘耀明 《冬將軍來的夏天》 探析 [Analysis on Gan Yao-Ming’s The Summer General Winter Came]. 國立彰化師範大學文學院學報 [NCUE Journal of Humanities], 21, 39–53. Wu, C.-R. (2016). Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and beyond. Cambria Press. Yip, J. C. (2004). Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, cinema, and the nation in the cultural imaginary. Duke University Press. Zamora, L., & Faris, W. (1995). Magical realism: Theory, history. Duke University Press.

Bert Scruggs is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, United States of America, which is located on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples.

Genres, Forms, and Ideas

Clipping Wings: A Chronicle and Wang Wen-Hsing’s Art Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Abstract Clipping Wings: A Chronicle (剪翼史) by Wang Wen-hsing (王文興), published in 2016, is the latest milestone in Taiwan’s Modernist fiction. The novel delves deeply into disturbing spiritual and ethical issues while bringing to a culmination Wang’s lifelong language experiment. Reading the work can be a soulwrenching and aesthetically gratifying experience for those equipped with the proper decoding tools. However, the novel’s contemporary reception has been dishearteningly apathetic. It is a phenomenon this chapter intends to explore and hopefully illuminate. Following an introductory section on the general background, this chapter goes on to explore the novel’s central themes by referring to a specific narrative device Wang professed to have employed: covertly positing an “implied author.” The subtle but readily discernible oscillation of narrative distance that results may hold the key to a more nuanced interpretation of the work’s thematic messages. Next, the chapter brings attention to the modernist-inflected cultural elitism that principally informs the novel’s sociocultural critique. Notably, through Wang’s proficient employment of “parodic mimicry,” poignant criticism is “put into brackets” and transformed into ambivalent showmanship. The chapter then tries to enhance our understanding of Wang’s radical language experiment with insights drawn from Brian Massumi’s theory of affect. The concluding section consists of brief remarks on the implications of the novel’s parting of the ways with Taiwan’s younger-generation critics from the perspective of literary history. Keywords Clipping Wings · Wang Wen-hsing · Literary genealogy · Aesthetic modernism · Flaubert · Mimesis · Translocal phenomena · Parodic mimicry

S. Y. Chang (B) University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_5

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1 Foreword Clipping Wings: A Chronicle (Jianyi shi 剪翼史) by Wang Wen-hsing (王文興; b. 1939), published in 2016, is the latest milestone in Taiwan’s Modernist fiction.1 The novel delves deeply into disturbing spiritual and ethical issues while bringing to a culmination Wang’s lifelong language experiment. Reading the work can be a soul-wrenching and aesthetically gratifying experience for those equipped with the proper decoding tools. However, the novel’s contemporary reception has been dishearteningly apathetic. It is a phenomenon this chapter intends to explore and hopefully illuminate. All three of Wang’s previous novels, Family Catastrophe (Jiabian 家變, 1973) and two installments of Backed Against the Sea (Beihai de ren 背海的人, 1981, 1997), have acquired iconic status in Taiwan’s literary circles, albeit after causing some initial controversies or dissension. A wave of public and academic activities between 2008 and 2013 celebrating Wang’s oeuvre further consolidated Wang’s stature as one of the most revered literary figures in contemporary Taiwan.2 Therefore, the awkward silence following the appearance of Clipping Wings merits attention not merely as a verdict on the novel’s merits or lack thereof. More importantly, it may be taken as signaling the final surfacing of the discordance between the aesthetic modernism propagated by the postwar Modernist literary movement and evolving literary trends in Taiwan’s contemporary era.3 A series of watershed events around the turn of the 1990s ushered in monumental changes to Taiwan’s cultural landscape. The translocal phenomenon of the late twentieth century, pinpointed by David Harvey (1990) and Arjun Appadurai (1990) under the umbrella categories of “postmodernity” and “global cultural economy,” found an opportune moment to exert a sweeping and transformative impact on Taiwan. The island nation had recently emerged from a 40-year martial-law decree that had restricted the free circulation of ideas and knowledge from the outside world. Domestic efforts at debunking the conformist, conservative, and neo-traditionalist dominant culture of the previous era created fertile ground for the reception and thriving of a host of postmodern-progressive-activist trends fomented broadly at this 1

This chapter uses “Modernist” with a capital M to refer to the literary movement that took place in postwar Taiwan between the late 1950s and late 1970s, and “modernism” in the more generic sense of the literary trends and artistic concepts originated in Europe from the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century. 2 Wang was the recipient of the 13th National Arts Award from the government of the Republic of China in October 2009. In 2011, Wang received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Minister of Culture of France and the 6th World Chinese Literature Award. The prolific activities that took place between 2008 and 2013 included scholarly conferences dedicated to Wang’s work; studio recordings of Wang’s readings of his fiction; seminar series in which Wang read aloud excerpts of texts from his two novels and offered interpretations; an elegant print volume of Wang’s manuscripts; and seven volumes comprising critical studies, interviews, and a sourcebook of research materials put out by the National Taiwan University Publishing Center in December of 2013. 3 There are of course different ways of periodizing contemporary Taiwan writers. Roughly speaking, after the Modernists were the fu-kan generation of the baby-boomers, the “inward-looking” generation born in the 1960s, the post-70 s generation, and the Millennials.

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historical juncture. The postcolonialist discourse promoted by a surge of US-returned scholars began to heighten the local intellectuals’ awareness of the different temporalities governing the West and the rest, thus instilling a desire to overturn the existing hierarchy. The post-Cold-War acceleration of globalization in the two following decades would further shrink the material and psychological distances between Taiwanese intellectuals and their counterparts in the international community. Abundant evidence suggests that a progressive revisionist ethos has increasingly prevailed in Taiwan’s cultural sphere in the twenty-first century. With Millennials coming of age, the generational factor has also come into play. The cross-disciplinary appropriation of the injunction “Asia (Taiwan) as method” in recent scholarship is symptomatic of a shared censure of Western cultural hegemony, a far cry from the main thrust of the Modernist generation’s [quest for “high culture”] modeled after modern Western civilization. As part of the structure of feeling in Taiwan’s immediate postwar years, the Modernists, to varying degrees of self-consciousness, subscribed to a universalist worldview central to Western modernist aesthetics. In the newer intellectual trends since the late twentieth century, universalism has been condemned for its complicitous role in the West’s imperialist-colonialist projects. The inherent contradiction between the Modernist disposition and the contemporary ethos is closely tied to the all-important question of evaluative criteria for literary quality. Taiwan’s Modernists would most likely have concurred with Pascale Casanova (2004) about the “Greenwich standard” of literary excellence, given their deep-seated aspiration to insert their work in the globally sanctioned elitist literary genealogy. The mindset resonates with the sociologically oriented theory of the “world literary system” conceived by scholars like Franco Moretti (2013) and Casanova (2004) in the early 2000s. The theory holds that, so far as modern times are concerned, the evaluative criteria prevailing in the global literary market have been radiating from the Western metropolitan centers. Treating a novel like Clipping Wings, which registers an episteme rooted in a bygone era, facilely as anachronistic, however, misses an essential dimension of the complex issues at hand. Simply put, the novel foregrounds a salient feature of the “compressed modernity” in many societies of the non-West. As latecomers to modernity, these societies are constantly engaged in building modern institutions, including the institution of art and its various subsets, after existing models. However, a formidable challenge looms over local cultural agents. The condensed time frame tends to entail truncated evolutionary cycles of regimes of knowledge they set off to emulate, threatening superficial assimilations or prematurely aborted efforts. To the extent that Clipping Wings brings elements of the modernist ethico-aesthetic regime to a high degree of fruition, it ought to be deemed a triumphant accomplishment on the grounds that it successfully breaks away from this seemingly inescapable destiny. In recognition of the reality that divergent literary genealogies inevitably coexist in a place like Taiwan, this chapter aims to excavate the meanings of Clipping Wings by referencing a particular segment of the modernist aesthetic regime within which the novel was conceived. Ultimately, it hopes to consolidate our knowledge

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about the constitution, trajectory, and developmental potential of the “modernist position” that, while ostensibly withering in today’s literary field, has played a prominent role in shaping the artistic visions of several generations of writers in contemporary Taiwan. Following an introductory section on the general background, the next two sections of this chapter explore the novel’s central themes by referring to a specific narrative device Wang professed to have employed: covertly positing an “implied author.” The subtle but readily discernible oscillation of narrative distance that results may hold the key to a more nuanced interpretation of the work’s thematic messages. The following section brings attention to the modernist-inflected cultural elitism that principally informs the novel’s sociocultural critique. Notably, through Wang’s proficient employment of “parodic mimicry,” poignant criticism is “put into brackets” and transformed into ambivalent showmanship. The chapter then tries to enhance our understanding of Wang’s radical language experiment with insights drawn from Brian Massumi’s theory of affect. The concluding section consists of brief remarks on the implications of the novel’s parting of the ways with Taiwan’s younger-generation critics from the perspective of literary history.

2 A Mid-20th-Century Pilgrimage: The Iowa Legacy That Taiwan’s postwar generation was susceptible to the imperative of high-culture quest can be easily attributed to their dilapidated cultural environment amid ColdWar isolation, economic scarcity, and political constraints. Two institutions played outsized roles in transmitting Western literary resources to Taiwan at the time: the Foreign Language and Literature departments at the universities and the United States Information Agency through its agents and libraries. Wang’s lifelong intimate affiliation with the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the National Taiwan University was an essential part of his professional identity. His US experience as a graduate student and visiting scholar in the 1960s, facilitated by the United States Information Agency, further played a crucial role in shaping his artistic orientation. The early 1960s saw literary modernism institutionalized in North American academia. The particular strand of the modernist school consecrated at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (IWW) at the time succeeded in winning the hearts and souls of several young creative talents from Taiwan. They later became the mainstay of Taiwan’s Modernist literary movement.4 Themes in their works encapsulated Irving Howe’s (1967) “the idea of the modern,” with their obsession with “depths,” in particular those of the human psyche, and commitment to symbolically representing the “universal human condition.” The IWW graduates’ adherence to the more realistic

4

These writers include Yü Kuang-chung, Yang Mu, Pai Hsien-yung, and Ou-yang Tzu.

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strand of mimetic tradition noticeably distinguished them from their peers infatuated with avant-gardist experimentation. And a highly esteemed figure in that tradition, Gustave Flaubert, would exert a particularly entrenching influence on Wang Wen-hsing.5 That Flaubert has been deemed an epoch-defining writer is evidenced by the fact that both Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1996) and Jacques Rancière (2010) treated him as the paradigmatic example of the evolution of narrative aesthetics in modern Western literature in their influential theoretical works. A set of comments from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953/2003), written shortly before Wang’s Iowa period, is particularly revelatory of the profound legacy Wang has inherited from this 19th-century master.

2.1 Flaubert’s Disciple: Literature as Substitute Religion Flaubert wanted to transform reality through style; transform it so that it would appear as God sees it, so that the divine order—insofar as it concerns the fragment of reality treated in a particular work—would perforce be incarnated in the author’s style. (Auerbach, 1953/2003, pp. 357–358) …his fanatical mysticism of art is almost like a substitute religion. (Auerbach, 1953/2003, p. 488)

Wang Wen-hsing converted to Catholicism in 1985. Indeed, Wang’s indestructible faith in language style’s quintessential value to his fiction carries quasi-religious overtones. In a 2010 interview, Wang claimed the novel that would later be published as Clipping Wings was still an ordinary literary work that depicted men’s responses to religion. It was not a piece of genuine “religious literature” (Shan & Lin, 2013, p. 471) like Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrections and The Power of Darkness, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, although he wished he could write a genuinely religious piece sometime in the future. What are the specific features that disqualified Clipping Wings as “religious literature,” then? On many occasions, Wang has stated that his fiction is primarily about “what happens between heaven and men” (天人之際). His visions in this regard are deeply conditioned by the existentialist intellectual trends in the mid-twentieth century, best captured by Heidegger’s notion of the radical historicity of human existence and knowledge. They are underlined by the concept of “thrownness”—the individual being is thrown into the world as an accident, in which the human will plays no part. Existential angst was a central preoccupation in such stories as “Lines of Fate” (命運的跡線), “Calendar” (日曆), “The Happiest Thing” (最快樂的事), and the novella Dragon-Heaven Tower (龍天樓). The religious subtext in these stories is 5

In a 1999 interview with Shu-ning Huang, Wang Wen-hsing claimed, “I am a hardcore disciple of Gustave Flaubert … we are still entrenched in the 19th-century realist tradition” (p. 301). Pai Hsien-yung, another prominent Modernist fiction writer in Taiwan, once remarked on how an IWW course on Madame Bovary encapsulated the quintessential spirit of creative fiction.

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unmistakable, as the flipside of anxieties about capricious fate and the meaning of human existence is the question of whether there exists a “divine order.” As will be demonstrated in the following sections, the themes of Clipping Wings can be fruitfully interpreted in terms of complex entanglements of spiritual issues revolving around existential angst and a somewhat fortuitous religious quest. The random thoughts and subjective observations of an eccentric college professor are only meaningful when taken in a symbolic sense, as oriented toward philosophical inquiries on such compelling issues as purposeless suffering, instinctive evil, vacuous compassion, and the possibility of redemption. These thematic concerns, while ostensibly conceived within Western intellectual frameworks, are motivated by concrete realities in Taiwan’s recent history that should be able to resonate with local memories. The novel’s failure to attract immediate interest may be explained by its deep embeddedness in an elitist literary genealogy with mature and highly cultivated narrative conventions. Wang’s steadfast commitment to that genealogy and his innovative deployment of techniques in its toolbox, especially those related to rhetorical devices, make deciphering the novel’s thematic messages an inordinately exacting task.

3 Narrative Device as Marker of Cognitive Capacity When writing Clipping Wings, Wang seemed to deliberately pare down elements superfluous to his core concerns, to the effect that the novel assumed a “purist” form, which Wang likened to “pristine water, with no scent” (真水無香) (Hsia & Chang, 2016). A blunt relentlessness underlies his effort to attain visionary mimetic truthfulness by remolding some established narrative conventions. On several occasions, the novel’s protagonist, Ho Tsung-ch’eng, risks breaching the all-important realist convention that puts the truth claims of fictional characters’ utterances into brackets as provisional speech acts. Most strikingly, the views articulated by Ho about religion as an “external, dependable force that intervenes in his life” echo Wang’s own words almost verbatim in a published interview (Shan & Lin, 2013, pp. 452, 456). The blurring of the narrator’s and the real author’s consciousnesses points to a device Wang claimed to have intentionally employed since his first novel, Family Catastrophe.6 In a nutshell, it is a device that deliberately conflates the narrator—or, in Henry James’s terms, the character that serves as the center-of-consciousness of the work— and a fictive author, which will be called the “implied author” hereafter, for lack of a better term. It is still a creative construction of the author, an avatar, not to be identified See pp. 371–376 in Wang’s conversation with Li Shih-yung (2013) in 語言本身就是一個理由— 王文興訪談錄 [Language itself is the reason: An interview of Wang Wen-hsing]. When Critical Theory dominated the intellectual sphere in the mid-to-late twentieth century, critics might quickly resort to Althusser’s definition of ideology—as the individual’s imagined relationship with the Lacanian Real—to dissolve such epistemological doubt. In the case of Clipping Wings, however, the inherent cognitive limitation of the narrator leads to either existentialist angst or an older form of resolution for humankind, religious faith.

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with the experiential self of the real author, despite possible affinities between the two. The device, though surreptitiously employed, leaves significant imprints on the overall narrative structure of the novel. Unlike the situation in which truth is denied to an “unreliable narrator” while remaining accessible to the reader, the narrator’s consciousness itself is rendered dubious. Consistent with the modernist spirit, neither the narrator nor the implied author has the privilege of uttering the last word. But the lurking presence of the implied author creates nuanced variations of the narrative distance, that is, the gap between the narrative voice and the referential reality or presumed truth. The author is given a license to shift the correlation between the two levels of consciousness at will, causing it to oscillate from one part to another depending on the nature of the subject matter. It is precisely in this sense that this somewhat idiosyncratic device may be seen as a hidden engine of meaning production at the novel’s thematic level. The philosophical underpinning of this device is undoubtedly the “epistemological incertitude,” or the ultimate inaccessibility of the true nature of reality that preoccupied writers of literary modernism in the early twentieth century. Positing an implied author provides an extra buffer and permits the writer to tread on forbidden turf with unflinching courage and candor. The conception of this device allows Wang to carry to another level Flaubert’s “objective seriousness,” which, as Auerbach (1953/2003) claims, “seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself being moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved” (p. 490). In short, Wang makes the problematization of the narrator’s access to “truth” a built-in feature of the novel’s narrative structure. In Clipping Wings, the impact is most readily felt in parts of the work that contemplate some aspects of the universal condition of human existence, as the device functions to underscore the limitations of human cognitive capacity and the unfathomable depth and complexity of the human psyche.

3.1 “Shame”: The Affect that Defines the Sense of Self Ho Tsung-ch’eng, a Chinese literature professor, suffers from a sudden attack of debilitating pain in the middle of his favorite poetry class. The unnamable illness is never cured. Clipping Wings is a record of the 20-year journey, during which Ho learns to cope and finally come to terms with this calamity. The sickness initially triggers an exaggerated sense of doom—the occasional attacks appear to be a nuisance that disrupts the normalcy of Ho’s everyday life rather than a real health threat—followed by an excruciating sense of shame. Ho’s most devastating fear appears to be caused by worries about his situation being discovered by others, and about the impact on his teaching performance, which could imperil both his sense of honor and job security. The degree to which unwarranted paranoia is tied to Ho’s sense of selfhood points to a dark recess of the human psyche. It is not supposed to be shared by the implied author or the reader and calls attention to a glaring gulf between the narrator’s consciousness and the world of common sense.

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Shame is one of the nine “affects” Silvan Tomkins lists (“Affect theory,” 2019),7 and it appears to most actively define Ho’s sense of self. Curiously, in this book an outburst of an overwhelming sense of shame tends to occur side-by-side with sickness and death, something menacing in an existential sense. After attending the funeral of a former mentor, Ho becomes overwhelmed with unrelenting regret as he recalls how he had emotionally betrayed a childhood pal, a middle-school teacher, and a former classmate in the past.8 Here, an overactive guilty conscience is readily detectable, and so is the narrator’s faulty judgment, twisted by a semi-pathological self-absorption. It forms a remarkable contrast to Ho’s response during the 40th-year class reunion toward the end of the novel.9 During a casual conversation among Ho’s former classmates, now in their mid-60s, terminal illness, deaths, and a near-death experience are mentioned matter-of-factly, even with good spirits. Ho’s response is omitted in the text space. In his old age, mortality-connected issues are no longer psychologically displaced by some other strong sentiments closely bound with the sense of self.

3.2 A Transactional Approach to Religious Faith As neither modern Western nor traditional Chinese medicine can come up with a proper diagnosis for Ho’s mysterious disease, he turns to the Catholic church for help. He reaches a deal that seems patently transactional in nature. Ho cites empirical evidence in daily life as the basis for his faith—such as swelling caused by a toothache miraculously gone in response to his prayer—and underscores the notion that religious faith is by definition blind, irrational, and akin to superstition. It leads to the conjecture that even suffering, like his mysterious disease, could be part of a divine scheme to help him avoid worse calamities, including those associated with his flawed character (an irritable temper and lack of control at departmental meetings). However, there are explicit indications of Ho’s self-awareness that undercut those testimonials, such as when Ho admits to embarrassment for believing the prayer’s healing effect. The same sentiment, however, appears in the 2010 interview (Shan & Lin, 2013). Toward the end of the novel, Ho expresses genuine gratitude to God for helping him cope, more or less successfully, with the mysterious disease over the second half of his teaching career, the 20 years covered in the novel. Under the narrative conventions of realist fiction, these utterances do not have to be considered proselytization, something Wang disclaimed in his interview with Shan (Shan & Lin, 7

Tomkins uses the concept of affect to refer to the “biological portion of emotion,” defined as the “hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us,” which, when triggered, precipitate a “known pattern of biological events.” However, it is also acknowledged that, in adults, the affective experience is a result of interactions between the innate mechanism and a “complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-affective formations” (“Affect theory,” 2019). 8 Part I, Chapter 8. 9 Part III, Chapter 5.

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2013) by denying that Clipping Wings could be classified as “religious literature.” Yet, given the notion of an implied author, the ambivalence remains.

3.3 Innocent Suffering, Vacuous Compassion, and the Instinctive Evil At the church service, watching the behaviors of his fellow worshipers, Ho observes how misfortune and ugliness often exist side by side, which makes it hard to sympathize.10 Ho is nonplussed by the inexplicable disparity in individuals’ fortunes, presumably reflecting God’s uneven blessing. A later episode describes how a goodnatured Sa-ti, a Filipina maid Ho gets to know in the neighborhood, is mistreated in inhuman ways by a member of the employing family.11 She becomes ill. The only compassionate act Ho is capable of is to lengthen and increase the frequency of his prayers for Sa-ti. Her tribulations eventually ease, but the reader is left with skepticism about how the two are causally connected in any direct way. The theme of innocent suffering undergoes a surprising twist in the last passage of Part I.12 Ho has just left a seedy area, where he visited a Chinese doctor, and witnesses a bus driver deliberately making a sharp turn to throw an older woman who has just boarded onto the floor. Indignant and furious, Ho recalls what he had recently read in the news: a kindergarten janitor in his 70s claimed his sexual assault of a six-year-old girl was an act of “mutual attraction.” Only moments later, however, the depraved sexual instinct has been transported into his own libido. Sauntering in the dark alley nearby his apartment, Ho enters a spell of orgiastic fantasy and abandons himself into a rhapsody of hallucinated assault, rape, and killing, complete with a spontaneous erection. The hysterical fantasy unfolds with a riveting rhythm and reaches a crescendo by the end of the page, where Part I of the novel is concluded (Wang, 2016). The mesmerizing, enthralling effect of the masterfully written passage makes it one of Wang’s most brilliant accomplishments in technical virtuosity. In the same stroke, the passage exemplifies Frederic Jameson’s (1982) conception of the modernist strategy of aesthetic containment of real conflicts in everyday life, transforming what is transgressive into sources of reading pleasure. Thanks to the suppleness with which the narrative distance shifts, the real criminal offenses in a corrupted society and vicarious gratification in the private self are juxtaposed and virtually equated. The result is hilarious, morally dubious, and thought-provoking. It is Bakhtin’s (1984) “ambivalent laughter” carried to a highwater mark.

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Part I, Chapter 6. Part II, Chapter 2. 12 Part I, Chapter 9. 11

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3.4 Trauma and the Possibility of Redemption The book’s most poignant episode is a traumatic experience that occurs in the middle of the third and last part of the novel.13 Ho was five or six years old when he maliciously crushed his kid sister’s hand by slamming the door to vent his anger over a lost toy. She died a year later. The memory, which rarely pops up, has been rekindled by his accidental glimpse of the face of a beautiful little girl overlooking her father’s shoulder. At night, Ho begins to relive the incident. He recalls that, after his mother rushed the sister to the hospital, he was questioned by the nanny and other adults but always insisted, falsely, of course, that “The door shut itself.” Now, 60 years later, Ho is suddenly struck by the horrible idea that the wound, rather than pneumonia, as previously assumed, eventually took his sister’s life. Even more devastating, it now dawns on him that everyone in the family always knew the truth, that he killed his sister, which is why they never talked about the incident before him. The discovery of a hitherto suppressed “truth” sends Ho into a dark abyss of excruciating pain and self-blame. Yet, the reader’s feeling of empathy may be unexpectedly stalled by seeing the last few words of the chapter: “Not long after, he falls asleep” (Wang, 2016, p. 177). A psychological control mechanism is at work. The ending potentially annihilates the faint suggestion of religious redemption. There must be a reason why the choir music from the church across the street was heard in the background when the terrible incident occurred. The lack of a clear anchoring in the narrative structure reinforces the duplicitous nature of human consciousness.

4 Existential Despair Reimagined The oscillation of narrative voice is facilitated by the loose-jointed structure of the work that chronologically presents slices of Ho’s life. Narrative distance in the thematic cluster described in this section departs from the previous discussion in that the narrator and the implied author seem to have converged and become identical. The transparency seems thematically necessitated, as Ho’s experiences in a world fraught with ethical breaches serve as the basis for the author’s earnest exploration of the nature of alienation, a long-standing modernist motif.

4.1 The Ethical Implications of “Taste” In a short chapter in Part III, Ho describes a visit to an exhibit of calligraphy produced by a colleague from the Agriculture College whom he has only met a few times.14 The venue is a sparsely decorated basement, with no other visitor in sight; even the 13 14

Part III, Chapter 2, pp. 168–177. Part III, Chapter 3.

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reception desk is unattended. Ho’s calm and confident praise of the quality of the exhibited artworks and his complaints about the lack of appreciation of authentic art in contemporary society give the impression the views of the narrator and the implied author are entirely aligned. In a direct and unassuming way, the chapter lays bare the core value subscribed to by the protagonist: taste, or the ability to appreciate authentic art, has a spiritual dimension, and its absence is inseparable from moral degeneration. Therefore, Ho’s devotion to teaching poetry is more than a professional commitment. And the malicious attempts by his colleagues to sabotage his integrity as a teacher, as we see below, carry broader implications than mere campus politics as they impinge on the very value with which Ho identifies himself.

4.2 Bureaucratic Conspiracy, Kafka-style Ho’s response to plots by his colleagues and school administrators to harm his status in the Chinese Department is a mixture of outrage, resentment, disdain, and a sense of helplessness. As the narrator lashes out regarding nepotism, office bullying, and other unethical and undignified behaviors, the author appears to be launching an attack on the Nationalist regime’s notorious infiltration of Taiwan’s academic institutions. But what ultimately qualifies these accusatory accounts as literature is the Kafkaesque mystery that enshrouds them. Two incidents stand out. Halfway through the novel, Ho feels greatly distressed when an auditing student, Ch’u Li, publishes a satirical article in the campus newsletter trashing Ho’s teaching, with the apparent goal of negatively affecting his class enrollment. Ho’s suspicion that Ch’u is a spy student appears to be confirmed by some somewhat equivocal evidence, but no further corroboration is attainable. Then, toward the novel’s end, a former departmental staff member suddenly comes up to Ho and makes a surprising confession during a walk on campus. She admits to having tampered with the grades of Ho’s classes for several years in the past at the order of the department chair.15 Rattled to the core, Ho makes meticulous calculations of his options to redress the repugnant situation, but to no avail. In situations described previously, views expressed by the narrator may have seemed equivocal or downright problematic. Emotionally stressed, the protagonist may have entered a state of paranoia or self-delusion. In the cases mentioned above, the reader is invited to share the narrator’s plight instead of questioning his cognitive capacity. Ho’s attempts to uncover the truth behind the suspected conspiracies against him are thwarted by mundane logistical difficulties rather than metaphysical unknowability. He has no practical means to verify the speculated connivance between Ch’u and school administrators or to extricate academic records of past students whose names have not been disclosed to him. When, near the end of the book, Ho declares “… he is also completely kept in the dark” (… 他也完全不知 道) (Wang, 2016, p. 195), the maddening despair has been driven by the fundamental structure of the phenomenal world. It is noteworthy that Ho ponders possible 15

Part III, Chapter 6.

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ways to pursue the detective work with the same positivist approach he employs to contemplate such issues as the existence of God or whether he has murdered his kid sister. A diehard rationalist is lurking behind his final resignation to the meaninglessness of life. Juxtaposing dualist and non-dualist beliefs, the novel harks back to the existentialist literature of the mid-twentieth century with the aid of a customized narrative device that permits movement between different levels of consciousness and the co-presence of multiple facets of reality in jarringly uncomfortable relations.

5 Cultural Elitism and the Aesthetically Neutralized Sociocultural Critique In an allegorical play titled M and W, published in 1987, Wang Wen-hsing used black comedy to convey a pessimism toward the rampant materialism in Taiwan society, then just being caught in the grip of a rapid capitalist transition. The main character W (standing for “all women”), utterly unmoored from all spiritual foundation, is finally snatched away by M, an incarnation of the Devil.16 According to Wang, the events in Clipping Wings took place between 1985 and 2005 (personal communication, June 2022). As will be demonstrated shortly, the same disparaging view of a degenerated “bourgeois culture” forms the basic tenor of the novel. This view bears visible imprints of the early phase of Western literary modernism, dated roughly from the mid-19th to the early twentieth century, that registered a profound aversion toward the menacing cultural changes brought about by the emerging middle class, a mindset best captured by the Arnoldian critique of philistinism. Wang’s artistic approach, on the other hand, is heavily indebted to the modernist ethico-aesthetic regime of the mid-twentieth century, especially in his deployment of an “aestheticization strategy” as Frederic Jameson (1982) conceived it. From a Marxist standpoint, Jameson (1982) faulted the strategy for its escapist tendency. As modernist art is oriented toward symbolic resolutions to conflicts and contradictions in real life, the argument goes, it provides means for containment rather than resistance. Notwithstanding Jameson’s (1982) patent judgmentalism, this concept is useful if applied to elucidate the inherent dualism of the literary mode employed in Clipping Wings, that of “parodic mimicry.” It also helps to explain the parting of the ways between Taiwan’s Modernist generation and the younger generation of artists. Brought up in an environment dominated by middle-class culture, the latter group favors progressivist activism and holds a disdain toward elitist visions of art.

16

A theatrically entertaining work, with the actors performing mime-like gestures.

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5.1 Depravity as Source of Mimetic Pleasure Wang’s sophisticated deployment of parodic mimicry in Clipping Wings brings him closest to the ideal of Flaubert’s “objective seriousness,” as described in Auerbach’s (1953/2003) Mimesis: Through his level of style, a systematic and objective seriousness from which things themselves speak and, according to their value, classify themselves before the reader as tragic or comic, or in most cases quite unobtrusively as both … there is clearly something of the earlier positivism in his idea of art. (p. 491)

With this mode, the author strictly abstains from any hint of judgment, allowing the reader to derive pleasure solely from the mimetic representation of scenes or actions in all their vividly depicted sensational details. The neutrality, to be sure, is only confined to the surface. Underneath, there are usually strong sentiments that can be made even more poignant by the deliberate suspension. With few exceptions, characters in Clipping Wings are all portrayed unflatteringly as embodiments of different forms of hollowness or depravity. At the same time, with superlative mimetic skill, the parodic representations of these characters “in action” elicit enormous pleasure from the reader. A perfect specimen is a ludicrous scene in which a young colleague of Ho’s, Lo Chi-liang, verbally re-creates his physical altercation with the Chinese department’s acting chair over some petty personnel issues.17 As Lo unabashedly brags about his acrobatic agility in the fistfight, the reader is at once entertained by the farcical body movements Lo describes in savory detail and flabbergasted by his total lack of a sense of decency. One can cite many other examples: the banal, silly dinner conversations that flag the deep fissures between Ho and his wife’s family18 ; the imbecility of the taxi driver shouting out profanities in English to the rearview mirror after learning new vocabulary from Ho19 ; the silly buffoonery of the resident artist at Sheng-kuang University where Ho attends a scholarly conference, a “smart alec” the community patiently humors with no trace of feeling offended.20 As the parodic mode simultaneously brackets the author’s disapproval and betrays his disdain, the tension and ambivalence are part of the pleasure of reading Clipping Wings. At their best, the literary effects in scenes from the novel are highly reminiscent of the iconic party scenes in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Although out of sync with the currently dominant aesthetic regime, readers schooled in modernism are well-rewarded by Wang’s mastery of its intricacies. Even more incongruous with the current aesthetic are the ways Wang has exploited, with painstaking dedication and utmost discipline, the Chinese language’s affective potential for achieving a set of rationally conceived aesthetic visions.

17

Part II, Chapter 2, pp. 124–126. Part I, Chapter 2, pp. 29–37. 19 Part I, Chapter 4, pp. 52–53. 20 Part III, Chapter 2, pp. 142–166. 18

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6 “Greater Freedom” in Tactics to Maximize Affect Flaubert’s letters on the ‘subjects of his aim in art’ lead to a theory—mystical in the last analysis, but in practice, like all true mysticism, based upon reason, experience, and discipline—of a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality which transforms them … and permits them to develop to mature expression. (Auerbach, 1953/2003, p. 486)

Throughout his career, Wang Wen-hsing has insisted that “language” is the real essence of his art of fiction, whose importance surpasses that of the thematic contents. The herculean efforts he puts into language experimentation are ultimately aimed at creating “a verisimilitude that captures the spirit,” based on an indestructible faith that resonates with Auerbach’s description of Flaubert’s mystical theory on the possibility of “a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality which … permits them to develop to mature expression.”21 It is noteworthy that, on several occasions, Wang claimed that, compared to the 19th-century Western realists, his language experimentation was “freer” (更自由些). The innovative language devices found in Clipping Wings may help explain what he means by “greater freedom” (Li, 2013). The novel carries on a set of devices similar to those Wang used in Family Catastrophe and Backed Against the Sea, arguably with greater regularity, and which can be broadly classified into two categories. The first involves altering the way Chinese ideographs are printed on the page: ● Inserting empty spaces and dashes to parse out parts of the sentences. ● Substituting ordinary ideographs with symbols (phonetic notation, English alphabet, or archaic and alternative script forms). ● Adding dots or lines (single or double, wavy, curved) on the sides of ideographs. ● Using boldface or alternating font size. By and large, these seem to be distributed more evenly and are more systematically employed in Clipping Wings. The second category consists of idiosyncratic syntactic features, adopted apparently to imitate an individual’s mental speech, or “interior monologue,” aiming to achieve verisimilitude. In Backed Against the Sea, the unusual syntax seems to suggest the protagonist’s stammering speech habits or a state of inebriation. The style and diction in Clipping Wings appropriately reflect the education level of the protagonist and reveal an intimacy that evokes the sense that this is how one engages in mental conversations with oneself. The objective of all the manipulations, simply put, is to exert control over the reading process by programming it with such “visual aids” as the altered appearance of printed scripts and mimicked speech patterns. These would supposedly generate audio images in the reader capable of evoking the sought-after “affects” beyond the “meanings” of the sentences that are comprehended only at the “semantic or semiotic” level. Inserting long dashes and empty spaces to sparse out sentences slows 21

At one point Wang used the term “trans-mimetic” to describe his practice (personal communication).

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the reader’s reading pace and more easily induces immersion. Wang has often been cited for comparing reading a literary work to listening to a piece of music composition: you can’t run through the entire course within a condensed time. The analogy finds justification in Susanne Langer’s (1953) notion of the “semblance of feeling” that marks the appreciation of non-discursive forms of art. In a nutshell, Wang has exploited some unique features of the Chinese ideographical language in his aggressive efforts to engineer effects with some evanescent elements in the sensorium of the reader’s body. The ultimate driving force is Wang’s profound dissatisfaction with conventional language expressions, believed to be incapable of creating the desired outcomes, elusive as they are. What exactly constitutes this author-text-reader interactive process involving physical and intellectual human faculties? What made Auerbach, on the one hand, deem Flaubert’s conception of art mystical while, on the other hand, seeing his practice as “based upon reason, experience, and discipline”? The amorphous, inexplicable process Wang strives to gain control of seems to coincide with what some scholars of affect theory have tried to illuminate with empirical scientific methods in recent years.

6.1 Affect Theory and the Tapping of the Bodily Realm for Aesthetic Resource Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination as a Symbolic). (Massumi, 1995, p. 87)

In his 1995 article “The Autonomy of Affect,” Brian Massumi proposed a drastic reworking of how we perceive the relationship between mind and body. The theory goes that the body registers external stimuli faster (roughly half a second) than the mind, which, unlike the body, would recognize the stimuli in terms of sociolinguistically coded conventional meanings. During the brief lapse of time, activities the body experiences are thus “pre-consciousness” and “pre-personal,” as they are yet to emerge into the consciousness, so to speak, and become fixed as socially recognizable meanings. They are “affects” rather than “emotions,” which are socially recognized and regarded as properties owned by individuals. Not all those vibrant actions and expressions in this pre-consciousness realm—or we may call them affective units, which are multiple in amount and mutually competing—would eventually “emerge” or pass the threshold of actualization into social meanings. In that sense, their existence is “virtual.” Elements that fail to pass the threshold of emergence are not expelled or lost. They are conserved and remain in the body as traces. Also preserved are the contexts of the previous encounters in which the stimuli impacted the body. Those traces remain in the virtual form as potentialities or tendencies that

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can be re-evoked and impact future instances of later bodily encounters with external stimuli. The way the visual appearance of “words”—or more precisely, the Chinese ideograms or “characters,” the basic units of “words,” consisting of mostly two to four characters—on the printed page generate mental activities through a process of audio recreation, or silent reading, has received Wang’s utmost attention. In his highly discriminatory process of choosing the words/ideograms, he makes minute and exquisite distinctions between alternatives based on their perceived sound qualities, often remarking that a certain ideogram is avoided because the audio impression evoked is “too heavy/strong” when a gentler touch is sought. Going beyond Flaubert’s “les mots justes” principle, Wang has invested enormous time and energy in not only choosing the “right words/ideograms” from the existing lexicon but also creating alternatives (substitutes with various symbols or obscure equivalents), to the extent of showing no qualm for using the “wrong words.” Such a radical stance goes beyond the “semantic or semiotic” level—“however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination as a Symbolic)”—in its absolutization of the affective potential of individual language components. In deploying admittedly mechanical devices aimed to work on the reader’s sensory faculties, Wang can be easily seen as tapping the physical realm in which, according to Massumi, unnamed affective units virtually exist and constitute a fertile and prolific reservoir of potential significations. Wang is known to have developed a peculiar way of writing manuscripts: inscribing Chinese ideograms/characters on slips of paper on the surface of a wooden desk with great force via striking with a short pencil stub, and then reassembling words on the paper slips into sentences and paragraphs afterward. The strenuous exertion of mental and physical labor involved in the process speaks to the challenging nature of extracting verbal expressions from a bodily realm that would resonate with his mimetic visions. In more recent years, Wang has repeatedly complained about the pai-hua (modern Chinese vernacular) language’s severe deficit in the aesthetic resources it could afford to writers, a result of its relatively brief evolutionary history, and suggested that this was one of the reasons for his language experiment. Massumi’s theory lends support to this claim in that Wang’s experiment supposedly enables him to access a supply of pre-consciousness language materials not yet processed by the restrictive sociolinguistic coding system. Conversely, it may also be argued that, for various historical reasons, pai-hua Chinese has accumulated a vast amount of clichéd verbiage that Wang is keen to highlight and deflate. The profuse use and misuse of set phrases by the protagonist of Backed Against the Sea, a semi-educated veteran and selfstyled poet, undoubtedly perform a deconstructive function with broad ideological implications. In his “Autonomy of Affect,” aside from citing lab experiment results, Massumi (1995) invokes a host of master thinkers—Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze—who the mainstream had sidelined for some time. Affect theories have taken shape against the backdrop of this strain of Western philosophy. Wang Wenhsing is undoubtedly not a philosopher. Yet the “mystical” conviction behind his

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arduous endeavors to mold an ideal language for his fiction in transcendence of the established linguistic coding systems exhibits a similar radicality and relentless determination to explore realms of the unknown, and, in Wang’s case, for the purpose of achieving an elusive aesthetic vision.

7 Contemporary Reception and Literary History Discussions in this chapter intend to demonstrate that the thematic and formal dimensions of Clipping Wings are deeply embedded in modern Western literary traditions, and the aesthetic visions of Wang Wen-hsing are firmly entrenched in the literary genealogy of global modernism. On the surface, it is unsurprising that the outcome of Wang’s creative endeavors is out of sync with Taiwan’s contemporary readers and critics. For a surge of a “new localism” in recent decades has boosted efforts at reconstructing an indigenous literary genealogy both in protest of the Nationalist suppression of the pre-1949 historical legacies, especially that from the Japanese colonial period, on the one hand, and to fend off the rising threat of China’s encroachment, on the other. There are, however, deeper reasons. Of primary importance is the paradigmatic change in writers’ aesthetic orientations. With Millennials and Taiwan’s Gen-Z counterparts entering the literary field, a new aesthetic regime has emerged. It registers the impact of saturated commercialism, digital revolution, the progressive-activist ethos, and an increasingly felt menace from China that threatens the collective self-identity of Taiwan’s residents. Clashes in presumptions about literature’s boundaries, functions, and evaluative criteria between generations of writers are universal. But the translocal phenomena in the post-Cold-War era have brought about some new transformations. Copresence and coevality of divergent literary genealogies are now found on a much larger scale. And the ascendance of popular culture and its social influence results in a flattening of genre hierarchies that used to privilege high-culture art. All these have made aesthetic modernism more rarified in the cultural landscape of contemporary Taiwan. But how to understand the apathy toward Clipping Wings coming from literary generations baptized in the postwar Modernist literary movement? Aside from the work’s austere “purist” quality and the possible post-canonization fatigue for its author, the following conjectures may provide some explanation. First, as Wang’s language innovation is primarily aimed at achieving a “higher level of verisimilitude,” the representation of contemporary people’s speech habits plays a central role in evoking affective responses. That the ethnically inflected language habits imitated in Clipping Wings have stopped being widely used, as pointed out by the Millennial generation writer-critic Chu Yu-hsün (2016), can genuinely hamper the work’s affective resonance with contemporary readers. In the same vein, the novel’s sociocultural critiques, directed mainly at the realities of late 20th-century Taiwan, cannot but assume an air of datedness.

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The second explanation concerns a phenomenon commonly found when importing foreign knowledge systems. Marston Anderson (1990) argues that Chinese writers’ assimilation of Realism in the Republican period encountered two major “impediments,” moral and political. He also observes that the philosophical underpinning of Western literary thought in Realism, the epistemological issues revolving around the relationship between the signifier and the signified, received very little attention. As is widely known, reductionist versions of Realism and Modernism played crucial roles in the prewar left-vs-right ideological struggles in all East Asian societies. And Taiwan’s Modernist-vs-Nativist contention in the 1970s carried over the tradition. This regional legacy has significantly contributed to the widespread tendency among local scholars in Taiwan to privilege formal innovation in their evaluation of modernist works. For instance, the negative assessment of Clipping Wings in Chu’s review is mainly based on Wang’s failure to continue providing the same language innovation as that which awed people in the early 1970s when Family Catastrophe first appeared. To the same extent that Realism is habitually equated with sociopolitical criticism informed by leftist ideology, the realist component of modernist writing, the core of Wang’s preoccupation, tends to be overlooked or misjudged. The tendency may be attributed to the indigenous critical tradition’s lack of interest in the philosophical dimension of mimesis. And a sociocultural critique conceived with Bakhtin-style dialogic imagination, like that found in Clipping Wings, easily falls outside the critic’s attention before it is considered for acceptance or rejection. Literary genealogies within the “world republic of letters,” à la Casanova, are conceptual constructs involving networks of influence, circuitous trajectories, and multiple layers of mediation. The chapter argues that Wang’s artistic project can be appropriately situated within the genealogy of global aesthetic modernism. It considers the postwar US–Taiwan cultural networks and the trajectory that took Wang to the mid-twentieth century ethico-aesthetic regime through his Iowa apprenticeship. The circulation of Wang’s creative products within the global literary market is the subject of a separate study. Translations of Wang’s short stories and his two novels, Family Catastrophe and Backed Against the Sea, have been in circulation in global literary circles.22 Considering Clipping Wings relies for its artistic effect more heavily on the visual and audio elements of the Chinese language, it would be daunting, if even possible, to try rendering the work successfully in a foreign language. And the mediation efforts by scholars may have to play a more active role in placing the work in the global circulation network.

Un Homme dos à la mer, a French translation of 背海的人 by Camille Loivier was just published in June 2022 by Éditions Vagabonde.

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heavenly eyes for an accidental glimpse of the red dust: Collection of biographies and interviews with Wang Wen-hsing] (pp. 278–305). National Taiwan University Publishing Center. Hung, S.-H. (Ed.). (2013c). 西北東南—王文興研究資料彙編 [West, north, east, and south: Sourcebook of research materials on Wang Wen-hsing]. National Taiwan University Publishing Center. Jameson, F. (1982). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. Cornell University Press. Jameson, F. (1984). Literary innovation and modes of production: A commentary. Modern Chinese Literature, 1(1), 67–77. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press. Langer, S. (1953). Feeling and form. Macmillan. Li, S.-Y. (2013). 語言本身就是一個理由—王文興訪談錄 [Language itself is the reason: An interview of Wang Wen-hsing]. In S.-N. Huang (Ed.), 偶開天眼僜紅塵: 王文興傳記訪談集 [Opening the heavenly eyes for an accidental glimpse of the red dust: Collection of biographies and interviews with Wang Wen-hsing] (pp. 360–397). National Taiwan University Publishing Center. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. McGurl, M. (2011). The program era: Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing. Harvard University Press. Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. Verso. Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly feelings. Harvard University Press. Ngai, S. (2012). Our aesthetic categories: Zany, Cute. Harvard University Press. Rancière, J. (2009). The aesthetic dimension: Aesthetics, politics. Knowledge. Critical Inquiry, 36(1), 1–19. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics (S. Corcoran, Ed. & Trans.). Continuum International Publishing Group. Schulte-Sasse, J. (1984). Foreword. In P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Michael Shaw, Trans.) (pp. vii–xlvii). University of Minnesota Press. Sedgwick, E., & Frank, A. (1995). Shame in the cybernetic fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. Critical Inquiry, 21, 496–522. Shan, T.-H. (2013a). 錘鍊文字的人—王文興訪談錄 [The man who experiments on language like tempering steel: An interview with Wang Wen-hsing]. In S.-N. Huang (Ed.), 偶開天眼僜紅 塵: 王文興傳記訪談集 [Opening the heavenly eyes for an accidental glimpse of the red dust: Collection of biographies and interviews with Wang Wen-hsing] (pp. 212–272). National Taiwan University Publishing Center. Shan, T.-H. (2013b). 偶開天眼僜紅塵—再訪王文興 [Opening the heavenly eyes for an accidental glimpse of the red dust: Another interview of Wang Wen-hsing]. In S.-N. Huang (Ed.), 偶開天 眼僜紅塵: 王文興傳記訪談集 [Opening the heavenly eyes for an accidental glimpse of the red dust: Collection of biographies and interviews with Wang Wen-hsing] (pp. 306–336). National Taiwan University Publishing Center. Shan, T.-H., & Lin, C.-C. (2013). 宗教與文學—王文興訪談錄 [Religion and literature: An interview with Wang Wen-hsing]. In S.-N. Huang (Ed.), 偶開天眼僜紅塵: 王文興傳記訪談集 [Opening the heavenly eyes for an accidental glimpse of the red dust: Collection of biographies and interviews with Wang Wen-hsing] (pp. 450–485). National Taiwan University Publishing Center. Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 57–78. Wang, W.-H. 王文興. (1973). 家變 [Family catastrophe]. Huan-yü Bookstore. Wang, W.-H. (1979). 十五篇小說 [Fifteen stories]. Huan-yü Bookstore. Wang, W.-H. (1981). 背海的人–上冊 [Backed against the sea] (Part I). Hung-fan Bookstore. Wang, W.-H. (1988). M 和 W [M and W]. 聯合文學 [Unitas, a monthly], 4:5. Wang, W.-H. (1999). 背海的人–下冊 [Backed against the sea] (Part II). Hung-fan Bookstore. Wang, W.-H. (2016). 剪翼史 [Clipping wings]. Hung-fan Bookstore.

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Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang received her Ph.D. degree from Stanford University and is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Chang is the author of Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law (Columbia University Press, 2004) and Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Duke University Press, 1993), and a coeditor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan (Feminist Press, 1990). Her books published in the Chinese language include《台灣文學生態:戒嚴法到 市場律》 (Literary culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law, 2022), 現代主義 ‧ 當代台 灣 (Modernism/Contemporary Taiwan,2015),当代台湾文学场域 (Literary Field in Contemporary Taiwan,2015), and 文學場域的變遷:當代台灣小說論 (Transformations of A Literary Field: On Contemporary Taiwan Fiction, 2001). Dr. Chang’s articles have appeared in journals, edited volumes, and anthologies in English and Chinese. Dr. Chang was the President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL) in 1999-2000 and has served on a dozen editorial boards and held offices in scholarly organizations. She is currently the Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at UT-Austin.

Xia Yu, the Supreme Stylist Michelle Yeh

My poetry doesn’t do anything, it’s a pure desire for words. Xia Yu (2018, book cover) What I mean is very very good poetry or else everything is wasted. Xia Yu (2013, p. 169)

Abstract This chapter offers a critical analysis of the poetry and poetics of Xia Yu (Hsia Yü 夏宇), a leading poet in the Chinese-speaking world. By focusing on the themes, language, and formal innovations of her work to date, I highlight the unique style and contributions of the poet. Keywords Xia Yu · Modern Chinese poetry · Language · Formal experiments · Self-fashioning Since the early 1980s, Xia Yu1 (Hsia Yü 夏宇; b. 1956)—the penname of Huang Qingqi (黃慶綺)—has been a towering figure on the poetry scene, first in Taiwan, then in Hong Kong, and increasingly in mainland China and around the world. With nine books of original poetry and one self-selected collection from 1984–2020, she has been called “Taiwan’s most innovative contemporary poet” (Parry, 2007, p. 80) and “a cutting-edge poet with a popular following” (Bradbury, 2007). Her books regularly sell out and go through multiple editions in a few months; in recent years, they have also been available online on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Her bold experiments in form and her creative book designs, on top of her innovative writing style, have attracted wide acclaim—and occasional criticism—from readers. It is no exaggeration to say she has become an icon in the Chinese-speaking world with a loyal following, a poet’s poet who has exerted a significant influence on younger generations. 1 From “Never See You Again Is Not a Bad Concept” (永不再見不失為一個好概念) in 88 SelfSelected Poems (88首自選). All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.

M. Yeh (B) University of California, Davis, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_6

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Xia Yu’s first book of poetry Memoranda (Beiwanglu 備忘錄, 1984) catapulted her to fame to her surprise. The poems spoke almost exclusively about private experience, especially romantic love, from a distinctly modern female perspective. While love may be the oldest theme of poetry, and there were plenty of women poets in Taiwan, Xia Yu’s treatment was refreshingly unconventional and iconoclastic. This is how “Sweet Revenge” (甜蜜的復仇)—arguably still her most famous poem to date—depicts a woman who has lost her love: I’ll take your shadow and add a little salt Pickle it Dry it in the wind When I’m old I’ll wash it down with wine (Xia, 2001b, p. 400). With laconic language and a homely scenario, the poem combines two commonplace yet gender-specific activities. If preparing food is traditionally a woman’s work, drinking wine is almost always associated positively with male poets, in both classical and modern Chinese poetry,2 suggesting transcendence and spiritual freedom. In the poem, however, it is the female speaker who engages in both. While “pickling his shadow” depicts an act of preservation, the projection of drinking and enjoying the pickled food in her old age suggests both the long process of healing and her having the proverbial last laugh. In other words, while she acknowledges her pain and anger at the present, she also foresees the day when she will be free from these emotions— thus her “sweet revenge.” In the Chinese original, the poem ends with the image of eating and drinking described with two characters: “xià jiˇu 下酒,” two accented syllables that create a firm, sonorous sound, intimating determination and finality. The female narrator in the poem acknowledges her vulnerability on the one hand, and affirms her agency in self-healing and self-empowerment on the other (Yeh, 1993). Xia Yu rarely talks about her first book of poetry; published in 2013, her selfselected collection of 88 poems only contains three poems from Memoranda.3 This suggests the poet’s discontent with her early work. Admittedly, it is simpler than her later work. Nevertheless, Memoranda is a landmark in literary history. First off, it is diametrically opposed to the nativist mainstream in Taiwan literature. As the democracy movement gained momentum in the late 1970s and early 1980s, eventually leading to the lifting of martial law in 1987, many poets took it upon themselves to uncover the repressed history of the island and to critique political corruption, social injustices, and economic inequality. It was the beginning of the end of the Grand Narrative constructed and perpetuated by the Nationalist government since 1949. In Memoranda, we see none of that. What we get is not a counter-narrative or oppositional discourse in a sociopolitical sense, but vignettes of the private life of a woman who lives in a cosmopolitan city. 2

A well-known exception is Li Qingzhao (李清照; 1084–1155), who often depicts drinking, on both happy and lonely occasions, in her poetry. 3 The three poems are “Saw” (鋸子), “A Can of Fish” (魚罐頭), and “Gangster A” (歹徒甲).

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From a literary-historical point of view, Memoranda embodies a subtle departure from the modernist tradition since the 1950s, characterized by a dense, figurative, and richly allusive language, an introspective, tormented, or ironic voice, and profound representations of alienation and other existential crises of modern men and women. In contrast, Xia Yu’s language is lighthearted, intimate, and chatty. Her tone ranges from confessional to cavalier. Her images tend to be concrete, sensual, literal, and full of colors, smells, tastes, and experiences in quotidian life: eating, drinking, smoking, reading, writing, walking, riding on a bus, listening to music, kissing, and making love. Some of her images are defiantly “non-poetic,” such as hemorrhoid and pimple, a man stands peeing and a woman menstruating. More importantly, these images are neither metaphoric nor symbolic; a pimple is a pimple but does not stand for or evoke something else. The poet freely mixes allusions that are highbrow and pop, literary and kitsch, Chinese and Western: from the Bible to the Book of Changes (or Yijing 易經) and Book of Songs (or Shijing 詩經, the first collection of Chinese poetry from the sixth century BCE), from Pinocchio and Cinderella to the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934–2016), from the John Denver/Peter, Paul, and Mary hit song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to the hermetic Chinese poet and fiction writer Fei Ming (廢名; 1901–1967), from Li Bai (李白; 701–762) and George Washington (1732–1799) to the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927). In either straightforward narratives or stream of consciousness, Memoranda exudes a feeling of spontaneity and a touch of the whimsical that are endearing and easy to relate to. The above characteristics comprise Xia Yu’s signature style and persist throughout her writing even as it evolves. In the ensuing books from the 1990s to the twenty-first century, Xia Yu’s poetry has become bolder and more complex. Love continues to be a major theme; however, while romantic sentiments can still be found, increasingly there are more explicitly sexual descriptions. When it comes to love, the first-person narrator in Xia Yu’s poetry is both independent and vulnerable, both sexualized and childlike (Yeh, 2018). Some of the sexual images are funny and fantastical, such as “collective masturbation” in “Afternoon Tea” (下午茶), the animalistic thirdpersonal pronoun referring to penis in “Heavy Metal” (重金屬), an academic paper on “From Lips to Labia” in “Me and My Unicorn” (我和我的獨角獸), and the longwinded discussion of infidelity in relationships in “A Private Conversation with Animals (IV)” (與動物密談). As an example of romantic sentiments, “The Last Sporadic Appearance at the Harbor” (在港口最後一次零星出現), written in 1988– 1990, compares a relationship to licking a knife and bleeding, it makes her feel “painfully happy” or, literally, “in pain and happiness” (痛並快樂著) (Xia, 1991, p. 95). The phrase became the title of a pop song she wrote, which was recorded by Qi Qin (齊秦) in 1995. In 2018, the theme song of the megahit drama series The Story of Yanxi Palace (延禧攻略), titled “The Sound of Snow Falling” (雪落下的聲 音), contains the line: “in pain and happiness fully tasted” (痛並把快樂Ř盡), which is a variation on Xia Yu’s phrase.4 4

Under the penname Li Gedi (李格弟), Xia Yu is an award-winning pop song lyricist. Some of her lyrics are widely known; besides “Painfully Happy,” other examples are “I Am Ugly, But I Am

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Poems about love, especially its uncertainty and misery, continue to abound in Xia Yu’s work to date. In particular, her 2020 book, titled The Axis of Spine Spine (Jizhui zhi zhou 脊椎之軸), is based on the poet’s personal experience in 2009 when, because of “a heartbreaking matter,” for five months she trekked across France to Cape Finisterre on the west coast of Galicia, Spain. In Roman times, Cape Finisterre, literally, “end of the earth,” was believed to be the end of the known world. In her postscript, Xia Yu details what happened on this physically trying and mentally straining journey. When she finally reached the destination, she threw all her clothing and notes into a bonfire in a ritual of rebirth. The thirty-three poems, all under ten lines each, contained in the collection are what she has managed to remember from the 300-plus lines she wrote down as she made her way to Cape Finisterre. In the postscript, she also refers to the poems as “humble love poems.” We find several recurring types of images: pain/emptiness, death, and confinement/emancipation. The first type can be seen in “Heart, as if cut by a knife/On display to those who shed tears” (Poem No. 1),5 “a hole in the heart” (No. 16), “servant of sorrow” (No. 31), “heart is ashes, mind is cold” and “wounded all over the body” (No. 33). The second type includes such images as tomb, the netherworld, graveyard, and dead souls. Finally, the ocean appears several times in the poems; in contrast to the silkworm cocoon, it suggests openness and hope. Poem No. 2 says: “The ocean is far away/We create our own waves/I accept you as my twilight lover.” Other images of the ocean suggest a desire to return to the cradle of life.” Another major theme that has emerged in Xia Yu’s poetry is language. “At the beginning are words” (太初有字) (Xia, 1999, p. 95). The theme contains two interrelated aspects. First, especially with regard to Chinese characters, the poet is fascinated by not only their meanings but also their sounds and shapes—i.e., the material attributes of individual words and words in endless combinations, and how they create physical sensations for the language user. In “Yiermidisuo Language Family” (伊爾米弟索語系), she imagines a language with which to “express myself profoundly.” For other people, language is a tool serving practical functions, such as “editing newspapers, compiling children’s textbooks, distributing travel guidebooks, and creating crossword puzzles.” But, for the poet, she will take 10 years to learn how to express love and to indulge in her penchant for proverbs and tongue-twisters. She will spend another 10 years learning “how to debate, with precision/And to inadvertently engage in all kinds of fiercely alive words/Like some crustaceans.” Finally, in another 10 years, she will be able to write poetry in which “oleaginous/syllables press near my throat over the tip of my tongue/and produce a purely sensory sensory sensory/pleasure” (Xia, 1991, pp. 38–39; Yeh and Malmqvist 2001, 408, modifications mine). One way in which words give sensory pleasure is through patterns of sounds. The poet loves using either readymade tongue-twisters or constructions of her own Gentle” (我很醜, 可是我很溫柔) and “Please Give Me a Better Rival in Love” (請你給我好一點 的情敵). 5 There are no page numbers; therefore, the poems are identified by the order in which they appear in The Axis of Spine (2019).

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making that have a tongue-twister effect, namely, exaggerated and excessive repetitions of sounds based on the same characters or homonyms. For example, “He knows I know he knows what he should not know” (Xia, 1991, p. 72). Borrowing the title of a collection of essays by the former French president François Mitterrand (1916–1996), Il faut laisser du temps au temps, the poet says: “Since time became time/We have to give time to time” (Xia, 1999/2014, p. 5). “Dreaming Beuys” (夢見 波依斯) and “Continuing Our Discussion of Boredom and Ennui” (繼續討論厭煩) are a pair of poems about “yànfán” (ennui, boredom, boring). In the first six lines of the latter poem, “yànfán” appears seven times: And so we must continue our discussion of boredom and ennui Boring things are all so very Boring And any old boring thing is boring too y boring things are actually boring It doesn’t need to be discovered it simply is6 (Xia, 1991/2001a, p. 25) If “The Yiermidisuo Language Family” is a manifesto declaring the poet’s “carnal love” for language, “carnal love” also suggests interconnectedness between the body and words. The poet observes that “traditional characters are fleshy simplified characters are bony” (Xia, 2019, p. 33).7 There is almost interchangeability between a lover and a word: “He is a word that I accidentally encounter when I look up another word” (Xia, 1999, p. 12). Whether with love or with words, the poet expresses her frustration with both: Flesh and word I used to believe when I was young Each is its own purgatory. Having lived to my age I know they cannot be each other’s Redemption. Despite my futile repeated pursuits And repeated explorations8 (Xia, 1999, p. 103) “Inside a Poem” talks about how “I” wraps “you” up with a blanket and then gets inside: “just like an unripe fruit nestled to/another fully ripe fruit/with a ripening agent/the powerful enzyme/makes one fruit ripe in no time/and the other even riper” (Xia, 2013, p. 125). While the description is all about love, given the title, the poem also suggests how words are nestled to one another to create “ripeness.” Love as the condition in which two individuals interact intimately and merge as one is an apt metaphor of the way words are combined to generate something greater in a poem than individually. 6

Ventriloquy (1999, p. 20); translation by Steve Bradbury in Fusion Kitsch (2001a, p. 25); I made one modification—deleting the word “Boredom” at the beginning of Line 6 to reflect the original. 7 “Manifesto I: Filming Must be Finished at the Scene of the Story” (宣言一: 攝影必須在故事的 發生地完成), Romance as Sudden Enlightenment (羅曼史作為頓悟) (2019). 8 “Lead the Goat, Regrets End” (牽羊悔亡), Salsa (1999).

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ILLustration. 1 The Missing Elephant

It is in this sense that “Inside a Poem” points to the second aspect of language that occupies Xia Yu: signification, or how meaning is created and expressed. Some of her poems celebrate the signifier. For example, “Séance II” expresses the excitement upon discovering polysemy in the case of the word “fudge”: “How can it be how can it be that it is/soft candy also nonsense also fake postal stamp also dodging?” (Xia, 1991, p. 49). Defined as pictographs, many Chinese characters are pictorial representations of concrete things. The Chinese word for “pictograph” is “xiangxing” (象形), meaning “depicting the form.” In the hands of the poet, however, “xiàngxíng” becomes “elephant form” since “elephant” is a pun on the verb “depict.” Thus, “The Missing Elephant” (失蹤的象) (Xia, 1991, pp. 62–63) quotes a famous passage from Wang Bi’s (王弼; 226–249 CE) Annotations on the Book of Changes (周易) about language as a means of expressing meaning; once meaning is grasped, the form—i.e., the word—can be forgotten. In the poem, the poet substitutes every “form/elephant” with a drawing of a concrete thing, whether an animal (cat, turtle, dinosaur, etc.), a plant (dandelion, pineapple), or an inanimate object (bench, briefcase, etc.). In calling attention to the concreteness of the form and the missing elephant, Xia Yu sends a counter message that the signifier is as important as the signified and is not to be forgotten. The sheer visual affect of Chinese characters is brought to the fore in “Séance III,” which is composed of fourteen lines of spurious characters with jumbled radicals and phonetics. The poem is a play with the tension between familiarity and defamiliarization. The epilogue to Salsa reiterates the poet’s love of the Chinese writing system: “Chinese characters, based on pictures, are especially beautiful in quick-freeze poetic thoughts that sparkle with a clear, cold light giving off a suggestive wisp of smoke. The atemporal nature of the writing system” (Xia, 1999, p. 143).

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ILLustration. 2 Pink Noise

When it comes to the signified, the poet acknowledges the ambiguity inherent in words: “How to explain even a simple sentence is divided uncertain uninterpretable” (Xia, 1999, p. 10). In the abovementioned poem “The Yiermidisuo Language Family,” Xia Yu refers to “proverbs and tongue-twisters.” They represent the two ends of the spectrum of signification: proverbs are typically four-character phrases that are pithy and easily memorable, while tongue-twisters are sheer plays with sounds with little meaning. Both types of language use are common in Xia Yu’s work. To date, her most radical experiment in signification is the 2007 book of poetry Pink Noise (粉紅色噪音). It contains thirty-three poems—all in English except one in French—and their Chinese translations. As Ron Hanson (2012) describes it, “The artist composed the poems in English using lines found by clicking hyperlinks on spam emails, mixing in lines from literary classics by Pushkin, Poe and Shakespeare, among others. Once composed Xia fed the poems through the automated translator ‘Sherlock’ and then continued working with the awkwardly transferred texts, feeding the Chinese back through the machine to obtain the English text.” As I have discussed elsewhere, these machine-generated translations contain numerous “context-based errors and … sheer nonsense”; like funny mirrors, they distort the originals, “producing incoherence, rupture, verbosity, obfuscation, as well as serendipitous originality, humor, and refreshing expressions” (Yeh, 2008, p. 173). Two examples are “But now it’s time to clean everything up” (No. 10) and “Words fail me” (No. 5). Both are common expressions in English; however, when they are

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translated literally into Chinese, new meanings emerge. In the first case, the Chinese translation reads: “But now Time is washing everything clean” (但現在是時間在 清洗一切); it turns “a pedestrian chore into a philosophical statement” (Yeh, 2008, p. 173). In the second case, the Chinese translation of “Words fail me” reads: “Words did not pass through me” (詞未通過我). Not only are the two versions divergent in meaning, but the Chinese rendition harks back to the poet’s view of language as a sensory affect. In using “bad translations” as original poetry, the poet is pushing the boundary of signification as established rules are broken and the native reader’s expectations are frustrated. Xia Yu is a supreme stylist despite her ostensible rejection of style: And O how we weary of style Does style, after all, exist So like the snow Defiled at the merest touch (Xia, 1999/2014, pp. 32–33)9 To borrow an image from her poem about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, a celebrity couple (now divorced) known for their unique styles, poetry is “planned insanity” (Xia, 2013, p. 128). The 1988 interview, which is included in Ventriloquy (Fuyushu 腹語術, 1991), offers many insights into her development as a poet and her poetics. For one, when asked about her poetry as a “language game” in a postmodern sense, she evokes the ancient ballad quoted in the Confucian classic, Mencius: “If the water in the Canglang River is clear, it can wash the tassel on my hat; if the water in the Canglang River is muddy, it can wash my feet.” Then she paraphrases it and retorts: “use clean [water] to wash hat tassel, use dirty [water] to wash feet. Is this not a language game? I don’t know, although I adore words, adore syllables, adore the new sounds generated in the automatic clashes of words, the extreme joy of sounds” (Xia, 1991, pp. 111–112). Her response is ambiguous. On the one hand, we may interpret it to mean that, if the language of the orthodox text Mencius is postmodern, she doesn’t mind being called postmodern. On the other hand, she is implicitly rejecting this or any other label. The fact is that her style is not only embodied in her language and poetics but also in form. Xia Yu has been called a “fanatic of form” (形式狂熱者) (Douban, 2020). Her formal experiments have both fascinated and scandalized readers over the years. Her first book, Memoranda, stood out for being a particularly small rectangle in brown paper, with the poet’s childlike handwriting on the cover. The poems in her second book of poetry, Ventriloquy, were cut up into fragments with scissors and then rearranged into a new set of poems collected under the title Rub Ineffable (Moca wuyimingzhang 摩擦●無以名狀, 1995), a book of collage art. The next book Salsa (1999) has uncut pages, which requires the reader’s “hands-on” participation, since the act of reading must be preceded by the act of cutting. The pages also do not align evenly, which creates a sense of visual and tactile discord. Poems, Sixty of Them (Shi 9

“The Ripest Rankest Summer” (最熟最爛的夏天), Salsa (S. Bradbury Trans.). See also, “The Ripest Rankest Juiciest Summer Ever,” in Xia Yu’s Fusion Kitsch, p. 13. Xia, Y. (2014). Salsa (S. Bradbury, Trans.). Zephyr Press. (Original work published 1999).

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liushishou詩六十首, 2011) boasts a book cover coated with opaque silver latex ink. Much like a California Lotto Scratcher, readers could freely scratch off the coating in any way they like. In fact, with the publication of the book, the poet invited readers to send in photographs of their “artworks.” To date, the most dazzling displays of Xia Yu’s formal inventiveness are Pink Noise (Fenhongse zaoyin 粉紅色噪音, 2007) and The Axis of Spine. In Pink Noise, the English/French originals are printed in black, and the Chinese translations in hot pink, on transparency sheets. In addition to the unusual look and weight of the book, the superimposition of black and pink words on the transparencies creates a reading experience that is “constantly interrupted, prolonged, delayed, and distracted” (Yeh, 2008, p. 177). One reviewer calls the book “a staticky mesh” (Hanson, 2012). Another study emphasizes the materiality of the book (Lee, 2015). In my view, the design itself creates “visual noises” (Yeh, 2008, p. 177) corresponding to the title of the book. Visually stunning, the book went on sale at the premier chain bookstore Eslite in the Design section rather than the Poetry section! In contrast to the bright pink and black colors of Pink Noise, The Axis of Spine is a book in pure white (the only exception being the postscript). All the poems are embossed, with each character in raised relief. As the companion volume to Romance as Sudden Enlightenment (Luomanshi zuowei dunwu 羅曼史作為頓悟, 2019), The Axis of Spine surpasses all the earlier books of poetry in its performative nature. One can almost refer to it as action art in this sense: reading is equivalent to enactment; the reader has to hold the book at a certain angle to let the light hit the page and show the words. Figuratively speaking, the thirty-three poems in the collection correspond to the thirty-three stacked vertebrae (small bones) that form the spinal canal. But, visually, the inkless lines on the page evoke tracks of footprints on snow-covered ground. (The dramatic contrast between snow and fire is noteworthy.) In her postscript, the poet quotes the advertisement for the book and envisions the eventual disappearance of the poems as the words lose their sharp relief over the course of years. Not all the formal experiments are equally successful, but the poet’s effort to make book designs truly an integral part of the reading process is not only admirable but also unprecedented in the history of modern Chinese poetry. At their best, Xia Yu’s formal experiments are inseparable from her explorations of the signifying capacity of language and the essence of poetry. “I wrap you up with dream/then wrap dream up with poetry” (Xia, 1999, p. 17). A recent poem compares language to a donkey turning a millstone, but then she feels “extremely ashamed” about the metaphor in that “language is no match for suffering” and she cannot do justice to language (Xia, 2020).10 While she expresses such doubt, she is also optimistic: “As if in an ordinary teahouse or bar I see some strangers sitting at the next table looking at pictures that have recently been developed, then I realize the irreplaceability of those simple, common, and powerful acts in life, and I am moved and walk out feeling deeply lonely yet believing firmly that all can be turned into poetry…” (Xia, 1999, p. 144).

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No. 29 in The Axis of Spine.

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ILLustration. 3 The Axis of Spine

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The poet’s pleasure in manipulating words—not only in their semantics but also in their visuality, musicality, and interrelatedness—is palpable. She is not interested only in mastering rhetorical devices, but through her language (e.g., neologisms, drawn images mixed in with words, pseudo-characters, exaggerated repetitions) and form (including book design), she creates barriers to the conventional mode of reading so readers can see poetry in a new light. If chance seems to be a component in her creative process, such as the collages in Rub Ineffable and machine translations in Pink Noise, her work as a whole is underscored by a strong desire for control. In the final analysis, all the linguistic and formal experiments suggest a will to expand the imagination and push the boundary not only of signification but also of poetry. And the lengthy interviews and postscripts in her books of poetry seem to aim to control how her works will be read. In the above-mentioned interview in Ventriloquy, when asked about “how to define the role of the poet,” Xia Yu says, Should the poet have a defined role? If so defined, can she read the biography of Tchaikovsky and eat macadamia nuts, then play a cassette tape of [the popular singer in the 1940s] Bai Guang, then walk the dog, then buy a newspaper and go home to read the sports section and about how to survive in the wild? (Xia, 1991, p. 115)

As seen in the above examples, Xia Yu’s answers to the interviewer’s questions are contiguous to her poetry in language and tone. It is in this sense that the interview is very much part of the book of poetry. This sets the precedent for later collections, some of which contain lengthy interviews or postscripts. They contextualize the poems and illuminate the poet’s intentions and designs. They also frame the poems and guide readers in their reading. Paradoxically, even as the poet pushes the boundary of signification in her poetry, the appended prose pieces also draw a line around interpretation and, in doing so, reveal her compulsion to control the act. Moreover, the interviews and postscripts serve another function: self-fashioning. In the 1988 interview, the very first question asks the poet to talk about her “writing process,” among other things related to her practice as a poet. Here is Xia Yu’s response: As of this moment, I have five tables in my house: a study desk, a dining table, a long table that I got at an auction when a coffee shop closed, a low table on tatami, and a small table with a gingham linen tablecloth. When I sense that I want to write something, I will pick a cleaner table and sit down; after sitting there for a while, I make a mess on the table. Then I switch to a second table, get organized before I mess it up again, not intentionally, honest. Then I get up again and move to another table. All afternoon I am busy moving about. In the end most of my poems are written at the most informal and most surprising places… (Xia, 1991, p. 106)

The response is typical Xia Yu. They offer many—too many—details of personal life—sometimes trivial, sometimes intimate. The tone tends to be chatty and familiar, and the train of thought teems with hyperboles and unexpected twists and turns. The self-fashioning as seen in the prose shows a close overlap between the poet and the woman Xia Yu. Unlike many poets whose life and craft are far apart, whether intentionally or not, in her case, the poet in real life seems to be identical to the poet

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as seen in her work. She is imaginative, obsessive, ambitious, and fiercely unconventional and individualistic. This persona extends into the publishing of her books too. While self-publishing is not uncommon in modern poetry in Taiwan, she takes an explicitly anti-commercial, anti-institutional position. Beginning with Memoranda, all her books of poetry (with the exception of Ventriloquy) are self-published. She dismays at the sight of “Sweet Revenge” printed on “pen holders, magazine racks, and seat cushions, in an exaggerated artistic style, creating an atmosphere of cheap and pretentious leisurely culture” (Xia, 1991, p. 114). This aversion to commercialization also extends to institutionalization, as seen in the speech balloons in her cartoon drawings of a goat that repeat: “Please do not turn my poems into exam questions, please do not…” (Xia, 2013, p. 103). The poet’s will to pleasure/power may explain one reviewer’s criticism: “Such stanzas display all the earmarks of the overwrought, navel-gazing artistic tone that many have come to identify with contemporary art … The few poems in this collection [Salsa the book of translation] that stall in affectation and take confusion as an end instead of a means die at the hands of pretension. Fortunately, they are a small minority” (Morse, 2015). Perhaps not all Xia Yu’s efforts are successful, but they certainly make her one of the most creative and exciting poets in our time.

References Bradbury, S. (2007). A creative “Mis-Translation” of Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise. Drunken Boat, 9, http:// d7.drunkenboat.com/db9/mistran_text/bradbury/Pink%20Noise.html Douban 豆瓣. (2020). Anonymous review. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://book.douban. com/subject/34972874/ Hanson, R. (2012, April 5). Art on the beautiful island. Rhizome. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/ apr/5/art-beautiful-island Morse, C. (2015, January 23). Changing the way we read: A review of Hsia Yu’s Salsa (S. Bradbury, Trans.). Paper Republic. Retrieved from https://paper-republic.org/pers/canaan-morse/changingthe-way-we-read-a-review-of-hsia-yus-salsa-translated-by-steven-bradbury. Parry, A. E. (2007). Interventions into modernist cultures: Poetry from beyond the empty screen. Duke University Press. Lee, Tong King (2015). Experimental Chinese literature: Translation, technology, poetics. Brill. Xia, Y. 夏宇. (1984). 備忘錄 [Memoranda]. Xia, Y. (1991). 腹語術 [Ventriloquy]. 現代詩季刊社 [Modern Poetry Quarterly]. Xia, Y. (1995). 摩擦●無以名狀 [Rub Ineffable]. 現代詩季刊社 [Modern Poetry Quarterly]. Xia, Y. (1999). Salsa. Xia, Y. (2001a). Fusion Kitsch (S. Bradbury, Trans.). Zephyr Press. Xia, Y. (2001b). Xia Yu (A. Lingenfelter & S. Bradbury, Trans.). In M. Yeh & N. G. D. Malmqvist (Eds.), Frontier Taiwan: An anthology of modern Chinese poetry (pp. 399–419). Columbia University Press. Xia, Y. (2007). 粉紅色噪音 [Pink noise]. Garden City Publishers. Xia, Y., & Li, G. 李格弟. (2010). This zebra/that zebra 這隻斑馬/那隻斑馬 [This zebra/that zebra]. Xia, Y. (2011). 詩六十首 [Poems, sixty of them]. Xia, Y. (2013). 88首自選 [88 self-selected poems]. Xia, Y. (2019). 羅曼史作為頓悟 [Romance as sudden enlightenment]. Xia, Y. (2020). 脊椎之軸 [The axis of spine].

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Yeh, M. (1993). The feminist poetics of . Modern Chinese Literature, 7(1), 33–60. Yeh, M., & Malmqvist, N. G. D. (Eds.). (2001). Frontier Taiwan: An anthology of modern Chinese poetry. Columbia University Press. Yeh, M. (2008). Toward a poetics of noise: From Hu Shi to Hsia Yü. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles Reviews (CLEAR), 30, 167–178. Yeh, M. (2018). Xia Yu and the modernist tradition. In C. Lupke & P. Manfredi (Eds.), Chinese poetic modernisms (pp. 107–131). Brill.

Michelle Yeh is Distinguished Professor of Chinese and Affiliated Faculty of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are traditional and modern Chinese poetry, comparative poetics, international modernism, and translation studies. Professor Yeh has published many monographs, edited volumes, and translations, including Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice since 1917, Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (edited and translated), No Trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu (co-translated), Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (co-edited and co-translated), Hawk of the Mind: Collected Poems of Yang Mu (edited), Poetics of Aromatics, and A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (co-edited).

Everything Everywhere All at Once: The New Taiwan in Egoyan Zheng’s Science Fiction Wen-Chi Li

Abstract In 2003 and 2004, some emerging Taiwanese novelists established the society of “Novelist-Readers” (小說家讀者, later renamed “Eight Wolves” 八P狼) in an attempt to break down the wall between high and low culture, the intellectuals and the masses, “belles-lettres” and popular fiction. They staged a series of creative literary events such as flash mobs, literary workshops, and a “live” writing experience in a bookstore’s display window. Although conservative critics took a dim view of some of these “deviant” activities, the literary achievements of the Eight Wolves eventually justified themselves and arguably brought fresh inspiration and style to the increasingly conventional literary culture and the shrinking reading public. Their writings put a great deal of emphasis on local Taiwanese cultures, which has been criticized as “post-regional literature” (後鄉土) for their representations of Taiwan in the era of globalization. Among these young writers, Egoyan Zheng (伊格言) stands out for his use of sci-fi to express serious contemporary concerns under the guise of futuristic concepts such as artificial intelligence, dream “inception,” and transhumanism in his depiction of a distant future in Dream Devourer (噬夢人, 2010) and by imagining a horrific nuclear disaster in the near future in Ground Zero (零地點, 2013). At first glance, both novels appear difficult to situate in the history of Taiwan literature. However, in this chapter, I argue that Egoyan’s works are deep and provocative reflections on Taiwan’s recent political history and ongoing search for a distinctive Taiwanese identity. The exploration of infinite time and full-scale space in Egoyan’s sci-fi worlds should be read as metaphors not merely for globalization but also for the particularities of Taiwan—its specific aspirations, fears, perplexities, and sorrows in the abiding shadow of Japanese colonialization and the KMT’s “Free China” dictatorship. Keywords Egoyan Egoyan · Science Fiction · Ground Zero · Dream Devourer

W.-C. Li (B) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_7

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In 2003 and 2004, eight young Taiwanese novelists—fearing the fiction market was shrinking and people were reading less and less literature—established the society of “Novelist-Readers” (小說家讀者, later renamed “Eight Wolves” 八P狼) to promote new strategies of literary writing and revitalize Taiwan’s reading culture. To break down the wall between high and low culture, between intellectuals and the masses, and between “belles-lettres” and genre fiction, they cultivated a humorous, light style and freely adopted popular forms such as detective and espionage stories, romance, fantasy, and the emerging young adult (YA) genre. They also criticized what they saw as the laziness of authors who did not seek new ways to reach the reading public beyond the limited space of newspaper supplements and literary magazines, and pioneered events such as literary flash mobs and pop-up workshops that had not been seen in Taiwan until then. In one stunt, they even sat in a bookstore’s display window and wrote in the full view of passersby. Although the Eight Wolves’ methods were regarded by conservatives in the cultural establishment as kitschy or philistine, the young rebels were convinced the only way to resuscitate Taiwan’s drooping literary culture was to attract more readers by making literature enjoyable even for non-elite readers. Not coincidentally, it was also around this time that scholar Ming-ju Fan began to revisit the old term xiangtu (literally “native soil”) and argue that the literature of the new millennium should be considered hou xiangtu (“post-native soil”). The xiangtu writers of the 1970s, Fan noted, had critiqued social injustices, problems of industrialization and urbanization, and American neo-imperialism in Taiwan directly and rather solemnly on the whole. By contrast, she argued, the writers of the new millennium, including the Eight Wolves, were experimenting with jolly, idiosyncratic, and less directly critical methods as well as turning their attention to the everyday problems of the masses, depicting elements of folk religion, and using the vernaculars of the villages where they had grown up. Fan’s use of the “post-” prefix does not merely acknowledge the more expansive, populist perspective of the new generation of Taiwanese writers but also suggests a continuity between their innovations and those of the postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, and deconstructionist “big bang” that arrived in Taiwan after the repeal of martial law in 1987. The new “native-soil” (sometimes translated as “regional”) movement in Taiwanese writing, Fan recognized, went beyond simple nostalgia or populism, nor was it merely a new way of approaching Taiwanese realities or asserting a Taiwanese identity. Fan (2007) saw that hou xiangtu literature was also a uniquely Taiwanese reflection of, and engagement with, the new cultural, political, and social realities of multiculturalism, environmentalism, and globalization. In the work of those Fan classified as hou xiangtu writers, ecological consciousness, multiethnic perspectives, attention to divergent forms of life and belief, and a dynamic exchange of local or regional and foreign cultures, vernaculars, and political and social issues explore a wide range of minor or personal narratives that, if they have little else in common, all challenge the primacy of the Republic of China’s (ROC) grand discourses. Compared to the high seriousness of the earlier xiangtu writers, their work may look unserious and superficial, but, I would argue, with Fan, it reflects the emerging realities of Taiwan in the 21st century and expresses the structure of feeling, the sense of cultural identity,

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the concern with gender and ethnic equality, and the commitment to environmental protection Taiwan urgently needs. Egoyan Zheng (伊格言; b. 1977), the hou xiangtu writer I am concerned with in this chapter, was a member of the Novelist-Readers/Eight Wolves society throughout its short life (it folded in 2006), and his work, like theirs, consistently trespasses the conventional borders between “serious” literature and popular fiction. The murders, double-crosses, criminals, and double agents that are staples of detective and spy fiction abound in his novels and stories, and he has frequent recourse to common sci-fi motifs such as artificial intelligence, totalitarian power, nuclear conflagration, and various devices of real and imaginary high technology. Born Zheng Qianci, Egoyan adopted the pen name from the Canadian avant-garde film director Atom Egoyan, whose appreciation for “the irrational part of a person” Egoyan admired (2021). Since 2003, he has published two novels—Dream Devourer (Shimeng ren 噬夢人, 2010) and Ground Zero (Lingdidian 零地點, 2013)—three short story collections—Man in an Urn (Wengzhongren 甕中人, 2003), Visiting Auntie Candy (Baifang tangfuo ayi 拜訪糖果阿姨, 2013), and Zero Degree of Separation (Lingdu fenli 零度分離, 2021)—and two collections of poetry—You Are the Light that Penetrates My Pupils (Ni shi chuanru wo tongkong de guang 你是穿入 我瞳孔的光, 2011) and As Lightweight as Loneliness (Yu guji dengqing 與孤寂等 輕, 2019), and is widely acknowledged both at home and abroad as one of Taiwan’s, and Asia’s, leading writers. Like other Novelist-Readers members, Egoyan follows the credo of full entertainment in his distinctive blending of themes and elements from different genres. His science-fiction stories, however, baffle scholars who have attempted to use the “post-regional literature” framework to discuss Egoyan’s depiction of contemporary Taiwanese social reality. How can plots set in a far-fetched future in New York, New Delhi, Tokyo, and Vladivostok reflect Taiwan’s current situation? What, indeed, makes Egoyan’s fiction “Taiwanese”? How should it be situated within the evolving Taiwanese literary scene or in the history of Taiwan whose trajectory passes through the Japanese Empire to the White Terror and years of Kuomintang (KMT) dictatorship, then to the repeal of martial law and the beginnings of democratization in 1987, and finally to the party alternation of 2000 and the present era of multiparty liberal democracy it ushered in? On the surface, Egoyan’s high-tech futuristic worlds can seem both too cosmopolitan, lacking distinctively Taiwanese elements, and too far removed from the realities of present-day Taiwan to bundle his work with that of his contemporaries. Certainly, Egoyan’s science fiction can be investigated from many perspectives—nationalism, feminism, gender studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, and postmodern ethics, to name only a few of the issues his work contends with. Can such worldwide themes truly connect with the more specific, and urgent, issues prompted by the present moment of Taiwan’s full democratization and emerging nationhood? To challenge this binary of (cosmopolitan) science fiction versus (local) realism, as well as bring Egoyan’s futuristic stories back to the framework of post-regional literature where I contend they belong, I will use two thought experiments—Schrödinger’s cat and Laplace’s demon—as inspirations to bring Egoyan’s major works, Ground Zero and Dream Devourer respectively, into clearer focus as prime examples of hou

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xiangtu. Ground Zero appears to abandon Taiwanese history for an imaginary and non-existent world, but in reality it embroiders the political corruption and ecological worries of our world into its visionary fabric. Dream Devourer uses an imagined conflict between androids and humans in a futuristic world as a metaphor for the abiding racial and ethnic conflicts of contemporary Taiwan. My title “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is not simply a tribute to the 2022 identically titled film that has promoted Asian visibility in the wider world but also intends to suggest the exploration of infinite time and borderless space in Egoyan’s sci-fi world should be read as a metaphor not merely for globalization in general but also for one small, concentrated point of intersection between globalization and localism—the island of Taiwan with its aspirations, fears, perplexities, and sorrows in the abiding shadows of Japanese and KMT colonialism and the looming threat of Chinese imperialism.

1 Ground Zero and Schrödinger’s Cat Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment in quantum mechanics that is meant to illustrate how quantum particles can exist in two different states at the same time (known as quantum superposition) and only collapse down to a single state upon interaction with other particles. In the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s imagination, he posits a cat penned up in a steel chamber with a radioactive atom that has an equal probability of decaying and emitting radiation, or not. If it decays, a hammer will be released and shatter a container of hydrocyanic acid, killing the unfortunate cat. One or the other event must happen, but, until an observer opens the chamber, Schrödinger maintains, the cat must be considered both dead and alive at the same time. The experiment was later developed by Hugh Everett as the basis of his manyworlds (or parallel universes) interpretation of quantum mechanics. For Everett, even after an observer opens the chamber, the live and dead states will continue to exist but cannot interreact with each other (Byrne, 2008). At that moment (and thus at every moment in time), a parallel universe is created. The concept of Schrödinger’s cat can help to clarify how Egoyan in Ground Zero imagines an event that may not happen. The novel is set in 2017, only five years after it was written, and envisions a nuclear catastrophe at Lungmen (“Nuke 4”) nuclear power plant, known as the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, in northern Taiwan. The fictional catastrophe is founded on a real and highly controversial issue concerning the station that goes back to 1962 when Chiang Kai-shek learned that the Chinese Communist Party was developing a nuclear weapon in northwest China and decided that Taiwan, the supposed “Free China in Exile,” had to pursue its own competing nuclear program. Chiang established the military-controlled Chung Shan Science Institute to match the mainland’s development of nuclear energy and rocket propulsion. When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) successfully detonated its first atomic bomb in 1964, the ROC responded with its nuclear weapon program, the Hsin Chu project, which was disguised as a Ministry of Economic Affairs project with no relationship to nuclear weapons research. The US suspected otherwise, and

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in 1969 the program was aborted due to international pressure, and Taiwan’s nuclear ambitions were redirected, officially, to the building of three nuclear plants for civilian use. Nevertheless, the ROC secretly launched another weapons program codenamed “Tao Yuan,” which was not abandoned until 1988, when Chang Hsien-yi, the deputy director of Taiwan’s Institute of Nuclear Energy Research, revealed the secret and defected to the United States, and then-President Ronald Reagan pressured the KMT into terminating its nuclear weapons research once and for all. Building the Lungmen power plant turned out to be scarcely less controversial. The project quickly led to a highly strained relationship between the government, the plant’s operator (Taipower), the Atomic Energy Council (AEC), and antinuclear protestors. The project was approved in 1980, and the plant was intended to be connected to the grid by 1994. Taipower had little experience in building nuclear power plants, however, and undertook the construction using blueprints from the General Electric Company (GE). The equally inexperienced AEC set up a regulatory committee to monitor Lungmen’s quality and progress when the plant had still not come on grid by 1997, and in 2002, when the real work on the plant finally started, the AEC began publishing short monthly monitoring reports (Hsu, 2017). Numerous flaws were identified during the early stages of construction, including reinforced tendons for a containment anchor being accidentally cut and careless contractors repeatedly setting working platforms directly on top of installed pipes and tubing, causing rust, dents, and even punctures (Hsu, 2017). It was also discovered that Taipower was inflating the cost and making alterations to the design, including support for an emergency cooling system, without consulting the AEC or GE (Hsu, 2017). Meanwhile, the main Taiwanese opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), had since its formation in 1986 opposed any new nuclear reactors, and when the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian won the presidential election in 2000, he decided to terminate the Lungmen project despite concerns about the astronomical penalty breaking the contract with Taipower would entail. Parliament, still dominated by the KMT, forced Chen to resume the project in 2001. In 2008, the KMT regained the presidency under Ma Ying-jeou and began to push hard for the completion of the Lungmen project. Three years later, however, the Fukushima disaster highlighted the dangers posed by a nuclear power plant in a seismically active zone such as Taiwan. The AEC’s declaration that “all nuclear power plants in Taiwan are as sturdy as Buddha sitting on his platform” (as cited in Hsu, 2017, p. 167) did not reassure many people. Zheng’s (2013) novel does not foresee the DPP’s dual presidential and parliamentary victories in the 2016 elections. For him at that moment, Taiwan, like Schrödinger’s cat, contains equal possibilities of fully experiencing/almost experiencing/postponing/safely avoiding a radioactive disaster. In the worst scenario, Egoyan imagines the disaster occurring in 2015. A station’s engineer, Lin Qunhao, escapes from the catastrophe but loses all memory of the incident. With the help of Dr. Li Liqing, he undertakes a new treatment for amnesia named Dream Image Reconstruction, but in the process of making a copy of a crucial image from Lin’s dreams, Li is ordered by an invisible superior to stop the investigation. When she persists in trying to uncover the truth of what happened at the power plant, she is abducted,

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and Lin is warned (presumably commanded by the same anonymous high-level official) to stop trying to recover his memory. Lin nevertheless gradually remembers that, after the explosion, he found himself in the exclusion zone with Chief Engineer Chen Hongqiu’s cellphone and that Hechen Duanfang, Chief of the AEC, wants the phone in order to conceal the fact Chen used it to warn the authorities a reservoir near the plant had been contaminated. Hechen has his eyes on the upcoming presidential election, which he hopes to win. He wants to disclose the news by himself to draw more public attention, but the price of delaying the news about the contamination will be the deaths of many more people. He has Lin and Li killed and their deaths disguised as a “love suicide.” In our real world that has chosen another possibility, the disaster did not happen, nor did a Hechen-like figure lead the KMT to regain the people’s trust and win the election. Instead, the critical historical moment that changed the fate of Taiwan was the 2014 Sunflower Movement when young Taiwanese occupied the parliament building on March 23 to protest the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement they felt had been passed by the KMT legislators in a non-transparent manner. In their view, the agreement, by opening the gates to mainland Chinese investment, damaged the Taiwanese economy and threatened the island’s autonomy and distinct identity. One of the central protest figures, Lin Fei-fan, declared, “We retake the parliament on behalf of the people,” and other slogans included “My own country. Save it by myself” as well as “When a dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a duty” (Li, 2020). This moment of political awakening made people not only warier of China but also more concerned about social justice and sustainability in general, including, inevitably, the hunger strike of Lin Yi-hsiung, a DPP antinuclear activist, for the termination of the Lungmen project. By this point, many young Taiwanese were furious at the KMT’s indifference to the danger of completing the construction of the plant. Under pressure from all directions, then-President Ma Ying-jeou reluctantly sealed the first reactor and halted construction of the second. Meanwhile, however, the KMT’s pro-China attitude severely damaged its popularity, and in 2016, the proindependence candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, led the DPP to victory in both the presidential and parliamentary elections, the first such double triumph in the DPP’s history. Since the DPP intends to phase out all nuclear power by 2025, construction of the Lungmen plant will surely not be restarted, and other plants will be retired. It is as if, in Schrödinger’s experiment, the radioactive substance does not decay and release the cyanide gas to kill the cat. In her opening statement at the 2021 Energy Taiwan exhibition, Tsai reemphasized the importance of green energy and the goal of netzero emissions (“President Tsai,” 2021). It seems that we now live in a better version of Egoyan’s world. Although the Lungmen nuclear catastrophe in Egoyan’s alternate world scenario has thus, for the present at least, become irrelevant to our actual world, this does not mean the alternate universe of Ground Zero is a “mere” fiction without any real-life application or fails to fit the framework of “post-regional literature.” The problems of the Lungmen power plant had been a heated issue, causing deep and real fear of atomic disaster and strengthening antinuclear sentiment in Taiwan, particularly after the Fukushima explosion. Among all the antinuclear protests provoked by the accident,

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the most vigorous, on March 9, 2013, brought some 220,000 citizens together all over Taiwan to call for the immediate suspension of the Lungmen project, a phase-out schedule for all nuclear power plants in Taiwan, and the removal of radioactive waste from Orchid Island as a matter of urgency. After this, environmental awareness, not to mention security concerns about building a nuclear power plant near a seismic fault zone, intensified, as the Sunflower Movement demanded justice and transparency in the government’s policymaking. It is also true that, from the early 1990s, as the threat of nuclear confrontation between the superpowers appeared to fade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, environmental concerns took center stage as the 21st century began. In Taiwan, the oil spill near Kenting National Park in 2001, the 2008 pollution scandal in Kaohsiung, the wastewater discharged by the ASE Group semiconductor company in 2013, also in Kaohsiung, and in Vietnam the soil contamination caused by Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group in 2010 intensified Taiwanese people’s concerns about the worsening global climate crisis they were increasingly hearing about through the internet and other media. Whereas “classic” sci-fi before this, such as Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948), Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963), and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) had used themes of nuclear disaster to allegorize Cold War anxieties, Egoyan’s Ground Zero abandons the outdated trend, bringing attention instead to the global environmental crisis and, in line with his approach to “post-regional” literature, depicting a specifically Taiwanese reaction to it. Ground Zero creates an alternate literary universe in which the environmental disaster the Taiwanese people fear has occurred and uses the scenario to engage in a sweeping critique of Taiwan’s political and social systems. The engineer Lin Qunhao, like most Taiwanese people in our actual world, worries about the safety of the nuclear operation. Before the disaster occurs, he discloses to his girlfriend Violet that the plant’s pipes and welds are poorly constructed and that the final “comprehensive” inspection of the site has just been a show (Zheng, 2013, p. 120). Indeed, even the Chief Engineer, Chen Hongqiu, knows the initial work on the plant was inadequately supervised and many of the design specifications and standards were ignored (Zheng, 2013). The work has involved too many opportunistic contractors and subcontractors, and the higher-ups are ignorant about the hundreds of errors that have occurred even in the installation of the plant’s vital fuel rods (Zheng, 2013). Lin’s and Chen’s disclosures show the rashness of the government, the irresponsibility of the contractors, and the powerlessness of the inspection team. When, as a consequence of negligence and corruption, the reactor releases radioactive contamination almost as soon as it starts up, Egoyan switches the focus from nuclear criticism to a satire of reactions to the crisis. Liu Bao-jie, host of the talk show “Crucial Time” in our actual world, is depicted as too surprised to comprehend the accident and create that night’s sensational show. He would rather appeal to his superstitious Taiwanese audience by talking about UFO sightings and alien abductions. Wu Yiqian, a young adult who may be intended to represent a “typical” Taiwanese youth, is aware of contamination but indifferent to it. She has been exposed to radiation for years. The kindergarten she attended was declared radioactive after it

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was discovered the builder, with official collusion, had used contaminated materials from the nuclear power plant to manufacture its window frames. Indeed, the entire community where she lived was found to be radioactive. The bitterness of Egoyan’s depiction of official corruption, media trivialization, and social apathy can be traced back to the period of martial law in Taiwan. The nuclear program was first proposed by Chiang Kai-shek in the context of the Cold War arms race with the PRC in the 1960s. After the focus on nuclear weapons shifted, officially, to nuclear power, the military continued to pursue a secret weapons program throughout the martial law period and only abandoned its efforts after Chang Hien-yi leaked the secret in 1988. Not coincidentally, Chang’s disclosures roughly coincided with other events such as Gorbachev’s reforms to the Soviet system, the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and similar developments that brought an end to the Cold War. Simultaneously, Taiwan dismantled its dictatorship, gave up its outdated self-image as Free China, and began to find a nonviolent way toward democracy. The nuclear program was also “democratized” and adapted to civilian use, but although democratization, over time, profoundly changed local experience and culture, the authoritarian and bureaucratic heritage of the Chiang dynasty and the KMT still haunted Taiwan. Gangsters, corruption, bribery, embezzlement, influence peddling, nepotism, and trafficking are keywords to describe the 1990s in Taiwan. Unsurprisingly, as the government pressed ahead with building the Lungmen station, people worried about transparency and security, and their worries seemed increasingly justified as the numerous problems at the plant were slowly revealed to the public by environmental groups toward the end of the 1990s. Ground Zero vividly demonstrates the tension between democracy and authoritarianism, transparency and corruption, during this period. Chen Hongqiu and Lin Qunhao are responsible engineers working in the station. By contrast, Hechen Duanfang is a typical KMT official who maintains a positive public image but takes advantage of every opportunity to advance his career regardless of public safety. After the nuclear explosion, Hechen presents himself as a hero who “formed a team of nuclear safety experts, geologists and disaster response professionals, and members of our nation’s special forces and led this suicide squad deep into the heart of the devastation to conduct a survey” (Zheng, 2013, pp. 97–98). For the talk show appearance he exploits to polish his image, he brings along his wife and daughter to convey the image of family man, and his wife, playing along, admits she cannot understand why her husband is such a workaholic and endangered his life during the crisis. Hechen responds by begging for her forgiveness for having made such a “noble sacrifice.” With his popularity soaring, he then decides to run for president. Continuing his deception, he deliberately withholds information about radioactive pollution in water from Chen Hongqiu, and after some victims die from internal exposure, even plays the role of reliable expert and sympathetic leader when announcing the sad news. To prevent this scandal from leaking, he sends his people to spy on Lin Qunhao and Li Liqing, abducts Li, and ultimately has them murdered in a faked double suicide. In the interview included at the end of the novel, Egoyan Zheng states that Ground Zero was not written for the future but for the past. Nuclear energy, he says, is a symbol

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of oppression and exploitation, pointing out that, when building Taiwan’s four nuclear power plants, the government forced residents to accept building stations in their neighborhoods without financial compensation and did not inform the workers of potential radioactive exposure (Zheng, 2013). Zheng (2013) then uses Schrödinger’s cat as a metaphor for Taiwan’s destiny: If the future of Taiwan is like Schrödinger’s cat in a box, I think, before a real catastrophe comes, all novels that predict the future can be seen in this way: a novel is itself a prediction. When a novel reacts to reality, the incident that is illustrated in a novel through reality becomes an allegory, showing a status that is neither dead nor alive. Taiwan is now neither dead nor alive, as well as both dead and alive. Before the arrival of a terrible catastrophe, Taiwan has not collapsed into one definite result. We still have chances. (p. 304)

Egoyan seems to suggest there are multiple possibilities for Taiwan in the future. Taiwan is a young nation that has only recently shaken off the outdated label of Free China and begun to forge its own democratic identity. In resolving issues such as national autonomy, social justice, environmental protection, and the threat from mainland China, Taiwan must be careful in every choice it makes, so it can have the best version of the future. A wrong decision, policy, administration, or pro-China president could easily cause Taiwan to “collapse” into an undesirable outcome.

2 Dream Devourer and Laplace’s Demon Laplace’s demon is a thought experiment in causal determinism and the knowability of the future devised by French Enlightenment thinker Pierre-Simon Laplace. It posits “one intelligence” (later referred to by others as a demon or superman) that knows the velocities, mass, and positions of all atoms in the universe. Laplace (1814/1902) asserts that if such a being were also able to analyze all this data, it would have a formula that could calculate the future movements of every person and particle in the universe: “for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes” (p. 4). If this thought experiment is approved, the future can be predictable by anyone, including a well-informed sci-fi writer. The futuristic scene can be comprehended by ordinary people and even for them address a similar problem that transcends the limitations of time and space. Egoyan’s Dream Devourer can be read as a narrative told from the perspective of Laplace’s demon. In this case, the “demon” foresees a future conflict between humans and androids, and conveys significant meanings to understand the problems of present-day Taiwan. Unlike Ground Zero, the action is set in a distant future, in 2219, when androids have attained the capability of self-evolution and are as capable of independent thought as humans. To free themselves from human domination, they establish the underground Android Liberation Organization (ALO) to fight the Seventh Seal—a government agency tasked with arresting disloyal androids and maintaining human hegemony. The protagonist, K, Chief of the Institute of Standards and Technology, works in this humans-only institute and develops a test to detect androids from humans. He is secretly an android himself but indifferent to

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the androids’ plight. Indeed, he refuses to accept his identity until he realizes a former human agent, Gödel, has fallen in love with an android and then betrays the government to join the ALO. Afterward, K also becomes a double agent and begins to disclose secrets to the ALO. He is later informed by M—a secret broker for the ALO—that the government intends to use the test to find and eliminate any android agents. K then decides to escape with his human girlfriend Eurydice and seek M’s help, only to find he has been murdered by the Seventh Seal. In his final testament composed before he was killed, M discloses to K that he is different from other androids because he is the product of an experiment by ALO member Cassandra, who used dream implantation technology to replace the “dream of originality” humans should have implanted in him to ensure his obedience. This caused him to be free and forget his android identity. Later he finds Cassandra, and Cassandra tells him that when he was created, he had been implanted with a dream associated with someone else’s human identity. Cassandra also reveals that, later on, K had been implanted by her with several other identities—colonizer, atomic explosion victim, freak, fornicator, and dictator—and that whenever a dream inception that caused a unique identity was successful, this dream/identity must be eliminated by the experience of death. Therefore, he had to “die” and be “reborn” in order to be reset with a new identity. In Cassandra’s experiment, K had experienced this process 13 times. However, in the last inception, he had received a dream that provided insufficient data to construct a stable identity. Theoretically, therefore, he has had no fixed identity in his current “lifetime.” A world of cyborgs and androids may be one of the possibilities predicted by Laplace’s Demon. These human–android conflicts depicted constantly by many “classic” sci-fi writers such as Mary Shelley, Philip Dick, and William Gibson can be understood as allegories for the creation of “forms of Otherness within society, or between societies, which have traditionally been built upon gendered divides or upon distinctions based on racial differences” (Cornea, 2005, p. 275). Egoyan follows this broad sci-fi trope in Dream Devourer. The androids represent people’s fears and anxieties about society’s Others, but Egoyan’s illustration of the conflict goes further. His description of the conflict undoubtedly challenges the fundamental categories of human and machine, nature and artifice, self and other, and ultimately critiques Western philosophy’s historical reliance on Cartesian-inspired dualisms of mind and body and the binary dichotomy of male and female (Cornea, 2005). While doing so, Egoyan as a Taiwanese post-regional writer also explores the longstanding problem of national identity. He approvingly cites Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, which argues that infants require constant interaction with their surroundings in order to learn that all their provoked, fragmentary feelings belong to an individuated self (1949/2001). This natural formation of self-identity, however, does not apply to androids whose consciousness is shaped by their inception in factories. They have no childhood to process interactions for identity formation. Instead, they are “incepted” using dreams that provide only their service instructions and whatever they need to know for the monotonous or menial jobs their human creators give them. Cassandra’s experiment, however, proves it is possible to form a full, human-like identity through dream inception alone, even though this has required implanting K with multiple

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horrific dreams, one after another. After she deletes all those dreams, the last one is almost plain and empty, providing K with an opportunity to develop his own identity through interactions with the world. I read K’s travails as, in part, an allegory on postcolonial political Taiwanese identity. The people of Taiwan should, ideally, have developed a sense of cultural identity through interaction with the local society and landscape. The KMT, however, to sustain its grand narrative of the Republic of China in exile, used the media, the education, the system, and a variety of laws, including martial law, to impose a Chineseness connected to the mainland. The KMT party-state also tried to erase the social and cultural influence of 50 years of Japanese colonial rule and implant a myth of the coherence of Chinese history before 1945 and of Taiwanese history after 1945. This revisionist historical discourse relied on a unitary concept of China that ignored the mainland’s heterogeneous history of multiple dynasties and disputed territories stretching back thousands of years. Thus, during the long KMT dictatorship, the Taiwanese people, like Egoyan’s androids with their programmed dreams, were “incepted” with an artificial identity that dismissed local and Indigenous Taiwanese cultures as inferior and barbarous. The Android Liberation Organization in Dream Devourer can hence be interpreted as a metaphor for the Dangwai (literally nonParty) resistance movement, which, like Egoyan’s fictional ALO, embraced liberation and equality and rebelled against an authoritarian regime that wanted to marginalize and even exterminate it. The KMT, like the Seventh Seal in Dream Devourer, took a hard line on any dissent, but its repressive actions such as the 1977 Zhongli Incident, the 1979 Qiaotou Incident, the 1979 Formosa Incident, the massacre of the Lin Family in 1980, the death of Chen Wen-cheng in 1981, together with the movement’s agitations, such as Green Action in 1986, the manifesto to the Republic of Taiwan in 1988, the self-immolation of Cheng Nan-jung in 1989, and the Wild Lily Movement of 1990, combined to increasingly deconstruct not just the KMT’s authority but also its Sinocentric grand narrative. With the eventual triumph of democracy in the 1990s, Taiwan entered a new era, one in which the younger generations are free to form Taiwanese identities based on their own experiences. In Dream Devourer, K, as a double agent, works for both human Seventh Seal and android ALO, and his situation can be read as demonstrating the potential of “mimicry” and “ambivalence” in Bhabha’s (1994) postcolonial sense. K’s double identity reflects how the Taiwanese people, during the dictatorship, found themselves caught between the KMT’s enforced Chineseness and their innate sense of difference. In Bhabha’s (1994) terms, this produced excess and slippage. The resulting postcolonial mimicry, like the androids who wear a human costume to escape persecution, was provoked through the process of disavowal and became a sign of the “inappropriate,” a difference that coheres to the “dominant strategic function of colonial power” and poses an “imminent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledge and disciplinary power” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 86). K should have no emotions and should not be able to fall in love. The ambivalence of androids occurs when another android, significantly named Eros, shows her human-like creativity in painting (as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go). Just as the Taiwanese people had to learn to forget their supposed inferior origins in order to behave and speak like the Chinese, so the

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androids in Dream Devourer seem to evolve into humans by developing human-like affect and imagination. As with Bhabha’s (1994) postcolonial dictum, “almost the same, but not quite” (p. 86), their behaviors are absolutely from their own incepted program yet bear some resemblance to those of homo sapiens. This ambivalence exists in a liminal zone where multiple possibilities and rebellions are created and camouflaged. Cassandra intends to use K to create the “third kind of humans,” not to conquer the existing homo sapiens but to transcend the difference between androids and humans and end the longstanding conflict peacefully (Zheng, 2010). This aspiration for a new, more complex being is analogous to the many efforts that have been made to resolve the enduring conflict between Taiwanese islanders and Chinese mainlanders. In 1999, the poet Yang Mu, for example, translated Shakespeare’s The Tempest to propose a “brave new world” (Li, 2022, p. 159) in Taiwan and to stress the importance of reconciliation and forgiveness within the island’s emerging egalitarian democracy. In October 1998, one year before Yang published his translation, President Lee Teng-hui (1999) delivered a speech to promote the concept of a “new Taiwanese people”: All of us who grow and live on this soil today are Taiwanese people. … [We all] share a common responsibility for Taiwan’s future. It is a non-transferable duty for each one of us, the “new Taiwanese people,” to convert our love and affection for Taiwan into concrete actions in order to open up a grander horizon for its development. (p. 193)

Lee’s vision of a “new Taiwanese people” aimed to transcend the old divisions between Taiwanese islanders and Chinese mainlanders by celebrating the multicultural and multilingual vitality of the island and encompassing all its inhabitants regardless of origin, ethnicity, or date of arrival. As Lee realized, the meaning of “Taiwanese people” has evolved through, for example, the intermarriages that have been common since 1949 and as more descendants of Chinese mainlanders began to identify themselves with Taiwan. This is very similar to Egoyan’s description of the human agent Gödel who betrays the Seventh Seal, joins the ALO, and even falls in love with the android Eros. If transracial love can be possible, it becomes hard to define who is “Android” (or “Taiwanese”) and who is not.

3 Conclusion Egoyan’s two sci-fi novels not only reflect global fears of nuclear disaster and more distant worries about future android–human conflicts or the consequences of “transhumanism” but also allegorize some specifically Taiwanese “regional” concerns. Ground Zero imagines a parallel universe in which the feared nuclear explosion at Lungmen occurred and thus engages with both global environmental concerns and controversies that are deeply rooted in the history of nuclear development in Taiwan, from Chiang’s nuclear weapons program in the 1960s to the shift to civilian use in the 1970s to the corruption and negligence of the Lungmen project in the 1990s and

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2000s. His depiction of the vulnerability of ordinary people in the face of politicians’ hypocrisy and dishonesty can also be related to the ghosts of dictatorship and plutocracy from the period of martial law that still haunt democratic Taiwan. Dream Devourer, for its part, is a metaphor for the anti-authoritarian protests, the racial conflicts, and the long search for a hybrid postcolonial Taiwanese identity in the era of the White Terror. The aspiration in the novel to transcend the difference between humans and androids and create new complex beings underlines the importance of reconciliation, forgiveness, emancipation, and equality in present-day Taiwan, and corresponds to Yang Mu’s vision of a “brave new world” and Lee Teng-hui’s aspiration for a “new Taiwanese people.” Egoyan’s exploration of a futuristic literary cosmos does not suggest he is ignorant about the thick history of Taiwan but has inherited the local concerns of the 1970s xiangtu writers. His sci-fi writing has not only broken the borders between belles-lettres and popular fiction but also conveyed what is urgent for Taiwanese people to amend. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Darryl Sterk for sharing the English translation of Ground Zero, forthcoming in the “World Literature from Taiwan” series from Balestier Press.

References Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Boulle, P. (2001). Planet of the apes (Xan Fielding, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1963). Byrne, P. (2008). The many worlds of Hugh Everett. Scientific American. https://www.scientificam erican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/. Cornea, C. (2005). Figurations of the cyborg in contemporary science fiction novels and film. In D. Seed (Ed.), A companion to science fiction (pp. 275–288). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/9780470997055.ch19. Dick, P. K. (1968). Do androids dream of electric sheep? Doubleday. Fan, M.-J. (2007). A primary survey of post-regional literature. Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature, 11, 21–49. https://www.airitilibrary.com/Publication/alDetailedMesh?DocID=16081692-200712-x11-21-49-a&PublishTypeID=P001. February 2021: Egoyan Zheng 伊格言. (2021). Retrieved from https://writingchinese.leeds.ac.uk/ book-club/february-2021-egoyan-zheng-%e4%bc%8a%e6%a0%bc%e8%a8%80/. Frank, P. (1959). Alas, Babylon. J. B. Lippincott. Hsu, G. K. (2017). Control or manipulation? Nuclear power in Taiwan. In P. van Ness & M. Gurtov (Eds.), Learning from fukushima: Nuclear power in East Asia (pp. 155–186). Australian National University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ws7wjm.14. Huxley, A. (1948). Ape and essence. Harper & Row. Ishiguro, K. (2005). Never let me go. Faber and Faber. Lacan, J. (2001). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the/as revealed in psychoanalysis experience. In Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1949). Laplace, P. S. (1902). A philosophical essay on probabilities (F. W Truscott & F. L. Emory, Trans.). Chapman & Hall. (Original work published 1814). Lee, T.-H. (1999). The road to democracy: Taiwan’s pursuit of identity. PHP Institute.

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Li, W.-C. (2020). Can the young adults speak? Poetry from the sunflower and umbrella movements. Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, 30, 1–14. http://jou rnals.ed.ac.uk/forum/article/view/4478/6057. Li, W.-C. (2022). Poetics of rebellion: Hybridity, minor narrative, Yang Mu. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Zurich. President Tsai attends 2021 energy Taiwan opening ceremony. (2021, December 18). Retrieved from https://english.president.gov.tw/News/6202. Zheng, E. 伊格言. (2010). 噬夢人 [Dream Devourer]. Unitas Publishing. Zheng, E. (2013). 零地點 [Ground Zero]. Rye Field.

Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD in Sinology from the University of Zurich. His research fields also include Taiwanese literature, Sinophone studies, postcolonialism, gender studies, translation theories, and world literature. As an editor, he has co-edited the Chinese book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBTQ (Dark Eyes, 2019) and the volume of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2023). As a vigorous translator, he introduces works from Taiwan in anthologies published by Columbia University Press, Washington University Press, Cambria, and Seagull Books. His translation won him the first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. He is also the co-founder of the “World Literature from Taiwan” series in Balestier Press.

Reflections Upon Gender and Sexuality

Chen Xue, Missing Fathers, and Queer Alternatives Carlos Rojas

Many readers’ impression of Chen Xue is that of a tongzhi author skilled at self-analysis, and in recent years the shadow of her relationship with her partner, Breakfaster, has frequently been visible in initiatives supporting marriage equality. Now, a hundred days after the legalization of same-sex marriage, she has returned to her creative work, and has resumed using fiction to explore people’s relationship to their home and to their homeland. Hsu (2019)

Abstract This chapter examines several works Chen Xue (陳雪), one of Taiwan’s most prominent lesbian authors, published (or republished) in the months immediately before and after Taiwan’s 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage. In particular, the chapter considers the relationship between Chen Xue’s focus on homoerotic themes in works spanning her entire literary career, on one hand, and the putatively straight premise of her 2019 novel, Fatherless City (無父之城)—and suggests the hinge between the two sets of literary concerns is a twin thematization of absent fathers and of literary production. In particular, in each of the works under consideration, lost or absent fathers function as a catalyst for innovative literary production and/or queer reconfigurations of phallo-patriarchal social structures. Keywords Chen Xue · Lesbian author · Fatherless City · Tongzhi · Homoeroticism · Queer Between 2017 and 2019, Taiwan’s marriage law was caught in a prolonged interregnum. On May 24, 2017, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court ruled the nation’s marriage law was unconstitutional and needed to be revised to permit same-sex unions. The Legislative Yuan was given two years to bring the law into compliance, but due to conservative opposition it was not until May 2019 that the requisite bill was finally passed by the Legislative Yuan and signed into law by President Tsai Ing-wen. The C. Rojas (B) Duke University, Durham, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_8

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new law ultimately took effect on May 24, 2019, the final day of the Constitutional Court’s moratorium. In the months leading up to Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage, one of Taiwan’s most prominent lesbian authors, Chen Xue (陳雪; b. 1970), published two books that both looked back at the recent history of queer concerns in Taiwan. First, in July 2018 she published a new edition of her first book, a 1995 collection of short stories titled Book of Evil Women (Enü shu 惡女書). Although the original volume went out of print relatively quickly, it was nevertheless an important rallying point for Taiwan’s emergent queer community at the time. Next, in September 2018, Chen Xue published a collection of essays titled When I Became We: Thirty-six Possibilities of Love and Relationships (Dang wo chengwei women: Ai yu guanxi de sanshiliu keneng 當我成為我們: 愛與關係的三十六種可能), reflecting on her relationship with a domestic partner she affectionately calls Zaocan ren (早餐人), or “Breakfaster.” The women had (unofficially) married in 2009, and Chen’s (2018b) volume looks back at their long-term union while also implicitly looking ahead to the imminent marriage law revision that would finally permit relationships like theirs to be legally recognized in Taiwan. In September 2019, less than four months after Taiwan’s legalization of samesex marriage, Chen Xue published Fatherless City (Wufu zhi cheng 無父之城), her first new novel since 2015. Despite the significance of 2019 as a watershed moment for Taiwan’s queer community, however, Fatherless City makes no explicit reference to same-sex desire. Instead, the work is structured as a mystery novel, with several intertwined plotlines anchored by a romance between a female author and a male detective. A common thread that runs through these various plotlines, however, involves fractured families, and the work’s deployment of the detective genre underscores the intricate connections between past traumas and contemporary reality—a set of concerns that, in Chen Xue’s earlier works, had been linked to an exploration of queer alternatives to heteronormative assumptions. In the following discussion, I use the theme of fractured families—and specifically missing fathers—to reexamine the relationship between heteronormative paradigms and their queer alternatives in Chen Xue’s work. I also consider how these works locate literary production within a chain of loss and displacement, and suggest that not only do these writings reflect on queer alternatives to patriarchal family structures, they also offer the writing process itself as a metaphor for these same alternatives.

1 “Lost Wings” The front cover of the 2018 edition of Chen Xue’s Book of Evil Women includes the work’s title and the author’s name, as well as a tagline that reads, “This book commemorates the chaos, uncertainty, tragedy, and struggle from that period when tongzhi [homoerotic] topics were still taboo and could not be spoken out loud.” This gesture of commemoration is reflected in the way the 2018 reedition contains the full text of the original edition, including a critical preface by the author and critic

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Yang Zhao 楊照, as well as two newer prefaces Chen Xue wrote for the 2005 and the 2018 reeditions. Chen Xue opens her 2018 preface with a discussion of Glenn Gould’s celebrated performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which Gould first recorded in 1955 when he was 22 and then recorded again 26 years later in 1981, just one year before his untimely death in 1982. Chen Xue notes that when she was younger, she was very fond of Gould’s legendary 1955 performance, but as she grew older she increasingly came to appreciate Gould’s 1981 radical reinterpretation of the work. Chen Xue then observes that, like Gould’s first performance of Goldberg Variations, her own story “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel” (Xunzhao yishi tianshi de chibang 尋找 天使遺失的翅膀)—which she wrote in her early 20 s and later included as the first story in Book of Evil Women—similarly became one of her most celebrated works (in fact, she notes that even in 2018 it was still her most reprinted and most discussed work). She recalls how she wrote the story in college while listening to Gould on a stereo her father had given her and adds that she truly loved the book in which the story was eventually published, but worried that later readers might reductively equate her with that early work—and explains that it was precisely this contradictory set of reactions of fondness and unease that later drove her to keep writing one book after another. She concludes the preface by returning to the contemporary moment, observing that, Although I cannot reinterpret my earlier work at middle age, as Gould did, it is nevertheless very important to me that this book could be republished at this particular historical juncture—just as tongzhi marriage is about to be legalized and I myself am facing many personal challenges. Not only does this work commemorate that difficult era (which was difficult not only for tongzhi, but also for myself), it also records my own painstaking first steps as an author. (Chen, 2018a, p. 6)

Noting that more than two decades have passed since she first published Book of Evil Women, Chen Xue concludes by referring to her maiden work as though it were her daughter: “I can now finally view her calmly. If she were a daughter, she would now be in her twenties, and I would no longer need to keep avoiding her” (Chen, 2018a, pp. 6–7). The references to Glenn Gould that bookend the preface, accordingly, are linked to a parallel pair of allusions to parents and daughters. Just as Chen Xue opens the preface by recalling how she composed the first story in the collection while in her early 20 s and listening to Gould on the stereo her father had given her, she concludes by comparing herself to a middle-aged Gould and her first book to a 20-something daughter. The implication that Chen Xue’s current relationship to her debut work now resembles the relationship her father had with her when she first composed the work itself is particularly significant given that the story itself pivots around a father–daughter relationship. The preface’s allusions to Gould, meanwhile, bring the parallel full circle, in that when Chen Xue was young she associated the pianist with her father (she describes playing Gould on the stereo her father bought her), but then compares herself to Gould when she is older (she compares Gould’s re-performance of Goldberg Variations when he was in his 40 s to her own republication of Book of Evil Women when she was similarly in her 40 s).

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“Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel” begins with a description of the teenage protagonist Cao-Cao making love with her older same-sex partner, A’Su, apparently for the first time. A’Su sucks Cao-Cao’s nipples, separates her pubic hair, then “approach[es] [her] core” (接近我生命的核心). A’Su remarks that Cao-Cao’s genitals “taste like tears” (有眼淚的味道), and the narrator describes how “when A’Su tasted my private parts, my tears fell, and amid the salty wetness of tears I reached an orgasm like I’d never had before; it was like a fevered nightmare, falling unconscious in the mad hotness, screaming in unconsciousness, and in the screaming, gradually shattering apart” (Chen, 2018a, pp. 29–30; Chen, 1999, p. 52).1 This description of A’Su is immediately followed by a discussion of Cao-Cao’s mother. Cao-Cao and her mother were apparently separated for a year not long after Cao-Cao’s father died in a traffic accident when she was 10, but Cao-Cao observes that, “Even after I succeeded in completely escaping from her, I always encountered my mother in my dreams” (Chen, 2018a, p. 30; Chen, 1999, p. 52). She recalls how, at the age of 12, she was reunited with her mother, but found that her mother’s clothing, makeup, and even her smell were completely different from before. On that occasion, moreover, her mother was hosting a strange man wearing a suit, and she simply gave Cao-Cao some money and told her to go entertain herself. Like the preceding description of Cao-Cao’s encounter with A’Su, this recollection of her reencounter with her mother similarly ends in tears—though this time they are tears of sorrow. Cao-Cao’s mother apparently became an escort after her husband died, and although as a teenager Cao-Cao was deeply resentful of her mother’s sex work, she later also began mimicking her mother by having casual sex with a wide assortment of men. After losing her virginity at the age of 17 (“I learned about sex from the body of a man ten years older than me”), she proceeded to “[lie] in the arms of countless men” (Chen, 2018a, p. 34; Chen 1999, p. 55). Even as she was sleeping with men, however, she developed an aversion to the male body, and particularly to the smell of semen. Eventually she begins sleeping with A’Su, who excites her in a way men never could. Similarly, although A’Su works as an escort (like Cao-Cao’s mother), it appears that her own desire for Cao-Cao is significantly greater than her desire for any of the men with whom she sleeps for money. The result is an interlocking chain of displacement and desire, wherein the death of Cao-Cao’s father results in her mother turning to sex work, which in turn leads CaoCao to pursue a series of heterosexual encounters that reflect both her identification and disgust with her mother. Moreover, the story suggests that another link in this chain of displacement involves the writing process itself. Cao-Cao describes how she writes to recover the “desolate and love-starved self” (愛無能的人) that lies hidden within her own body: I want to love, but I know that until I recover this self, I remain impotent in love. So I write, trying with writing to excavate this hidden self. I write, I write as if masturbating. I write in a frenzy, and after writing I tear the pieces up one by one, as though ejaculating; 1

Here and below, the Chinese text is taken from the 2018 reedition of Book of Evil Women. The English version is taken from Fran Martin’s 1999 translation, with occasional minor modifications.

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and in obliterating them I experience orgasm impossible in sex. (Chen, 2018a, p. 33; Chen, 1999, p. 54)

The text notes that one of the stories Cao-Cao writes during this period is titled “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” and when A’Su reads the story when it is still only half-finished, she urges Cao-Cao to complete it. Later, as Cao-Cao is finishing the story, A’Su tells her, Cao-Cao, you have to keep on writing, and on the paper you’ll see me, and you’ll see yourself. Everything I’ve done has been to show you this one thing. Write, never stop writing, you have no other choice. This is your fate. (Chen, 2018a, p. 51; Chen, 1999, pp. 65–66)

Once Cao-Cao completes the story, however, she tries to show it to A’Su, but discovers A’Su has mysteriously disappeared and Cao-Cao appears to be the only person with any recollection of her—the implication apparently being that A’Su, all along, had been merely Cao-Cao’s fantasy projection. The story concludes with Cao-Cao returning to her father’s grave. She had visited the grave with her mother earlier in the story, after having passed the college entrance exam. This time, however, Cao-Cao visits the grave alone, as by this point her mother has already committed suicide. Cao-Cao finds that the tombstone next to her father’s is inscribed with her mother’s name—and here, for the first time, we are given the mother’s name: Su Qingyu. This revelation that Cao-Cao’s mother and A’Su share the same surname reinforces the earlier suggestion that A’Su is essentially a displaced projection of the figure of the mother, and the story concludes with Cao-Cao telling her deceased mother, “I love you, absolutely,” whereupon she appears to hear the sound of A’Su’s laughter coming from above (Chen, 2018a, p. 56; Chen, 1999, p. 68). It is significant that the story’s final emphasis on the parallels between the figures of A’Su and Cao-Cao’s mother takes place next to the grave of Cao-Cao’s father. Although the work never identifies the father by name, it nevertheless suggests that his death helped catalyze a series of compensatory displacements on the part of both Cao-Cao’s mother and Cao-Cao herself—including Cao-Cao’s transition from mimicking her mother’s heteroerotic sexual activity to her eventual homoerotic desire for the mother-like A’Su. Moreover, to the extent that the work also suggests CaoCao’s own creative writing is another key link in this chain of displacements, the story points to a relationship between Cao-Cao’s loss of her father and her subsequent investment in queer writing. Her queer writing, in other words, is presented as a compensatory reaction to the loss of the father, even as it simultaneously represents an antithesis to everything the father stood for.

2 Becoming We Published just two months after the reedition of Book of Evil Women, Chen’s 2018 essay collection When I Became We uses the author’s relationship with her longterm partner, Breakfaster, to reflect on issues of (homoerotic) love and romance. In contrast to the prominent focus on parents in “Searching for the Lost Wings of the

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Angel,” parents are barely mentioned until near the end of the latter volume, in a section titled “Beginning to Travel for the Sake of Love.” Here, Chen Xue reflects that she and Breakfaster wanted to travel somewhere together but frequently found themselves under financial constraints, given that Chen Xue regularly needed to send money to help support her parents. Chen Xue and Breakfaster ultimately decide to travel to Kanazawa, in Japan, and although they book their tickets and make their reservations, Chen Xue never describes their actual trip. Instead, she describes how she and Breakfaster get lost going out to dinner in Taipei, then joke about Chen Xue’s lack of sense of direction. Chen Xue concludes the chapter by reflecting that, “Whether it be at home or away from home, lovers must frequently be on the road, because only then will they discover that it is in the process of returning home that they can confirm the direction of their love” (Chen, 2018b, p. 236). The suggestion that Chen Xue’s obligation to continue supporting her parents has prevented her from travelling with Breakfaster indicates that, even as Chen Xue and Breakfaster have been establishing a same-sex domestic partnership partially modelled on the legal marriages that had been available to their parents, their own relationship nevertheless continues to be haunted by the specter of the heteronormative tradition the parents (and their marriage) represent. The relative invisibility of parents in Chen Xue’s When I Became We is particularly striking if we consider the work in relationship to its famous predecessor, the 2012 diary novel A Wife’s Diary (Renqi riji 人妻日記). Co-authored by Chen Xue and Breakfaster, that earlier work consists of a series of journal entries Chen Xue composed and published on-line between September 2011 and July 2012, reflecting on her life with Breakfaster after their marriage in 2009, followed by a shorter section consisting of a collection of private letters Breakfaster wrote to Chen Xue between April 2007 and May 2008, during a period when the two women were separated and living apart. In this earlier work, Chen Xue describes how her parents were relatively conservative, to the point that even after her marriage to Breakfaster had been publicly announced in the papers and was widely known within the community, she still could not bring herself to tell her parents. She half-jokingly speculates that if she were to tell them, their reaction would probably be to complain, “What a waste—this way we can’t post announcements and receive [money-filled] red envelopes from our relatives.” Chen Xue imagines how she might tell her parents she and Breakfaster are married, but feels every potential way of broaching the topic would inevitably be very awkward. She concludes, “I don’t know for certain what their views on tongzhi are, but I do know that they would find some way to understand and accept [me]. I guess that they would accept me by maintaining silence [on the topic]” (Chen & Breakfaster, 2012, pp. 50–51). In one journal entry, Chen Xue discusses the stereo system her father gave her when she was in college (evidently the same stereo system she mentions in the preface to Book of Evil Women). She describes how she has had this stereo since her early 20 s, and how, given that the wiring is complicated, she would always need to find someone to help her set it up again every time she moved. She feels the stereo “is the most tangible link between myself and my family,” and describes how the stereo is

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covered in stickers that appear “loyal and stubborn, like the way my father protects me” (Chen & Breakfaster, 2012, p. 40). This symbolic displacement from Chen Xue’s father to the stereo’s stickers, in turn, mirrors Chen Xue’s earlier discussion of how, after her grandfather passed away, her father would go to her grandmother’s room every night, and the grandmother would speak to him as though he were her husband, at which point Chen Xue notes that, “Listening to her speech, I sometimes felt that Grandmother knew that Grandfather was gone, and that she was merely using her willpower to transform [Chen Xue’s father] into a simulacrum of the real thing” (Chen & Breakfaster, 2012, p. 19). Perhaps the most intriguing allusion to parents in A Wife’s Diary, however, appears not in Chen Xue’s journal entries, but rather in one of Breakfaster’s letters near the end of the work—in a detailed description of a dream that is described as being “simultaneously scary and warm” (Chen & Breakfaster, 2012, p. 273). In the dream, Breakfaster discovers in her house a long snake with a small head and black eyes. She immediately runs outside but worries the snake might escape and threaten others. Concerned that she is the only person who knows about the snake, Breakfaster sees her father using a hose to wash down the ground in front of a storefront, and quickly recruits him to kill the snake. The father enters the house, grabs the snake’s head, breaks its neck, then chops the animal into pieces. Breakfaster, however, is dismayed to discover that after a while the pieces begin to reconstitute themselves, “becoming a snake-shaped paper snake” (Chen & Breakfaster, 2012, p. 274), but her father addresses this new threat by cutting up the snake and burning the fragments. Even after the snake has been reduced to ashes, however, Breakfaster still wonders whether it might be able to reconstitute itself yet again. Although Breakfaster summarizes this dream without comment, its significance appears obvious. To begin with, although Breakfaster’s letters were written during a period when she and Chen Xue were living apart, they nevertheless reflect on the possibility the couple may later be reunited. Moreover, the specification that Breakfaster finds the snake inside her house suggests the creature represents the challenges Breakfaster and Chen Xue may face in establishing a home together. The dream’s pairing of the phallic snake and the patriarchal father, meanwhile, points to a phallo-patriarchal order at odds with itself—in that the paradigmatically phallic figure of the snake is paired with the similarly phallic figure of the father (with his water hose). At a practical level, this scenario could be viewed as an anticipation of the way Breakfaster and Chen Xue would later attempt to use the heteronormative institution of marriage to validate their relationship in an environment where same-sex unions are still illegal and homophobia is still pervasive. Another notable aspect of the Breakfaster’s dream involves the way the snake repeatedly threatens to reconstitute itself after having been disassembled— suggesting the snake may present as much of a threat in its absence as its presence. In psychoanalytic terms, the snake may be viewed as an example of what Jacques Lacan calls the “name of the father” (le nom de père)—an abstract figure of authority and prohibition that Lacan proposes anchors the symbolic order (Lacan, 1997). Lacan plays on the homophony, in French, between “nom” (name) and “non” (no), to suggest this figure of authority is also a figure of prohibition and negation (“le non

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de père”/“the ‘no’ of the father”). This psychoanalytic concept builds how fathers are viewed as authority figures within a conventional nuclear family structure, just as an abstract notion of patriarchy plays a similar role within patriarchal societies. In Lacan’s framework, the name of the father represents not only the symbolic father but also the symbolic order itself, and in Breakfaster’s dream the figure of the father is an antidote to the harmful patriarchal influence symbolized by the snake, while also symbolically reaffirming the underlying patriarchal order itself. Finally, it is also significant that the snake in the dream is eventually transformed into a “paper snake.” Breakfaster’s dream emphasizes paper’s material characteristics (including its ability to be cut up and burned), and the father’s attempts to cut up the paper snake resonate with Cao-Cao’s own insistence, in “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” on ripping up her own stories as soon as she completed them. Like the snake, the story-within-a-story in Chen Xue’s “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel” is positioned within a chain of symbolic displacements that can be traced back to an absent father (the father’s death leading to the mother’s sex work, leading to Cao-Cao’s promiscuity, leading to Cao-Cao’s same-sex relationship with an older woman modeled on her own mother). Like Breakfaster’s dream, Chen Xue’s story-within-a-story is a product of a chain of attachment, loss, and displaced desire, while also offering a commentary on that same imbricated process of displaced identification and desire.

3 The Name of the Father The theme of absent fathers, meanwhile, is a central conceit in Chen’s 2019 novel Fatherless City. The work’s protagonist, Wang Menglan, is a 35-year-old author who previously worked as a creative writer but who more recently has been struggling with writers’ block and has therefore turned to ghost writing—finding it easier to write other people’s stories than to write her own. Wang lives in Taipei, but at the beginning of the novel she is offered a job to ghostwrite the autobiography of an elderly artist in the coastal town of Haishan. Given that at this point Wang has recently broken up with the boyfriend with whom she had been living for five years, she therefore jumps at the opportunity to temporarily relocate to Haishan, where she not only hopes to recover from her romantic breakup but also plans to start writing creatively again. Wang Menglan’s original reason for going to Haishan is quickly mooted after the artist she was planning to interview dies unexpectedly. Conveniently, however, another of the town’s residents, Lin Yongfeng, asks Wang to help write a biographical account of his father—who had spent a decade imprisoned in the 1950s during the White Terror period but never discussed his experiences with his family in any detail. Lin indicates that he does not necessarily want a factual accounting of his father’s experiences, and that a fictional account that rings true would be sufficient. Wang is intrigued by this assignment but is reluctant to fully commit, given that she feels she does not have a good understanding of the historical context of the White Terror period. She therefore offers to explore the topic on a preliminary basis, during which

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time she would begin interviewing some of the elder Mr. Lin’s relatives while also researching the White Terror period. As Wang Menglan is beginning to examine the elder Mr. Lin’s life, she meets a private investigator named Chen Shaogang, who has come to Haishan to investigate the recent disappearance of the teenage daughter of a local legislator. The police are unsure whether the girl’s disappearance is a case of a run-away, abduction, or murder, and therefore the girl’s father has hired Chen to conduct his own investigation. When Wang first encounters Chen, she immediately recognizes he is an outsider to the community like herself, and when they begin discussing their work, she realizes their respective jobs are also quite similar—in that both jobs involve researching other people’s stories. Chen invites Wang to help him conduct his investigation, and soon they begin sleeping together as well. As the novel’s title implies, several of the work’s intertwined plotlines feature missing fathers. Most notably, Wang Menglan’s father drowned himself in the ocean when she was 10, and although Wang’s mother subsequently married another man who was very kind to Wang, Wang remained haunted by this loss. One of Wang’s projects in Haishan, meanwhile, involves helping Lin Yongfeng (whom she explicitly views as something of a father figure) reconstruct the story of his own deceased father. Moreover, as she and Chen Shaogang investigate Qiu Zhishan’s disappearance, it becomes increasingly apparent her disappearance is tied to the fact her father was relatively absent from her life, meaning she was raised primarily by a stepmother. With Wang Menglan’s help, Chen Shaogang eventually solves the case of Qiu Zhishan’s disappearance (it turns out her body had been hidden after she was accidentally killed in an incident involving drugs and a secret boyfriend), whereupon Chen leaves Haishan to take another assignment elsewhere. Wang, however, continues working for Lin Yongfeng, and ultimately succeeds in composing a narrative about the elder Mr. Lin’s experiences in prison—a narrative that is necessarily based more on her speculation than on the scant biographical information she was able to uncover. After completing the narrative, however, Wang belatedly discovers a letter the elder Mr. Lin wrote (but never delivered) to his children, in which he describes his experiences from the White Terror period. When Wang reads it, she realizes that her earlier reconstruction of the elder Mr. Lin’s experiences had been completely off the mark. It turns out he was arrested not because of his participation in an unspecified “reading group,” as he had told his family, but rather because of his participation in an underground communist organization. Throughout his life, he was never able to bring himself to tell his children directly the truth about his communist involvement, and instead he laid it out in a letter he knew they might not read until after his death. The letter is composed in a combination of Japanese, Chinese, and Chinese romanization, and in it Lin discusses the stress of keeping the secret of his political sympathies in the same way a queer subject might discuss the stress of needing to remain in the closet—although Lin never uses the term in his letter, it is notable the Chinese word for (Communist) comrade, tongzhi 同志, is also one of the standard terms for gay/lesbian. Wang Menglan spends three days translating it into standard Chinese, which she then gives to Lin Yongfeng. The process of reading and translating Mr. Lin’s letter is particularly meaningful to Wang because she feels “it as though it is

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my own father confessing to me” (Chen, 2019, p. 395). In particular, her mother had always told her the reason her father committed suicide was because of an extramarital affair, and it was only much later Wang discovered the real reason was that he was encumbered by debt. In the process of working on the Qiu Zhishan and Mr. Lin cases, Wang Menglan also begins writing again, and after Chen Shaogang leaves Haishan, Wang sends him numerous letters and drafts of the new stories she has composed. Wang appears unfazed by the fact that Chen does not reply to any of her letters—suggesting the letters are more for her benefit than for his. The novel concludes with Wang Menglan returning from Haishan to Taipei, where she receives an e-mail from Chen. In the message, Chen apologizes for the long delay in responding to her earlier letters, but assures Wang he read all her letters and manuscripts with great interest. He explains he has taken a leave of absence from his job because he was still tormented by the loss of his son and wife. He concludes, however, the letter by saying, I hope everything is well with you. There are many things that need to be repaired, many abilities that have already been lost, and too many regrets that can no longer be recovered. However, the important thing is that I want to return to life. I feel that I want to live, to truly live. Thank you for everything that you have given me. (Chen, 2019, p. 411)

Upon reading the message Wang immediately begins sobbing, and in the work’s final line she describes how “the tears washed clear my eyes” (Chen, 2019, p. 412). The parallel between Wang Menglan’s tears at the end of Fatherless City and CaoCao’s tears at the beginning of “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel” suggests a broader set of resonances between the two works. Most obviously, in both works the female protagonist loses her father at the age of 10 and later responds to this loss by having a series of romantic relationships with older men (though in “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” the protagonist subsequently transitions to sleeping with an older woman). Both works, moreover, feature a metafictional turn in which the protagonist is composing a fictional text that appears to be a version of the work itself. In “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” the imbedded text is a short story that is also titled “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel” and appears to be about the protagonist’s relationship with A’Su. In Fatherless City, meanwhile, the imbedded text is a novel titled The Small Town that I Loved and Lost (Wo zhongai yu yishi de xiaozhen 我鍾愛與遺失的小鎮), consisting of a series of linked short stories, several of which are included in the text of Fatherless City itself. Although the stories from The Small Town that I Loved and Lost are clearly differentiated from the rest of the work by being printed on a different color paper, several of the stories resonate closely with the plot of the novel itself. This is most evident with the first story, which describes a policeman named Chen Shaogang, whose marriage falls apart after the death of the couple’s young child, after which he becomes a private detective so he can use the process of searching for missing people as a stand-in for searching for his own wife and son. The third story, meanwhile, features an unnamed 35-year-old male author who had previously published some prize-winning works of fiction, and who now wants to write a new novel. He decides

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the new work will be set in the year 1995 (which, of course, is also the year in which Chen Xue published her first book), in the coastal town where he attended college. He has already spent several years developing numerous plotlines and dozens of fictional characters, and now must endeavor to piece them together into a full-length work. However, as the first line of the story specifies, the new work “is definitely missing a certain important key character” (Chen, 2019, p. 180). The author has a good sense of who this missing key character should be—she should be between 28 and 35 years old, sorrowful but not dejected, having one or two cats, unmarried but having previously been in love between three and 10 times. She would be the lynchpin who would hold all the others together. To write his novel, the author moves from the city back to his college coastal town. One night someone knocks on his door, and it turns out to be a neighbor—a young woman who had been out drinking that evening but has no recollection of how she ended up naked and locked out of her apartment. The author agrees to help her, and quickly realizes she is the perfect incarnation of the fictional character his novel is missing—in fact, his first thought is that he must have created the woman himself. The two neighbors gradually get acquainted as the author continues working on his novel—eventually reaching a climatic point where the novel’s protagonist breaks up with her new boyfriend and, distraught, walks out into the frothy ocean. The story then concludes with the woman telling the author she would like to introduce him to her new boyfriend, but while procrastinating before going to her apartment, the author has a brief fantasy that in the distance he sees someone using semaphore flags to send the message “all secrets are contained here” (Chen, 2019, p. 190), whereupon ocean waves surge toward him, and he suddenly imagines that he himself—not his female protagonist—is the one who is about to drown. While the first story is clearly based on Chen Shaogang, the third story instead revolves around a fictional author not unlike Wang Menglan—though in this case the fictional author is figured as a man rather than a woman. The male author in the latter work meets a woman who is also not unlike Wang Menglan, and whom the author views as a living incarnation of the novel he is writing. The fictional novel culminates with the novel’s protagonist drowning herself in the sea, while the story itself concludes with the male author imagining that he is the one who is about to drown himself at sea—further suggesting that both the fictional author and his female neighbor are displaced projections of Wang Menglan, who has been haunted since childhood by the memory of how her own father drowned himself at sea.

4 Coda If the tagline on the front cover of the 2018 edition of Book of Evil Women explicitly references the historical gap between the mid-1990s moment when the volume was initially published and the late-2010s moment when the new edition was released, the back cover does so in a more subtle fashion by tacitly alluding to the now-infamous preface Yang Zhao wrote for the volume’s first edition. Whereas the back cover

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of the 2018 edition features a quote from Chen Xue’s new preface discussing how “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel” remains her most popular work, the back cover of the 1995 edition instead features a quote from Yang Zhao’s original preface to the volume, in which he detailed what he contended were the work’s limitations: The lesbian sentiments that we read about in Book of Evil Women are almost all intentionally extracted from any social context, and yet the more these sentiments attempt to escape from society’s interventions, the more they will express that side that is society’s slave. In Chen Xue’s writing, every passage of lesbian erotics is filled with a sense of sinful guilt. But what sin/evil do lesbians have? What sin/evil do women’s erotics have? Why is it necessary to place lesbian erotics at a distance from everyday situations? Does not Chen Xue’s intense “escape by way of exoticism” reflect precisely the overarching shadow of society’s restrictions? (Chen, 1995, back cover)2

Born in 1963, Yang Zhao is seven years older than Chen Xue—they are separated by roughly the same age gap as the one that separated Cao-Cao and the unnamed man from whose body she first “learned about sex.” When Book of Evil Women was first published, Yang Zhao was already an influential figure in Taiwan literary circles, and his preface to Chen Xue’s maiden work effectively granted the work a symbolic seal of approval from the literary establishment. In his preface, Yang Zhao notes the 1995 publication of Book of Evil Women followed closely on the heels of other influential queer-themed Taiwanese literary works such as Qiu Miaojin’s (邱妙津) Notes of a Crocodile (Eyu shouji 鱷魚手記) and Zhu Tianwen’s (朱天文) Notes of a Desolate Man (Huangren shouji 荒人手記), both of which were published in 1994 and played a seminal role in helping encourage local discussions of queer matters. In the early to mid-1990s, there had been a surge of interest in Taiwan in homoerotic topics, though queer individuals were still marginalized and discriminated against. At the same time, however, Yang Zhao is rather critical of what he perceives to be Chen Xue’s general narrative strategy, claiming that her strategic “exoticization” of same-sex desire implicitly reaffirms the same underlying heteronormative social structure her volume is ostensibly attempting to challenge in the first place. Yang Zhao contends that, “paradoxically, despite having written an entire book about lesbians, Chen Xue, is actually denying ‘lesbianism per se’” (Yang, 1995, p. 23). The irony, of course, is that in critiquing Chen Xue for presenting a vision of lesbianism that Yang believes reaffirms the underlying patriarchal order, Yang is himself writing from the privileged position of a well-respected older (and presumptively straight) man—in this context, he effectively represents the voice of the patriarchal establishment itself. In her preface to the 2005 reedition of the volume, Chen Xue notes she was displeased with Yang Zhao’s original preface, but she observes the preface was arranged by the publisher without her approval (she modestly claims at the time she did not even know any other authors). In any event, however, she explains for the new edition she had decided to reprint the original preface exactly as it had first appeared, on the logic that “it is as though Book of Evil Women were no longer my own work, and 2

The blurb was an amalgamation of three separate passages from Yang Zhao’s original preface (Chen, 2018a, pp. 23–25).

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instead belongs to all readers who have ever discussed it, which is why I would like for this book to be republished just as before” (Chen, 2018a, p. 14). In retaining Yang Zhao’s original preface in subsequent reeditions of Book of Evil Women, accordingly, Chen Xue is deploying a version of the same strategy she previously used in “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” A Wife’s Diary, When I Became We, and other works—in that she does not attempt to expel the specter of patriarchy from these works, but rather strategically retains that same specter as a site of strategic absence. For instance, Cao-Cao’s deceased father is not absent from “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” but rather is an absent presence that continues to influence not only on Cao-Cao’s mother but also Cao-Cao herself. Similarly, the virtual absence of Chen Xue’s father in A Wife’s Diary generates a chain of symbolic displacements, such as the way the stereo her father gave her becomes a metonymic figure for her father himself. In Fatherless City, meanwhile, Wang Menglan is haunted by the death of her father when she was a child, and the reason the elder Mr. Lin’s letter to his children and Chen Shaogang’s letter to her are so meaningful is because they each help her come to terms with her father’s premature death. In each work, however, it is precisely in the symbolic space that is opened up by the loss of the father, that a wide array of alternative socio-symbolic formations may emerge—including, but not limited to, homoerotic and queer ones.

References Chen Xue. 陳雪. (1995). 惡女書 Book of evil women. Huanguan. Chen Xue. (1999). Searching for the lost wings of the angel (F. Martin. Trans.). Positions: Asian Critique, 7(1), 51–69. Chen Xue. (2018a). 惡女書 Book of evil women. Ink Publishing. Chen Xue. (2018b). 當我成為我們: 愛與關係的三十六種可能 When I became we: Thirty-six possibilities of love and relationships. Ink Publishing. Chen Xue. (2019). 無父之城 [Fatherless city]. Mirror Fiction. Chen Xue. & Breakfaster 早餐人. (2012). 人妻日記. Ink Publishing. Hsu, W. (2019, September 14). 走進無父之城: 陳雪步步解謎 Entering the fatherless city: Incrementally deciphering Chen Xue. 中國時報 [China Times]. https://prize.turnnewsapp.com/最新 消息/開卷書訊/3480/. Lacan, J. (1997). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3: The psychoses. W.W. Norton. Yang Zhao (1995). 何惡之有?—序陳雪小說集 《惡女書》What evil is there?—Preface to Chen Xue’s story collection. In Book of Evil Women; Xue, C. (2018a). 15–26.

Carlos Rojas is a professor of Chinese cultural studies at Duke University, United States of America. He is the author, editor, and translator of many books, including Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China.

Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and a Farewell Letter Linshan Jiang

Abstract In this chapter, I will conduct a comparative reading of Zhang Yixuan’s (張亦絢) The Love that is Temporary (愛的不久時) and A Farewell Letter (永別 書) and discuss the female protagonists’ traumatic memories caused by domestic violence and intimate partner violence. The two novels are written in the fashion of “traumatic realism,” a term proposed by Rothberg (2000) in an attempt to “produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture” (p. 103). As both protagonists are writers and the stories are narrated in the first-person perspective, they represent the traumatic realism “under the sign of trauma” through “self-reflexive metanarrative techniques” (Chen, 2020, p. 46). I argue that the self-reflections of the two female protagonists point to the issues of sex and sexuality, as a possible leeway in processing their traumatic memories. Keywords Zhang Yixuan · Traumatic memories · Traumatic realism · Queer · Sexuality As a queer feminist, Zhang Yixuan (張亦絢) has been vocal on feminist and lesbian issues. She was born in 1973 in Taipei. As a teenager, she witnessed the prosperous feminist movements and experienced the transition from the martial law period to the post-martial law period in Taiwan in the 1980s.1 When she was a student at Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School, she started writing short stories and screenplays. In 1990, Zhang published her first story entitled “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (Shengdan laoren yao jincheng le 聖誕老人要進城了) in the Supplement of Independence Evening Post (Lo, 2013, p. 1). In her college years, she served as the head of the Feminist Club (Nüyanshe 女研社) at National Chengchi University. She 1 The martial law period in Taiwan usually refers to the military control by the Republic of China Armed Forces between May 20, 1949 and July 14, 1987. It is also referred to as the White Terror due to the political repression on civilians by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT). For more discussion, see Lin’s (2007).

L. Jiang (B) Duke University, Durham, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_9

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earned a master’s degree from the Department of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies at Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 1995, she published her first critical essay collection, As a Feminist Suspect (Shenwei nüxingzhuyi xianyifan 身為女性主義嫌疑犯), which was partly based on her reflection on feminism and her experience in the Feminist Club. Her first two short story collections, When Things Decay (Huaidiao shihou 壞掉時候, 2001) and The Best of Times (Zuihao de shiguang 最好的時光, 2003), depict female students and their relationships, particularly in the Feminist Club. Because of these two short story collections, Zhang has been discussed in parallel with Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津), Chen Xue (陳雪), Cao Lijuan (曹麗娟) when it comes to tongzhi2 (同志) literature (Hu, 2012; Liou, 2004), even though she rejects such labeling and categorization (Chen & Zhang, 2015, p. 413). Zhang’s “Domestic Affairs” (Yinren qinü 淫人妻 女), which was included in When Things Decay, was awarded Unitas’s New Author Award for Fiction in 1996 (Paper Republic). In the 2010s, she published two novels, The Love that is Temporary: Memoir in Nates/Paris (Ai de bujiu shi: nante/bali huiyilu 愛的不久時: 南特/巴黎回憶錄, 2011)3 and A Farewell Letter: In the Era that I Leave You (Yongbie shu: zai wo buzai de shidai 永別書: 在我不在的時代, 2015). In these two novels, Zhang reflects on feminist and lesbian issues by putting the characters in the national and/or diasporic contexts. In addition to writing creative stories as well as literary and critical essays, she has also written a screenplay, Risks Along the Riverbank (Women yanhe maoxian 我們沿河冒險, 2013), and filmed one short play, Natalie, What are You Doing on this Earth? (Natali, ni weishenme zai dishang 娜塔莉, 你為什麼在地上?, 2009), and one documentary, Fail to Understand Hakka Language: Little Stories under the Raid on Taipei in 1945 (Tingbudong kejiahua: 1945 Taibei hongzha xia de xiao gushi 聽不懂客家話: 1945 台北大轟炸下的小故事, 2012). In recent years, she has published more essay collections, such as The Adults that I Disliked (Wo taoyan guo de daren men 我討厭過的大人們, 2020). Her works have recently been translated into other languages, including “Shikima no musume” (色魔の娘, 2021), a Japanese translation of “Domestic Affairs,” and “A Libertine is Not Made in a Day” (Yinfu bushi yitian zaocheng de 淫婦不是 一天造成的, 2022), an English translation of a short story included in her latest short story collection, History of the Meaning of Sex (Xing yisi shi 性意思史, 2019). Most of the scholarly discussions about Zhang’s works are in Chinese language, including master’s theses and articles. The earlier scholarship focuses on her first two short story collections and/or her first novel from both literary and sociohistorical perspectives (Chang, 2012; Hu, 2012; Liou, 2004; Lo, 2013). In recent years, her second novel has attracted more attention and stimulated discussions on queer activism, identity, and trauma (Chang, 2019; Lin, 2020).

2 For a discussion on the difference among tongzhi, queer, and homosexuality, see the first chapter of Chi (2017). This chapter uses tongzhi and queer interchangeably. 3 There is a second version of this novel published in 2020, in which her own introduction and afterward as well as her friends’ texts are deleted. Due to the availability, I use the 2020 version.

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In this chapter, I will conduct a comparative reading of The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter and discuss the female protagonists’ traumatic memories wrought by domestic violence and intimate partner violence. The two novels are written in the fashion of “traumatic realism,” a term proposed by Rothberg (2000) in an attempt to “produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture” (p. 103). As both protagonists are writers and the stories are narrated in the first-person perspective, they represent the traumatic realism “under the sign of trauma” through “self-reflexive metanarrative techniques” (Chen, 2020, p. 46). I argue that the self-reflections of the two female protagonists point to the issues of sex and sexuality, as a possible leeway in processing their traumatic memories.

1 Domestic Violence Domestic violence has been a consistent concern in Zhang’s creative writing. Starting from “Domestic Affairs,” Zhang has been using the trope of domestic violence to reveal gendered trauma in the family: the daughter was sexually abused by the father during childhood, but the mother remains silent and even serves as an accomplice to further domestic violence (Lo, 2013, p. 58). This is also the case in The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter. The female protagonists in the two novels share similar personal and family backgrounds: both are lesbian writers, born in the early 1970s in Taiwan; both were raped by the father and the mother furthered the torture. In The Love that is Temporary, the story is mainly situated in France, particularly in relation to the female protagonist’s memories in Nates. Her traumatic memories of domestic violence are usually triggered by the “trivial,” personal matters in the diasporic context. In Nates, she is afraid of making dishes in front of other people in the shared apartment because she has learned cooking by herself and her mother never taught her to do so. The female protagonist sees the fear as “irrational” and is worried about her family relationship being exposed to outsiders (Zhang, 2020, p. 59). She has made up all kinds of lies in her mind to excuse her incapability in domestic affairs. Adding to her trauma, she receives a family photo from her mother in Nates. She names her mother’s action as “quasi-rape” (lei qiangjian 類強姦), and she feels being “voluntarily raped” (ziyuan xing de bei qiangjian 自願性地被強姦) (Zhang, 2020, p. 238). While her mother sent this family photo to her as a memorial of their “happy family” (jiating xingfu 家庭幸福) (Zhang, 2020, p. 238), the photo serves as a reminder and “second-time abuse” (dierdu qinhai 第二度侵害) for the female protagonist (Zhang, 2020, p. 144). All these memories of and reflections on the domestic violence are scattered in her “memoir” in Nates and Paris, which resemble her unstable state to process her sexual trauma. While the domestic violence in The Love that is Temporary is mingled with the interpersonal relationships in the diasporic context, domestic violence in A Farewell

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Letter is much more elaborative and closely linked to the author’s critique of sociopolitical issues in Taiwan. A Farewell Letter presents a comprehensive coming-of-age experience of the female protagonist, He Yinyin, during and after the martial law period of Taiwan, in relation to her mainlander4 father, her Hakka mother, and her little sister. He Yinyin’s father was passionate about the Tangwai (黨外) movement5 and even named his daughter after Yin Haiguang (殷海光) to memorize him, a writer and thinker who dared to express his dissent of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomingtang, or KMT) in the 1950s. Yinyin has been bearing the burden of remembering those revolutionaries since she was born. Her father constantly conveyed to her his thoughts about anti-KMT activism and Yinyin was usually the listener in these talks during her childhood. However, after reading more than half of the novel, readers suddenly find out the drastic truth between Yinyin and her father. Yinyin, as the narrator of the whole novel, told one of her followers and the readers that “she was raped by her father at the age of three” (Zhang, 2015, p. 258). Yinyin described it as the “first ‘explosion’” of her life (Zhang, 2015, p. 256). From the reader’s perspective, this reading experience is also an explosion. Before the shocking revelation, I read Yinyin as a narcissistic person who cherishes her political identity (a firm supporter of Taiwan independence born in a family of a mainlander father and a Hakka mother) and sexual identity (a lesbian girl who is skillful in dealing with emotional relationships and active in tongzhi movements). After it, I can find a deeper self-reflection of the female protagonist about her political and sexual identities, experiences, and memories. Through traumatic realism, readers are dragged by the female protagonist into the abyss and required to think about the seemingly truthful things of the Tangwai movement and tongzhi movement. The puzzling details in the previous chapters are the narrator’s form of self-reflection and even self-help. A Farewell Letter depicts graphic details about domestic violence, and the burden of remembering the trauma is even harder to bear for the female protagonist. While Yinyin remembers every detail of the domestic violence, her little sister seems to have forgotten everything that happened in childhood. Yinyin recalls when her father was fighting with her mother, her father suddenly turned to smashing her little sister and even ordered her little sister to “attack your mum, to hit your mum, and to fuck your mum” (Zhang, 2015, p. 189). Her little sister did follow her father’s order to hit her mother. Her father pushed even further in case her little sister did not know what to do with the word “fuck” and explained that “fuck your mum; touch her breast, fuck her; touch her breast, fuck her; women don’t get enough fucking” (Zhang, 2015, p. 189). Experiencing such extreme violence, Yinyin plucked up her encourage, only enough 4

Mainlander in Chinese is waishengren (外省人). This is a group of migrants in Taiwan from mainland China between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. The tension between the mainlanders and the natives (benshengren 本省人) as well as their attitudes to the rule of the KMT are complicated and entangled, serving as one of the major political threads in the second half of the 20th-century in Taiwan. For more discussion, see Chen (2010). 5 Tangwai literally means “outside the party,” and the party refers to the KMT. The Tangwai movement is a political movement to oppose the authoritarian rule of the KMT in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

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to argue with her mother, and her mother even defended her father by saying “your dad is wrong, but you cannot deny that he is contributing to the financial condition of this family” (Zhang, 2015, p. 191). While it is easy to compare this saying with the KMT’s excuse about maintaining its authoritarian rule, Yinyin found out that it was more because her mother never bothered to think (Zhang, 2015). During her childhood, Yinyin had to construct a set of thoughts in order to let herself process this family terror at a young age, which was to blame the KMT for making her parents abnormal (Zhang, 2015). Gradually, she was no longer able to link the seemingly heroic image of her parents during the anti-KMT movement with their violent images at home. She describes her parents’ paradoxical lives as “horrible failures” (Zhang, 2015, p. 268). It is easy to denote the author’s continuous reflection on domestic violence through these two novels. While the narrative in The Love that is Temporary is concerned more with the female protagonist’s introspection, A Farewell Letter establishes many vivid scenes so readers are forced to enter the female protagonist’s traumatic memories. In A Farewell Letter, the author also builds up the stark contrast between the private image of the parents and their public images, which again compels the readers to dwell on the tension between public history and private history during the martial law period. In some sense, political violence during the martial law period is in parallel with domestic violence, and those fighting political violence may repeat the violence they are fighting on their family members. This is indeed one of the biggest paradoxes presented in the novel. Comparatively, being far away from the domestic violence in France does not spare the torture from traumatic memories, which can be triggered at any moment.

2 Intimate Partner Violence In addition to domestic violence, the female protagonists in the two novels also endure violence from their intimate partners: both of them are cheated on by their female intimate partners. While there are different kinds of intimate partner violence in the romantic relationship, the two novels focus on “psychological aggression” as a way of exerting control over the female protagonists and harming them mentally and emotionally (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2021). This somehow diverts from the usual depictions in tongzhi literature, in which the violence stems from society and the family, and the intimate partner is supposed to be the guardian. In The Love that is Temporary, the female protagonist is even involved a “love relationship” with a man named Alex, although she denies “it is a love relationship.” These narratives are transgressive in terms of tongzhi literature and force readers to rethink homosexual relationships through traumatic realism. In The Love that is Temporary, the female protagonist is cheated on by her girlfriend Yarong for five years. Yarong lies to her that she had an elder sister who committed suicide at the age of 16 because her elder sister was jealous of their mother’s preference for Yarong. Because of this story, the female protagonist is full

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of pity for Yarong and generous about her mistakes. However, five years after the start of their relationship, Yarong confesses to the female protagonist that she has been cheating and she does not have an elder sister. When the female protagonist asks Yarong why she did such a thing, Yarong says that she wanted to catch the female protagonist’s attention. However, the female protagonist describes this event as a “disruption,” which disturbs her value judgement. Distraught with such psychological harm, she starts to rethink her sexual identity as a lesbian woman and questions the idea of coming out. She feels the action of coming out is too much of a social performance. Instead of caring about how society views her as a lesbian woman, she wants to care more about herself now. She concludes that “she never wants to come out” (yong bu chugui 永不出櫃) (Zhang, 2020, p. 129). All this reflection seems to counter the mainstream ideology of the LGBTQ communities; however, the significance lies in the challenge and the questioning. After she is hurt by the lies, her writing enters the realm of traumatic realism. Comparably, Yinyin in A Farewell Letter experiences a similar yet even more drastic betrayal by her girlfriend Xuanxuan. Similar to the lesbian couple in The Love that is Temporary, Yiyin and Xuanxuan have been living together for four or five years. However, one day, Xuanxuan tells Yinyin that she made up most of her experiences about her own life; all the characters and stories are not real experiences but made up by her. Yinyin describes it as the “second explosion” of her life because it destroys all the meanings behind their daily communications (Zhang, 2015, p. 322). In contrast to Xuanxuan’s lies, Yinyin shares all her real secrets to Xuanxuan, especially the domestic violence by her parents. Xuanxuan even uses Yinyin’s dreadful family stories as a demonstration of how corrupt heteronormativity is and leads Yinyin into the tongzhi movement. Because of this explosion, Yinyin is forced to rethink and even avoid the tongzhi movement and those slogans in the movement. When sexuality in the homosexual romantic relationship seems to be the salvation from domestic violence, it turns into another disaster, which again forces the major protagonist to reflect on her past. Through the depiction of the “bad” homosexual relationships, the author warns readers to be cautious about fantasies of having a homosexual relationship. At the same time, both female protagonists still consider themselves as lesbian women. In a way, this description is to juxtapose all kinds of love and sexual relationships that one person may encounter rather than making illusory stories about homosexual ones.

3 Sex and Sexuality If there is a possible way out of domestic violence and intimate partner violence, the answer might be sex and sexuality in the two novels. In The Love that is Temporary, the female protagonist’s decision to study abroad in France is grounded in her desire to live for herself, and her heterosexual relationship with Alex in Nates is rational and exploratory. She takes full control of her emotional state while she is in this relationship. She offers the name for the man in her narrative even though the man

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does not like the name Alex. Since Alex is a white man from France, she is fully aware of the racial superiority he unconsciously reveals from time to time. Most importantly, the female protagonist feels a sense of “innocent sexual desire” (chunjie de xingyu 純侫的性欲) in her relationship with Alex because Alex is willing to hold onto his sexual desire and be a gentleman with her (Zhang, 2020, p. 157). Her first reaction to the “innocent sexual desire” is a total shock because her body was violated by her parents and her sexual relationship with Yarong is only about “sexual desire” that has nothing to do with innocence. Her sexual exploration with a heterosexual man serves as an epitome of salvation, even though she never feels so-called love with him. She cannot even recognize him when they meet each other in Paris after the relationship ends. The “love that is temporary,” as the novel’s title suggests, is destined to be transitory since she invariably considers herself homosexual; still, it is a profound process that heals the subject. In A Farewell Letter, Yinyin experiences a time of total loss after the two explosions, followed by her re-discovery of sex and sexuality. Similar to the female protagonist in The Love that is Temporary, she feels under control by becoming involved in sexual relationships. In addition, Yinyin recalls an encounter in Vienna with a heterosexual couple, which makes her think deeper about sex and sexuality. This couple had a male friend and the three of them grew up together. While the two became a couple, the male friend never stepped out of their circle. In order to push the male friend to move on with his life, the couple left France and moved to Vienna, leaving the male friend alone. Three months after they left, their male friend committed suicide. While telling their story to Yinyin, the couple kept saying “we don’t know what to do,” and Yinyin feels a sense of honesty that she has lost for a long time (Zhang, 2020, p. 379). In these two stories, the author plays with various types of sexuality and transgresses the boundaries of each category of sexual identity. While the female protagonist in The Love that is Temporary seems to be bisexual, she never claims to be in the story. Outside the text itself, this plot makes it hard to define this piece of literature. As discussed by the queer scholar Chi Ta-wei (2012), “Is this a piece of tongzhi literature? Should bisexual literature be categorized into tongzhi literature?” (p. 181). In A Farewell Letter, the author continues her sexual exploration by staging a seemingly obvious ménage à trois, which shows a much more complicated picture than it seems to be. Geographically, the strange thing is that homosexual people in Taiwan can only be involved in heterosexual relationships when they are abroad in The Love that is Temporary (Chi, 2011). The multifarity of sexuality can only be explored in the diasporic context. At this point, Zhang’s written narrative makes possible the sexual exploration and salvation in the diasporic context. At the beginning of The Love that is Temporary, the writer-protagonist feels hesitant to record a secret. Until the end of the novel, she never expresses outspokenly what the secret is and whether she has recorded it through the novel. The answer seems to be positive because the trauma of domestic violence and intimate partner violence is already heavy enough, but the real answer is suspended. Nevertheless, her memories of Nates and Paris help her sustain herself. Comparatively, the traumatic memories in A Farewell Letter are much more entangled

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in the sociopolitical context. At the beginning of the novel, Yinyin writes, “I really intend, at the age of forty-three, to destroy all my memories” (Zhang, 2015, p. 1). Throughout the novel, she records all her traumatic memories and reflections on political and queer movements. Toward the end of the novel, she reemphasizes her intention and warns readers that “the most dangerous thing is to atone for a crime by meritorious actions” (Zhang, 2015, p. 385). Instead of following sociopolitical trends, the author reminds readers to pause and think. In these two novels, the author presents an entangled and complicated picture of sexual trauma and exploration. The female protagonists’ lives are first disrupted by domestic violence and then by intimate partner violence. Under such unbearable traumatic burdens, what is the way to survive? The author asks the female protagonists to keep thinking and writing in multiple temporalities and spatialities. Even though the sexual trauma can never be resolved, in the end, only through sexual exploration can the female protagonists reconcile their traumatic memories.

References Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). Fast facts: Preventing intimate partner violence. Retrieved July 12, 2022, from https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/ fastfact.html. Chang, C. Y.-P. (2012). 張亦絢 《壞掉時候》 與 《最好的時光》 中的糾結情感 [Entangled Emotions in Zhang Yi-Xuan’s The Broken Hours and The Best Hours]. [Master’s thesis, National Central University]. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertation in Taiwan. https://hdl.handle. net/11296/nt4pu3. Chang, T.-L. (2019). 論台灣同志小說中的抒情主體: 以吳繼文, 林俊穎, 張亦絢為討論對象 [Lyrical Subject in Taiwan’s Tongzhi Fiction: Wu Chi-Wen, Lin Chun-Ying and Chang Yi-Hsuan as Case Studies]. [Master’s thesis, National Chung Hsing University]. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertation in Taiwan. https://hdl.handle.net/11296/73xte6. Chen, K.-H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press. Chen, L. L. (2020). The great leap backward: Forgetting and representing the Mao years. Cambria Press. Chen, Q., & Zhang, Y. (2015). 情不自禁及其他: 答編輯問 [Qingbuzijin ji qita: da bianji wen]. In 永別書: 在我不在的時代 [Yongbie shu: zai wo buzai de shidai] (pp. 410–415). ECUS Publishing House. Chi, T.-W. (2011, August 5). 我的原則 閱讀張亦絢 《愛的不久時》 [Wo de yuanze—yuedu Zhang Yixuan Ai de bujiu shi. Lianhe wenxue]. Unitas Publishing. http://dgnet.com.tw/articleview.php? product_id=1163&issue_id=2579&article_id=13463. Chi, T.-W. (2012). 正面與背影—台灣同志文學簡史 [Zhengmian yu beiying—Taiwan tongzhi wenxue jianshi]. National Museum of Taiwan Literature. Chi, T.-W. (2017). 同志文學史: 台灣的發明 [A Queer Invention in Taiwan: A History of Tongzhi Literature]. Linking Publishing. Hu, Y.-Y. (2012). 邱妙津, 陳雪, 張亦絢女同志小說中的性別與空間 [Gender and Space in the Lesbian Novels: A Study on the Literature Works of Qiu Miao Jin, Chen Xue and Zhang Yi Xuan]. [Master’s thesis, National Taipei University of Education]. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertation in Taiwan. https://hdl.handle.net/11296/dscvu2.

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Lin, H.-C. (2020). 覆述與複數: 張亦絢小說中的性別主體 [Reformulation and Multiplicity: The Gendered Subjects in Chang Yi-Hsuan’s Novels]. [Master’s thesis, National Cheng Kung University]. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertation in Taiwan. https://hdl.handle.net/11296/ 46mwv5. Lin, S.L.-C. (2007). Representing atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 incident and white terror in fiction and film. Columbia University Press. Liou, L.-Y. (2004). 鬼魅書寫: 台灣女同性戀小說中的創傷與怪胎展演 [Ghost-Writing: Trauma and Queer Performativity in Taiwanese Lesbian Fiction]. 中外文學 [Chung Wai Literary Monthly], 33(1), 165–183. Lo, C.-C. (2013). 愛女人的女作家 張亦絢作品析論 [A Woman Writer Who Loves Woman: An Analysis of Zhang Yi-Xuan’s Texts]. [Master’s thesis, National Cheng Kung University]. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertation in Taiwan. https://hdl.handle.net/11296/bh2b8h. Paper Republic. (n.d.). Zhang Yixuan 張亦絢. Retrieved July 10, 2022, from https://paper-republic. org/pers/zhang-yixuan/. Rothberg, M. (2000). Traumatic realism: The demands of holocaust representation. University of Minnesota Press. Tu, K.-C., et al. (Eds.). (2022). 台灣文學英譯叢刊 (No. 49): 台灣新時代女性小說專輯 [Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 49; Special Issue on New Generation Women’s Fiction from Taiwan]. US-Taiwan Literature Foundation & National Taiwan University Press. Wu, P., (Ed.). (2021). 台湾文学ブックカフェ1 女性作家集 蝶のしるし [Taiwan Literary Book Café Female Writers’ Collection: The Mark of Butterfly]. Sakuhinsha. Zhang, Y. 張亦絢. (2015). 永別書: 在我不在的時代 [A Farewell Letter: In the Era that I Leave You]. ECUS Publishing House. Zhang, Y. (2020). 愛的不久時: 南特/巴黎回憶錄 (2020我行我素版) [The Love that is Temporary: Memoir in Nates/Paris (The 2020 Edition)]. ECUS Publishing House. (Original work published 2011).

Linshan Jiang is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, United States of America. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. in Translation Studies. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Her primary research project focuses on female writers’ war experience and memories of the AsiaPacific War, entitled “Women Writing War Memories: Hayashi Fumiko, Nieh Hualing, and Zhang Ling.” Her second research project explores how queerness is performed in the Sinophone queer cultural productions. She has published articles about gender studies and queer studies in literature and culture as well as translations of scholarly and popular works in Chinese and English.

Liglav Awu, Child of the “Double Country”: The Clarion Voice of Indigenous Women in Taiwan Fanny Caron

Abstract This chapter introduces Paiwan author Liglav Awu (利格拉樂·阿烏), who asserts her Indigeneity by promoting tribal unity in her militant works. Since the 1990s, Awu has brought to the fore silenced Indigenous women in the margins of a predominantly Han Taiwanese society. Echoing their feelings of alienation, she defends their place and visibility by rectifying the dominant society’s arbitrary and hegemonic discourse. Awu’s literary style, drawing upon her varied cultural heritage, is open to plurality and alterity. In her writings, personal and tribal (hi)stories are interconnected, acting as a literary bridge linking Indigenous families, nationally and internationally, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples. Through this chapter, readers will acquaint themselves with Awu’s literary production—from personal narratives, detailing the experiences of a child of the “double country” who grew outside of Native tribes and stories, to the testimonies of Indigenous women, their observations and knowledges—analyzed from an emic perspective. They will also be able to grasp how social and environmental issues, made manifest in the stigmatization of Indigenous women in exile on their own land, are explored and translated by Awu into a committed literature through which these women reclaim their cultures, (hi)stories, and territories. Keywords Liglav Awu · Paiwan literature · Indigenous women · (hi)stories · Double country

1 Introduction Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and

F. Caron (B) CNRS-Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_10

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seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Audre Lorde (1984/2007, p. 112) Born in 1969 to a Paiwan1 mother and a waisheng2 father, Liglav Awu (利格拉樂· 阿烏) was not raised in a Paiwan community, and temporarily turned her back on her Indigenous identity, before participating in Taiwan’s Indigenous Movements at the end of the 1980s3 with Atayal writer Walis Nokan (瓦歷斯·諾幹). Together, in 1990, they founded The Hunters’ Culture4 (Lieren wenhua 「獵人文化」), an Indigenous magazine denouncing the untenable situation in which Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples found themselves at the time, by voicing their concerns and defending their cultures. Meanwhile, after becoming a mother, Awu reconnected with her Native roots through a quest for identity that led her to ancestral tribal5 territories. She changed her Han name to that of Liglav Awu, the Paiwan name she used when publishing her first stories chronicling, mainly through literary (journalism) essays, her encounters with the island’s Indigenous women, including her mother and maternal grandmother— her main sources of inspiration. These stories, printed between 1994 and 1996 in various Taiwanese papers,6 were then collated in 1996 in Who Will Wear the Beautiful Clothes I Weave. It was the first book by an Indigenous woman of Taiwan published in Taiwan, and was followed by two new collections in 1997 and 1998. Awu’s stories, precursors to a feminist and committed literature born in the wake of the Indigenous Movements, constitute a cultural refuge for women who are doubly ostracized—on the grounds of their ethnicity and gender—and an indispensable link, until then missing, in the literature of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples. But how do they facilitate Indigenous women’s efforts to reclaim their identity, their (hi)stories, and their lands? Given our current global socio-environmental situation, could the values and knowledges they contain serve as an alternative model to mainstream neoliberal ideologies? A neoliberalism such as that described by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1998), with a “program 1

The Paiwan (排灣) is the second largest of Taiwan’s sixteen officially recognized Indigenous Nations. Paiwan villages are mostly located in the island’s southern part of the Central Mountain Range, as well as on its coastal southern tip, in Pingtung, Kaoshiung, and Taitung counties. 2 Waishengren (外省人), literally “person from a foreign/outside province,” is a term referring to Chinese mainlander migrants who arrived in Taiwan after Japan’s defeat at the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the Kuomintang’s retreat to the island in 1949. 3 During the Indigenous Movements (Yuanzhumin yundong 原住民運動), that arose in the mid1980s, Taiwan’s First Inhabitants (Yuanzhumin) fought for their agency and for their rights, inter alia: land rights, or the right to use their Indigenous names (including on their official identity documents, which until 1995 only contained their Han names). 4 In this chapter, all translations from Mandarin and from French into English are by the author. 5 Taiwan’s Indigenous authors, Awu included, employ – and (re)claim – certain terms originating from colonizers, such as “tribe” (buluo 部落), used to describe the social group composed of households connected in a village (the physical place of residence) through economical, religious, cultural, and kinship ties. 6 E.g., the Taiwan Times (Taiwan Shibao 台灣時報), the China Times (Zhongguo Shibao 中國時 報), and the Independence Evening Post (Zili Wanbao 自立晚報).

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of methodological destruction of the collectives,” namely “all collective structures capable of blocking pure market logic” (emphasis in the original, p. 3). Coming from a decolonizing perspective, Awu, while writing in Mandarin, effectively reaching a larger readership, especially a young Indigenous one, rejects “the master’s tools”—Han ideologies, values, and knowledges (on Indigenous Peoples), which, as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, Audre Lorde (1984/2007) states, “will never dismantle the master’s house” (p. 112). She thus recovers Indigenous paradigms to “dismantle” said “house”—institutions (scholastic, economic, political, cultural) supporting Han supremacy. Hence, how does Awu’s position, as a woman of the “double country,” a term coined by Lebanese poet Salah Stétié (1997), become a bridge between members of minorities and of the dominant society, and a tool to decolonize the collective imaginary? The worldviews of Indigenous societies, for whom colonialism is still a reality, have always contrasted with those of dominant societies, the latter considering the former’s values and ontologies as “abhorrent” and “barbaric” (Smith, 1999/2005, p. 43). Yet, as the Peoples themselves, they have endured, “embedded in indigenous languages and stories and etched in memories” (Smith, 1999/2005, p. 43). Therefore, in this chapter, the alterNative concepts and knowledges of the women inhabiting Awu’s 1990s’ literary production will be analyzed from an emic perspective—according to Indigenous epistemologies. First, Awu’s multicultural heritage and identity quest will be addressed. Her decolonizing processes, by way of destigmatizing Indigenous women and their practices, will then be examined. Finally, the ties Awu weaves with her extended international kinship, in order to approach shared challenges, will be discussed.

2 A Child of the Double Country As a child of the double country, Awu passes down her experiences and knowledge to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike. Her prose, like her variegated cultural heritage, is intrinsically open to plurality and alterity. Moreover, her peregrinations, detailed in her writings, are an open invitation to all uprooted and displaced Indigenous people, or to those who have turned their backs on their tribal identity, to find a way back.

2.1 Awu’s Double Heritage In her family history’s narration in Who Will Wear the Beautiful Clothes I Weave (1996), Awu describes her father with empathy. He is himself a “victim” of the Kuomintang. After fighting for the Party during the final phase of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), and its ensuing defeat, he and hundreds of thousands of soldiers flee en masse from China. Becoming a casualty of wartime displacement, he does not

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feel at home in Taiwan and longs for the homeland he can no longer return to. Adding insult to injury, in the mid-1970s, during Taiwan’s White Terror era (1949–1987), the very same government he sacrificed his life in China for unfairly labels him a communist traitor and imprisons him (Awu, 1996, pp. 169–173). Awu’s literary style is molded by the observation at an early age of the consequences of her parents’ uprooting, of a father belonging to the colonizers’ nation yet in forced exile, and a mother from a colonized People. The stories about her parents oscillate between the veteran father’s tales, “heard hundreds of times already,” told like a tragic leitmotiv “as he drinks the Kaoliang liquor hidden under his bed” (Awu, 1996, p. 162), and the recounting of traumatic events punctuating her childhood. Both parents feel the pain of estrangement and ostracism. However, they remain locked within the confines of their own torments, in a “loveless marriage”: When I was little, our home was always quiet. In addition to the linguistic barrier, my mother admitted frankly: “I really don’t know what to say to your father.” … The relationship between my parents was complicated. My father was thoroughly meticulous, and it often was one of my mother’s shortcomings, and the reason why my father would nag or scold her. (Awu, 1996, pp. 63–65)

Their union is transactional. The father, stranded in Taiwan, wants to start a family. An unscrupulous “marriage broker” then dupes Awu’s grandmother, struggling financially at the time to raise her five children, and Awu’s mother, at the age of seventeen, marries a man 25 years her senior—a common “business deal” in Taiwan during the 1960s (and up to the 1980–1990s), where Indigenous girls and women were also sold into prostitution (Awu, 1996). Awu’s mother leaves her tribe of Pucunug to live with her husband in a juancun,7 where she is routinely bullied by the waisheng wives who “risked their lives to accompany these old soldiers [from China], whose youthful charms had faded,” and who treat young Indigenous women as “ferocious beasts” here to “devour” their spouses (Awu, 1996, p. 36). The mother becomes an exile in her own country, living among a hostile and racist majority whose customs she is foreign to. She is subjected to colonial imaginary, premised upon prevailing stereotypes making out Indigenous Peoples to be barbarians, perpetuated by these waisheng wives, intensifying Indigenous women’s feelings of alienation from their new “homeland.” For the waishengren, she is a fanpo (番婆), “savage woman,” and sandiren (山地人), “mountain person” (two derogatory monikers), despite her acculturation efforts: “Fanpo,” “sandiren,” these are terms my mother had long been accustomed to. Even though she did not speak the same language as my father, and had different customs than him, for her little girls who were still infants, my mother endured these first years, which were the hardest, in the juancun, gritting her teeth. Slowly, she could understand the strong mainland accents, eat the dishes full of hot pepper and garlic, and it seemed like she became accustomed to everything. But the villagers’ prejudice against my mother is like the Paiwans’ skin color on her body, no matter how hard you try to scrub it, it cannot be erased. (1996, p. 36) 7

A juancun (眷村), often translated as “military dependents’ village,” is particular to Taiwan. These residential complexes were built at the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s (and up to the 1960s), to temporarily house Kuomintang soldiers and their dependents who fled China after the Party’s defeat. Without an exact equivalent in English, the pinyin term juancun is retained in this chapter.

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Her children are tormented as well. One day, as the father is away, Awu and her younger sister are “mistreated” by Han children from the juancun, the same children who regularly abuse them verbally and physically, saying: “mountain children eat people” (Awu, 1996, p. 37). Seeing her daughters cry, the mother seeks out the Han children’s mothers to remedy this recurring situation. In response, she is “dragged outside the village to be copiously beaten” by the waisheng spouses who had “long wanted to beat [her] because [she is] a sandiren!” (Awu, 1996, p. 37). Awu then “accidentally stumbles” upon her mother “covered in mud, in a large ravine outside of the juancun” (Awu, 1996, pp. 37–38). Awu’s mother, wanting to protect her daughters from such cruelty, prohibits them from playing with the village children. Moreover, she eventually starts to “feel inferior” due to “the Indigenous blood running through her veins” (Awu, 1996, p. 38). Out of fear and shame, she encourages them to hide their Indigenous ancestry by “telling people they are Chinese,” so they “are not discriminated against” (Caron-Scarulli, 2020, p. 705). Throughout her narration, Awu paints a portrait of Taiwan’s Indigenous women from the 1960s to the 1990s, illustrating the internalization of colonial domination they underwent. Treated as merchandise, having left their tribes, they are, at least temporarily, alienated from their ethnocultural identity. A fracture Awu is familiar with, that is healed by finding a “way back home.”

2.2 A Way Back After becoming a mother, Awu felt that part of her identity was “missing.” During an interview in 2016, she explained how her mother, who “never taught [her] who the Paiwan People were,” was “a stranger” to her (Caron-Scarulli, 2020, p. 705). At the beginning of the 1990s, Awu did not want her own “children to not know” her, but wonders “how to tell them who [she is], since it is impossible to tell them who [her] mother is” and she “only “knows half of herself,” the “paternal half” (CaronScarulli, 2020, p. 705). Awu felt the imperious necessity to “know her mother” (Caron-Scarulli, 2020, p. 705). She undertook investigative fieldwork and an identity quest that excavated long-repressed memories and traumas. One day, when visiting her mother, who returned home since her husband’s passing, to “talk about the past” (Awu, 1996, p. 35), Awu realizes why she had no friends in the juancun where she lived for almost 10 years: Under the impetus of my mother’s words, memories, like beasts whose enclosure was opened, resurface, one after the other. Simultaneously, bit by bit, they gnaw at me: I finally realized why I had no playmates, why my living environment, outside of school, was restricted to my house. The questions imprisoned in my heart finally find their answers: it is because I have an Indigenous mother. At that time, the children from the juancun did not deign to be friends with my little sister and I. So, apart from school, we dared not go anywhere but home, or we would be bullied, and they would usually call us “mountain children.” (p. 35)

The mother’s isolation, due to her Indigeneity, reverberates on her daughters and causes young Awu to both deny her Paiwan roots and attempt assimilating into a

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dominant society that ostracizes her. The children’s insults left such an emotional scar that Awu’s work is pervaded by animal imagery, incarnating here “enclosed” childhood memories. This road of catharsis continued with Red-mouthed Vuvu (Hongzuiba de Vuvu 紅 嘴巴的VuVu), a second collection published in 1997, once again combining family and tribal stories, of Indigenous women from Taiwan and beyond. In “Red-mouthed Vuvu” (1997/2001, pp. 97–127), the eponymous story (the longest, at the heart of the book), Awu’s maternal grandmother, Vuvu Agan, integrates tribal legends, where deities and historical figures intersect and merge, into her life story. The title is an homage to Agan, and by extension to all Indigenous vuvu8 (grandmothers), whose red mouths symbolize the transmission of values and knowledges via storytelling. In the book, Awu travels across Taiwan, reaching various Indigenous Nations: the Aohua Atayal tribe on the Northeast of the island in the first story; the Yushan Bunun village in the center of Taiwan in the third; or, in the eighth, the Truku village of Heping in the East. It closes with Awu’s return “home” to Pucunug, where she celebrates Masalu, the Paiwan sacred millet rite, finalizing the physical and mental journey of a woman reconnecting with her tribal roots. Awu’s third collection, Mulidan—Tribal Letters (穆莉淡 Mulidan: 部落手扎), published in 1998, is an open letter to her long-misunderstood mother, named Mulidan, and an act of reconciliation with her Paiwan “half.” In the preface, as a conclusion to her identity quest, Awu (1998/2004) describes the joy generated by this rapprochement with her mother: The excitement that fills my heart is indescribable. The distance between my mother and I, between the tribe and I, continuously gets narrower. This took place during the creation process of this book. That is why I used my mother’s name, Mulidan, as a book title, in remembrance of the first contact I had with my mother’s glass bead. (pp. 4–5)

A mamazangiljan (member of Paiwan nobility) “bestowed” on Mulidan, who does not belong to the nobility, a name that was, like the eponymous qata (bead), reserved for nobles. She would not have otherwise had the right to bear this symbol-rich name (Awu, 1996, p. 3; Caron-Scarulli, 2020, p. 706) of a qata that was, according to the legend, a gift from the gods. To Awu, it is the emblem of her “Paiwaness,” representing the maternal figure and her desire to never forget her Indigeneity again. After an introspective exploration that compelled her to understand her parents’ mutual alienation feelings and to forge ties with Taiwan’s Indigenous women, Awu embraces her dual belonging. She uses it to impel her readers to discover Taiwan through the invisibles’ eyes. Her literary production is a powerful tool in “decolonizing the mind,” to quote Kenyan (post)colonial theorist Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o (1986), and in reclaiming Indigenous erudition and values. Awu’s process follows what French anti-colonialist, psychiatrist, and essayist Frantz Fanon (1961/2002) describes in The Wretched of the Earth, where the “colonized” is first assimilated into the occupying power’s culture. Then, (s)he is “rattled and decides to remember” (Fanon, 1961/2002, p. 211). Finally, in “the third so-called 8

In the Paiwan language, vuvu can mean grandmother/grandfather/grandparent, as well as granddaughter/grandson/grandchild.

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combat period, … after having attempted to lose oneself in the people, to lose oneself with the people, [(s)he] will, contrariwise, shake up the people,” becoming a “people’s awakener” (Fanon, 1961/2002, p. 211). Following in the footsteps of intellectuals and writers from colonized Peoples, acculturated and trained by Euro/Sinocentric societies, Awu “went back over the line” to produce a “literature of combat” (Fanon, 1961/2002, p. 211).

3 Decolonizing Via Literature: “Dismantling” then “Rebuilding” Awu draws upon her resilience, acquired notably in the juancun, and upon Mandarin language and written systems, to make silenced Indigenous women’s voices heard. Putting forth women relegated to the margins of Han society, she defends their place, their practices, and their experiences on stolen land and within intellectual creations still occulted by the norms of arbitrary hegemonic discourses. Positioning herself with Indigenous women, and as an Indigenous woman, Awu attempts, in the same manner as M¯aori women presented by M¯aori professor emeritus Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999/2005) in her book on decolonizing methodologies, to “reconstruct [Indigenous women’s] traditional roles” (p. 170). She resists and challenges “existing ‘knowledge’ which is primarily ideological or false,” yet validated and circulated by Euro/Sinocentric academic institutions, “entrapping” Indigenous Peoples “within a cultural definition which does not connect with either [their] oral traditions or [their] lived reality (Smith, 1999/2005, pp. 169–171).

3.1 Destigmatizing Indigenous Women Awu’s writings describe the ongoing colonization of Taiwan, where Indigenous women brave all forms of abuse, exploitation, and humiliation. Her quest leads her back to her maternal family, then beyond her ancestors’ path. In the 1990s, Awu explores her island to compile Indigenous women’s life stories, highlighting the richness of their social and cultural fabrics. Hence, she destigmatizes their image, healing the wounds of alienation. Awu underscores the cause of major scourges afflicting Indigenous Peoples—the intrusion of a dominant society and its “tools” that undermine tribal social structures and identites. With colonialism, especially since the Japanese (1895–1945) and Chinese (Kuomintang, 1945–2000) waves, women’s freedoms are gradually restricted, their status drastically deteriorating. Furthermore, Christian missionaries, who arrived soon after the Kuomintang and converted 70 percent of the island’s Indigenous population between 1945 and 1960 (Awu, 1997/2001), regarded many of their customs as “sins.”

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Contrary to women’s position in Han society or the Church, in precolonial Paiwan society, women were not subordinate to men, and could speak freely. They could inherit the role of village chief, divorce, be in same-sex couples, and “lend their womb” (Caron-Scarulli, 2020, p. 707) to same-sex couples, who could also adopt children from the tribe.9 Without derogating from ancestral social norms, in the 1990s, Vuvu Agan decides to divorce her third husband, much to his despair. After two years of marriage, she cannot stand the “strange habit” of this ordinarily “gentle and silent” man, who, “after getting inebriated, invariably loves to whisper and talk incessantly” (Awu, 1996, p. 56). This story is titled “The ears who want a divorce,” mirroring Agan’s words, when she comically tells her granddaughter, while pulling on her own ear: “It’s not me who wants a divorce, it’s my ears, my ears can no longer tolerate his ravings!” (Awu, 1996, p. 58). The “very self-aware” grandmother does not change her mind despite her family’s insistence. Even though “Han society’s gender gap and culture were progressively invading the mentalities of the tribal members” (Awu, 1996, p. 60), Agan does not fear public reprobation. After Awu’s birth, Agan already witnessed this outside influence, as Mulidan is crying when announcing her daughter’s birth, because, for the Han, only the birth of a male heir is a blessing: It turned out that the waisheng son-in-law … was hoping for a strong chubby little man, who would perpetuate his lineage. … For the first time, Vuvu Agan perceived diverging views the width of a river between her and this individual of a different ethnic origin. “Why must you have a boy?” The tribe’s idea of being proud of a first-born daughter is strongly impacted. Answering this question is as complex as choosing the most delicious bethel nut amongst a thousand others. (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 115)

Vuvu Agan’s answer, recounted by Awu, is a message of resistance aimed at Indigenous women. The incursion of foreign values, in opposition with the Paiwan’s, affects the way women are perceived, and, consequently, their role is depreciated. The author, a clarion voice of Elder women’s wisdom, encourages these women to (re)gain their power and control, following Agan’s example, who, in another account, declares: I have the right to make decisions about my own life, I know what kind of life suits me best. … Every woman has her way of singing, her way of living; I sing this way, and my song is not over. (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 123)

By reviving the vuvu’s knowledges and practices, Indigenous women are able to brave decades-long—or even centuries-long—challenges, inter alia, the encroachment on their cultures and lands.

3.2 Defending Practices and Territories In “Who will wear the beautiful clothes I weave” (Awu, 1996), Awu relays the preoccupations of an Amis Elder, who sent her daughter far from the tribe for her 9

This information was gathered during my 2016 interview with Awu.

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education, so she could have a better, more prosperous life. Now worried because she has not passed on her culture to her—from age-old weaving techniques to songs and dances, she asks “when will she come back” and “who will wear the beautiful clothes I weave?” (Awu, 1996, p. 14), and Awu cannot bring herself to disclose the living circumstances of Indigenous people in the cities, who lost “the ancestors’ protection” from being used as capitalists’ cheap labor: Should I tell her this is all due to a dominant culture’s invasion, to the inevitability of capitalism, to inappropriate governmental policies, or to the ethnic groups’ fate, and therefore Indigenous Elders must send their children, one after the other, into the plains society,10 just to get a better education? But as a result, they have forgotten their own mother tongue and the ancestor’s culture? … That many others who share the same Indigenous blood as us, to survive, were forced to leave a familiar tribe for cities without mountains and rivers. They form a large workforce performing dangerous and arduous tasks to support their wives and children. (pp. 14–15)

Awu (1996) wonders “how many fledglings are still lost in this gloomy city? And how many Indigenous people are sweating profusely as they toil on the concrete soilless ground?” (p. 15). The new animal metaphor, fledglings representing young Indigenous persons, is evocative of ancestral Paiwan stories, particularly the one about cultural heroes “Ngangay and Tjugelui,” two children neglected by their mother who turned themselves into birds to survive. However, contrary to the legend, the hardships of Awu’s “fledglings” do not emanate from a parent. Here, they are forced to leave their families for inhospitable cities where they are victims of discrimination and inequality. Awu (1996) thus chronicles the various forms of Han’s exploitation of Indigenous people and territories, such as the arrival of “capitalists who started developing new touristic resources two kilometers away from” Pucunug, joined by “young tribespeople who once worked on the mountains” and “have abandoned the millet fields left by the ancestors … for a comparatively higher income” (p. 39). Awu (1996) then overturns colonial frameworks, refuting Sinocentric visions of civilization, when stating that she “cannot help but be afraid when seeing those successive hordes of civilized beasts outside of the tribe” (p. 39). She engages in a rebuttal of the portrayal of Paiwan People as “ferocious beasts” (Awu, 1996, p. 36), depicting the Han as “civilized beasts.” In response to dehumanizing assimilationist policies that dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands, history, and identity, Awu, herself one of the “subalterns” described by Indian literary and feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, restores the humanity and dignity of Taiwan’s most marginalized women with her words. In Awu’s work, Indigenous women’s life stories are transformed into an interconnection manifesto highly relevant to a committed literature. She links together social and environmental issues heavily impacting the island’s Indigenous population, implicating a capitalist privileged class. For instance, in “Report from Aohua” 10

Awu uses the term pingdi shehui (平地社會), “society of the plains,” in reference to the Pingdiren (平地人), “people of the plains,” the Han settlers who, historically, first colonized the island’s more easily accessible planar areas.

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(Awu, 1997/2001), after looking at the history of Aohua, once a self-sufficient Atayal tribe living off the land, in harmony with its milieu, she produces an alarming ecological assessment of its circumstances of the time. The mining activities of the island’s Han “capitalists” are destroying the surroundings. Similarly, in “Heping village’s fight against the Cement Professional Area,” she visits Heping where she witnesses the Truku’s fierce combat against the Asia Cement Corporation mining their ancestral lands (Awu, 1997/2001). This battle is still underway, where Indigenous representatives denounce the Executive Yuan’s bias in favor of a lucrative international company (Hioe, 2022). Awu, who gives way to Indigenous women’s testimonies, only intervenes to support them, express her own related fears, or weave together their shared experiences. Her presence in stories, even the most personal ones, is implied in her thematic choices, like weaving, a time-honored activity practiced by all Indigenous women of Taiwan. This is a recurring theme in multiple essays of her first book, including the one on the Amis Elder, and in “An Atayal Woman and a Loom” (Awu, 1996), about an Atayal Elder who is weaving, not to clothe her tribesmen, but to entertain non-Indigenous tourists in Taroko National Park. This scene is reminiscent of the Japanese colonization era’s human zoos, where Taiwan Indigenous people were displayed like animals (Caron-Scarulli, 2020). This Elder’s inextricable situation of semi-servitude once again reveals the profound changes of Indigenous women’s roles. Paiwan women once all wove together, telling each other stories to pass the time (Kobayashi, 1998). It was an opportunity for vuvu to pass down social values and rules embedded in these stories, essential to the community’s survival. Weaving, a marker of Indigenous historical and cultural memories, illustrates the potential disappearance of such memories together with the gradual disappearance of its practitioners. However, recording them on paper, for posterity, is in itself a means of preservation, breathing new life into these practices. As her narration progresses, by interlinking past and present, old and new generations, Awu assumes the Elders’ primordial role of passing on the people’s memory and knowledges, placing these women at the center of Indigenous struggles—against social injustices, environmental destruction, or for their right to self-determination—shared between Indigenous Peoples around the world.

4 Trans-Indigenous Bridges In 1991, Awu’s peregrinations led her to the United States, in the Alaskan Gwitch’in village of Venetie, to attend the International Indian Tribal Council (IITC) Conference. Founded in 1974, the IITC, the first Indigenous organization to be recognized as an NGO in 1977, works for “the Sovereignty and Self Determination of Indigenous Peoples and the recognition and protection of Indigenous Rights, Treaties, Traditional Cultures and Sacred Lands” (International Indian Tribal Council, 2022).

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During the Conference, Indigenous people from North America discussed the impact of colonialism, such as the thorough fragmentation of tribal societies.

4.1 Common (Hi)Stories The essay recounting this 1991 encounter is titled “Forty-nine Persons, the Songs and Dances of Forty-nine Persons, the Dances of Forty-nine Persons” (1997/2001). While predating Awu’s first—and perhaps more personal—book, it is included in her second collection, documenting her physical journey throughout Taiwan. Awu’s mental evolution, illustrated by her spatial evolution, entails extending kinship ties to her distant transatlantic family, steering her quest for identity towards a transIndigenous and transnational questioning. Divided in six parts, the essay is strategically placed at the beginning of the collection to give the tone for the rest of the book detailing the trials of Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan. Awu exposes the guiding principle of both Taiwanese and American assimilation policies, namely the alleged moral and intellectual superiority of dominant societies. She pays particular attention to women’s testimonies. In the third part, titled “The Trail of Blood and Tears,” in reference to the infamous Trail of Tears,11 she introduces Little Buffalo Woman, whose children were forcibly sent away in 1987 to governmental schools, favored institutions of acculturation, far from their tribal families: “The White people’s government believes Indigenous communities are ignorant, that we do not know how to educate our children, therefore it has taken my three children” (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 35). Four years later, this mother is still fighting to recover her children, and her disquiet over her children’s future echoes that of Taiwan’s Indigenous mothers. Awu depicts the continuing exile of Indigenous Peoples in North America, whose struggles, much like those of Indigenous Peoples from Taiwan, were shaped by a colonial history replete with acculturation attempts, forced displacements, and discrimination. These all-too-familiar accounts make her wonder when this worldwide oppression of Indigenous Peoples will end: “Every day, the testimonies on Indigenous Peoples being oppressed, bullied, and massacred are reiterated at the Conference. I do not know until when this page in the history of blood and tears will continue?” (Awu, 1997/2001, pp. 35–36). She does notes a major difference with Taiwan, as North America was “vast enough to exile Indigenous Peoples in worthless territories” (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 35) they could still have some form of sovereignty over, at least temporarily. But, as with her mother’s tribe, the “capitalists” were yet again circling what little land they had left, viewing its inhabitants “as a thorn in their eyes,” and working with the government to “find ways to destroy their territories”: 11

The Trail of Tears is the name given to a series of forced displacements. Following the United States government’s “Indian removal” policy (1830–1847), tens of thousands of Natives were removed from their ancestral homelands. They suffered from exposure, hunger and diseases, and many died on the way to—or soon after reaching—a newly designated “Indian Territory.”.

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In the eyes of the Whites, their territories were a lump of shinny gold. From colonization in Columbus’ time, to the discovery of gold, to the subsequent discovery of oil, natural gas, to what became nuclear waste, to the best regions for burying industrial waste, the governmental leaders were unscrupulous about trampling and devastating our territories. (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 36)

After a fourth part on “Means of Education and Acculturation of Indigenous Peoples” (Awu, 1997/2001), the fifth part of the essay, titled “Your God is not our God”, focuses on the invasion of Anglo-Saxon missionaries as a new great calamity precipitating the erosion of social and religious systems (in both North America and Taiwan): “The introduction of the Church broke the original social system of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples, and even entirely destroyed the rituals of their original religions. It cannot be said that such a prejudice is not profound” (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 44). Despite these traumas, Awu (1997/2001), using Cherokee Chief John Ross’s 1930 statement, proclaims that “the most humble and pious request from the bottom of the heart of all Indigenous Peoples throughout the world” is “to live in peace” (p. 36). But to achieve such peace, they must assert their rights to a tribal sovereignty and identity. This is the message conveyed by Indigenous Peoples today, in literary and artistic works, in international political forums, in the media, or any stage where their voices can be heard.

4.2 Survivance Stories During our 2016 interview, Awu expounded on the reason why no Paiwan author from her generation wrote down their People’s oral history and stories. Taiwan’s education system, acting as a cultural isolate, had erased this part of its history (Caron-Scarulli, 2020). Furthermore, at home, children of the double country were raised as Han by mothers ashamed of their Indigeneity and fathers who knew nothing of their spouse’s—and by extension their children’s—heritage, this “foreign” “half” Awu speaks of. In trying to protect their children from the discrimination and alienation they felt, these mothers did not relay their tribal (hi)stories, and unwittingly left an identity vacuum. Awu, by filling this vacuum through “the continuation of Indigenous stories,” produces what Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor (1999) calls “Native stories of survivance,” that “are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (p. vii). From her mother’s attempts at acculturation to her own, Awu deduces they would always be kept in the margins of dominant society, and that they excluded themselves from their own Paiwan culture. In 1990, on the other side of the globe, Okanagan author and artist Jeannette Armstrong (1992) attests of a similar reality for Canada’s First Nations: Imagine at what cost to you psychologically, to acquiesce and attempt to speak, dress, eat, and worship, like your oppressors, simply out of a need to be treated humanly. Imagine attempting to assimilate so that your children will not suffer what you have, and imagine finding that assimilationist measures are not meant to include you but to destroy all remnants

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of your culture. Imagine finding that even when you emulate every cultural process from customs to values you are still excluded, despised, and ridiculed because you are Native. (p. 208)

By featuring heroines resilient in spite of the many wrongs they endured, Awu (1996) hopes “her own children,” and in turn all of Taiwan’s Indigenous children, “will not repeat [her] mistakes” (p. 9), and will not deny their varied cultural origins. Awu (1996), “a child learning how to be Paiwan,” who “forgot her mother for twenty years,” also prays “that Indigenous women may live in their own corner of heaven,” waiting “impatiently that each Indigenous mother may remain beautiful but no longer sad” (p. 9). In comparing Mulidan’s story in the juancun, where she got used to Han usages and customs (Awu, 1996), and Awu’s reverse journey, as she “learns how to be Paiwan” (p. 36), a way towards decolonization is offered to Indigenous women. As is the case for their family across the ocean, for Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples, there is nothing “post” about colonization. They tenaciously fight for their rights to auto-determination and tribal sovereignty, “determined to protect [their] native land, as [they] have for millennia, and as [they] will keep doing” (Pu et al., 2019). Awu (1997/2001) not only resists imperialist encroachment within the psyche of Indigenous Peoples but also exposes the colonizers’ Euro/Sinocentric perspectives on “civilization,” “progress,” “money,” and “resources,” based on their self-proclaimed cultural hegemony that caused an “ideological colonization” (p. 45) of Indigenous minds. Awu presents two social systems, clearly opposed through their mutual incomprehension and incompatibility. Addressing the oppressors’ tools, “reprehensible value systems which promote domination and aggression” (Armstrong, 1992, p. 209), Awu dispels “lies,” refusing to participate in them. She instead produces Indigenous tools—“fundamental co-operative values” and “pacifism” (p. 209). As an Indigenous mother, she is concerned about “lost fledglings,” physically and ideologically distanced from the tribes, some of whom are participating in the exploitation of nature, and shows them a way back. Her collections form a literary matriarchal triptych of three generations of women, Awu, Agan, then Mulidan, who established themselves as strong figures of Indigeneity, and whose life itineraries can inspire other women to liberate themselves from colonial stigmata.

5 Conclusion: Awu’s Heritage Our task as Native writers is twofold. To examine the past and culturally affirm toward a new vision for all our people in the future … We, as Native people, through continuously resisting cultural imperialism and seeking means toward co-operative relationships, provide an integral mechanism for solutions currently needed in this country. Jeannette Armstrong (1992, p. 210)

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Awu did not distance herself from her Han father, even chronicling moments of his life, but from a dominant society whose assimilation attempts caused the social and cultural breakdown of her mother’s People. Her duality became an asset she used to navigate between two dichotomous worlds and cultures, promoting Indigenous values in a predominantly Han country. In doing so, Awu, heir of Paiwan vuvu, ensures the continuity of tribal stories, and as a result, of ancestral values and knowledges in contemporary Indigenous societies. She disseminates these teachings to young Indigenous people dispersed throughout the island and to a readership made aware of Indigenous trials. Awu, at the forefront of Taiwan’s Indigenous feminist movement, has assuredly inspired a new generation of Paiwan authors, who pursue the militant work of their Elders. Among them, Tjinuay Ljivangerau (b. 1983) describes in her poem “Moving. Formosa” (Yidong. Fuermosa 移動·福爾摩沙), published in 2010, the Paiwan surviving by working “on the furthest deep-sea fishing boats and the highest unclimbable scaffoldings” (p. 226). They are “engulfed” by “globalization cyclones,” as are other “members of the same tribe”—migrant workers coming to Taiwan from “the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia” (p. 225). Ljivangerau (2010) weaves together these isolated, uprooted, and exploited parents, all casualties of “inegalitarian trading markets” (p. 226). She offers them a positive outcome, encouraging them to “Take root and blossom—Blossom where [they] are” (p. 227), the way Taiwan’s endemic plants do, to reconquer their territory. From the 1990s to the present day, literary productions of Indigenous women from Taiwan resonate with worldwide oppressed minorities, through their personal and collective experience of ostracism and racism. Speaking from the margins, they “choose to remain, to wear their identifies with pride and work with and for their own communities and nations” (Smith, 1999/2005, p. 199). Challenging dominant ideologies that have led to social inequalities and planetary environmental destruction, they provide all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, an alterNative view of “civilization,” “progress,” and “resources” (Awu, 1997/2001, p. 45). So, we—researchers and actants committed to justice, equality, and dignity—could greatly benefit from being attentive to their legacy of resilience stories.

References Armstrong, J. (1992). The disempowerment of first North American native peoples and empowerment through their writing. In D. D. Moses & T. Goldie (Eds.), An anthology of canadian native literature in English (pp. 207–211). Oxford University Press. Awu, L. 利格拉樂·阿烏. (1996). 誰來穿我織的美麗衣裳 [Who will wear the beautiful clothes I weave]. Morning Star. Awu, L. (2001). 紅嘴巴的VuVu [Red-mouthed Vuvu]. Morning Star. (Original work published 1997). Awu, L. (2004). 穆莉淡 Mulidan: 部落手扎 [Mulidan—Tribal letters]. Nushu wenhua. (Original work published 1998)

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Bourdieu, P. (1998, March). L’essence du néolibéralisme. Le Monde diplomatique, 528, 3. Retrieved from https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/BOURDIEU/3609. Caron-Scarulli, F. (2020). De l’orature ancestrale à la littérature contemporaine des Dakotapi et des Paiwan : histoire(s) de résilience trans-autochtone [Doctoral thesis, Aix-Marseille Université]. HAL. Retrieved from https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02480191 Fanon, F. (2002). Les damnés de la terre. Éditions La Découverte & Syros. (Original work published 1961). Hioe, B. (2022, February 17). Indigenous representatives criticise Executive Yuan Report on Asia Cement mine. New Bloom/ 關於破土. Retrieved from https://newbloommag.net/2022/02/17/eyreport-asia-cement/. International Indian Treaty Council. (2022). About ITTC. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https:// www.iitc.org/about-iitc/. Kobayashi, Y. (1998). 排灣傳說集 [Collection of Paiwan legends] (Matsuzawa K. 松澤員子, Ed.; Xie L. 謝荔, Trans.). SMC Publishing. Ljivangerau, T. (2010). 移動·福爾摩沙 [Moving. Formosa]. In Sun T. (Ed.), 用文字釀酒. 用筆來 唱歌: 99年臺灣原住民族文學獎得獎作品集 [Using the written language to make wine, using a pen to sing: 2010 Taiwan Indigenous Literary Awards winning works’ collection] (pp. 224–227). Council of Indigenous Peoples. Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (Revised ed.). Crossing Press. (Original work published 1984). Ng˜ug˜ı, w. T. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey; Heinemann Kenya; Heinemann; Zimbabwe Publishing House. Pu, C., Mateli, S., Magaitan, L. et al. (2019, January 17). 習近平先生, 你不懂尊嚴, 因此誤會了 偉大!台灣原住民族致中國的一封信 [Mr Xi Jinping, you do not understand dignity, therefore, you fail to understand greatness! A letter to China from Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples]. ESG 永續台灣—今周刊. Retrieved from https://esg.businesstoday.com.tw/article/category/180698/ post/201902190028/. Smith, L. T. (2005). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books; University of Otago Press. (Original work published 1999). Stétié, S. (1997). L’homme du double pays. Esprit, 228(1), 140–142. Retrieved from http://www. jstor.org/stable/24277017. Vizenor, G. (1999). Manifest manners: Narratives on postindian survivance. University of Nebraska Press.

Fanny Caron is an associate researcher of the IrAsia research unit, CNRS-Aix-Marseille University, France, member of the research teams five: “Transmission of knowledge, orientation of social values”, and one: “Asian literatures and translations.” She defended her PhD in Chinese Languages and Literatures from AMU, titled “From ancestral Orature to contemporary Literature of the Dakotapi and the Paiwan: (hi)stories of trans-indigenous resilience,” January 10, 2020. Having been trained and educated in the fields of General and Comparative Literature and of Chinese Studies, her work is multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary. Such transversal epistemological approach was useful for her study of Indigenous orature and literature, analyzed from a literary and stylistic standpoint, and from an anthropological one. She is now expanding her research to Dakotapi and Paiwan contemporary works (plastic and musical) by female artists who perpetuate and enrich Indigenous artistic practices by exploring their alterNative viewpoints and knowledges.

On Ethnicities and Races

Through an Indigenous Lens: Syaman Rapongan’s Rewriting of Oceanic Taiwan Chia-rong Wu

Taiwan is an oceanic country. The ocean is coded in the DNA of Taiwanese people –Tsai Ing-wen, President of Taiwan (as cited in Teng, 2018)

Abstract This chapter examines oceanic discourse in Taiwan literature with a focus on Syaman Rapongan (夏曼·藍波安), whose seafaring writing diversifies Taiwan’s land-centered Indigenous literature and goes beyond the political arena of the islandstate and the long-established cross-Strait dynamic. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part tackles the overlapping of Taiwan’s Indigenous literature and marine literature with an extensive survey of Rapongan’s literary journey as an Indigenous writer, his cultural resistance against the island-state, and his love of the ocean. The second part provides a critical analysis of Rapongan’s Floating Dreams in the Ocean (大海浮夢, 2014) and Mata nu Wawa (大海之眼, 2018). Rapongan provides a deconstructive critique of the Han Chinese-dominated ideology in Taiwan and employs the Pacific Ocean as an expansive, all-encompassing entity across geographical, racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. Rapongan’s writing strategy sheds light on the heated discussions of the reproduction of Taiwan’s Indigeneity in response to the oceanic discourse of Taiwan. Through an Indigenous lens, Rapongan’s works help reshape Taiwan literature and connect Taiwan with the global tribal communities via ocean passages. Keywords Syaman Rapongan · Oceanic Taiwan · Indigenous literature · Pacific ocean Excluded from the United Nations, Taiwan is a contested democratic island-nation of 23.5 million people across ethnicities in the Pacific Ocean. In the twentieth century, Taiwan endured the longest martial law period (1949–1987) in world history, during which the Kuomintang (KMT), also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party, dictated Taiwanese people and reinforced the ideology that China was the symbolic homeland C. Wu (B) University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_11

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to Taiwan both culturally and politically. Taiwan’s political stance in the international community is also severely challenged by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under its One China Policy. Despite all the odds, Taiwan has gradually developed a unique national identity through the reconstruction of Indigeneity and reexamination of its maritime history. As Shih-Shan Henry Tsai points out, Contrary to a widespread misconception regarding the history of China-Taiwan relations, Chinese influence was not significantly felt in Taiwan until the second half of the seventeenth century, even though the island is separated from mainland China by only a 100-mile strait. Moreover, the transmission of Chinese culture to Taiwan was continually met with competing countercurrents emanating from the larger maritime world. (2014, p. 3)

Long before the massive immigration of Han Chinese settlers from the seventeenth century onward, Taiwan was “home to diverse indigenous groups,” and in the following centuries, “Taiwanese peoples from many origins and ethnicities” had formulated a “collective identity” that “was anything but Chinese” (Feng, 2018). One has to keep in mind that Taiwan’s cultural position is further complicated by the colonial practices of the Dutch and the Spanish and the short-lived command by late-Ming Admiral Koxinga in the seventeenth century, followed by the Qing court’s imperial reign from 1683 to 1895, Japan’s colonial rule from 1895 to 1945, and the KMT’s authoritarian governance in the postwar era. It is significant to observe how the political focus of contemporary Taiwan is shifting from the continental heritage of China and Chinese diaspora, as experienced by earlier Chinese immigrant settlers, to a far-reaching global Indigenous network across the Pacific Ocean, thus creating a particular oceanic discourse of its own and fostering an imagined community, as defined by Benedict Anderson, in the profound process of localization and nation-building. This chapter examines oceanic discourse in Taiwan literature with a focus on Syaman Rapongan (夏曼·藍波安; b. 1957), whose seafaring writing diversifies Taiwan’s land-centered Indigenous literature and goes beyond the political arena of the island-state and the long-established cross-Strait dynamic. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part tackles the overlapping of Taiwan’s Indigenous literature and marine literature with a survey of Rapongan’s literary journey as an Indigenous writer, his cultural resistance against the island-state, and his love of the ocean. The second part provides a critical analysis of Rapongan’s Floating Dreams in the Ocean (Dahai fumeng 大海浮夢, 2014) and Mata nu Wawa (Dahai zhi yan 大海之眼, 2018). Rapongan provides a deconstructive critique of the Han Chinesedominated ideology in Taiwan and employs the Pacific Ocean as an expansive, allencompassing entity across geographical, racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. Rapongan’s writing strategy sheds light on heated discussions of the reproduction of Taiwan’s Indigeneity in response to the oceanic discourse of Taiwan. Through an Indigenous lens, Rapongan’s works help reshape Taiwan literature and connect Taiwan with the global tribal communities via ocean passages. Taiwan contains 16 officially recognized Indigenous peoples: Amis (Pangcah), Atayal, Bunun, Hla’alua, Kavalan, Kanakanavu, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Sakizaya, Sediq, Tao (Yami), Thao, Truku, and Tsou, all of which belong to the

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enlarged Austronesian-speaking world. About 5,000 years ago, some of Taiwan’s Indigenes undertook southbound voyages and were later intermarried with other Pacific Islanders. According to Todd (2021), “The linguistic legacy of these voyages comprises over 1,200 Austronesian languages spread across a vast realm: not just Southeast Asia, but also Madagascar, Micronesia, Melanesia and the Polynesian triangle bounded by Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand.” Since 2016, Taiwan’s reconstruction of its collective Indigenous identity is ideologically amplified by President Tsai Ing-wen, whose paternal grandmother is from the Paiwan tribe. While the Taiwanese ruling party is setting a lofty political goal to mobilize the antiChina, nationalist sentiment of the people through the Indigenous subjectivity of the island, Indigenous peoples’ history and culture are ironically in crisis due to the rapid urbanization and modernization of Taiwan. Like other tribal nations around the world, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples are faced with cultural assimilation from within and from the dominant West. Although the stigmatization of Indigenous Taiwanese peoples is no longer a common practice as previously observed under Japan’s and the KMT’s rules, the Indigenous communities in Taiwan continue to be plagued by “alcoholism, out-migration, economic hardship, and cultural threat” even though “indigenous consciousness” and “multicultural awareness” (Shih, 2013, p. 4) are gradually thriving on the island. Since the 1980s, Indigenous activists have started a series of protests to fight for the preservation of their tribal cultures and rights to the land. A great number of Indigenous writers are also involved in these political campaigns through active participation and literary creation. Syaman Rapongan is undoubtedly one of the most notable Indigenous activists and writers for his contribution to Taiwan’s marine literature in the new era. Taiwan’s marine literature has a delayed start. In the past 400 years, written accounts about Taiwan and the seas around it were mainly produced by the Other, such as Qing officials, Han Chinese settlers, and Japanese colonizers, granting very limited space and agency to Indigenous people. In the twentieth century, Taiwan literature gradually gained widespread recognition and political weight through the native-soil (or nativist) movement, which promoted writings on Taiwanese history, place, and people. Still, marine literature remained a relatively vague term in postwar Taiwan. As Min-min Wu (2005) observes, the ocean was never the “focus of attention” and merely served as “spatial scene” and “imagery” (p. 118) in Taiwan literature from the 1950s to 1980s. Since the 1980s, marine literature has become an important subcategory of Taiwan literature in relation to nature writing and ecocriticism. Broadly defined, marine literature points to literary works relating to “the ocean or any activities in the ocean,” and it covers a vast range of genres: “poetry, prose, novel, theatre, literary diary, and literary biography” (Lin, 2007, p. 92). To be more specific, marine literature is centered around the ocean and contains “various natural scenes of the sea, sea creatures, and the interaction between humans and the ocean”; oceanic writing can be extended to the depiction of sailors, fishermen, and navy in response to “the unique consciousness” and “spiritual values” of the ocean (Hsieh, 2017, p. 89). It was not until the 1990s that Syaman Rapongan and Liao Hung-Chi, a non-Indigenous writer, began to bring localist oceanic writings to the attention of general readers and critics.

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Born in 1957, Syaman Rapongan, whose Chinese name is Shi Nulai, is of Tao aboriginal descent from Orchid Island, a small island close to the southeastern coast of Taiwan. He left his hometown for high school education on the main island of Taiwan in 1973. Upon graduation, he audaciously declined the special benefit granted by the government for Indigenous students like him to be admitted to colleges without taking the highly competitive college entrance examination. Instead, he started working part-time and studying for examination himself. It took him several years to pass the exam and enter Tamkang University and finally earned his Bachelor’s degree in French in 1986. After enduring hardship and discrimination on the main island, Rapongan decided to return to Orchid Island in search of his cultural roots as a Tao man and an Indigenous writer. Compared with his fellow Indigenous writers, Syaman Rapongan stands tall in the literary arena of Taiwan for his writing about Orchid Island and the Pacific Ocean. For thousands of years, Orchid Island has been home to the Taos, the only Indigenous people not inhabiting the main island of Taiwan. As reported by Liou (2017), “the Taos have shared more similarities and interacted more frequently with the Ivatan indigenes on the Batan islands of the Philippines,” while “continental (Han Chinese and Han Taiwanese) knowledge was not to be introduced to them until the Qing dynasty” (p. 327). Compared with other Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, Tao people in Orchid Island stand out for their devotion to the ocean-centered lifestyle and beliefs. While other Indigenous writers focus on land- or mountain-based narratives, Rapongan adds diversity and depth to Taiwan’s Indigenous literature with his unparalleled oceanic writing. As Syaman Rapongan skillfully incorporates his real-life experience as a Tao fisherman into his oceanic writing, he has attracted a large readership and received very positive reviews far and wide. He has earned numerous accolades, including the Wu San-Lien Award, Taiwan Literature Golden Award, and Wu Chuo-liu Literary Prize. Rapongan is emotionally attached to the traditional Tao way of living both on paper and in real life. Confronting the dominant Indigenous hunters’ tales from the main island, Rapongan instills in his writing the essential practices of the Tao people, including plank boat building, spearfishing, and navigation. To him, the ocean can be feared; yet, it is dearer than his family by blood and serves as an integral part of his literary works. In addition to Floating Dreams in the Ocean and Mata nu Wawa, Rapongan’s representative works include Kavavatanen No Ta-u Jimask (Badaiwan de shenhua 八代灣的神話; Legends of Badai Bay, 1992), Cold Sea, Deep Emotions (Lenghai qingshen 冷海情深, 1997), Black Fins (Heise de chibang 黑色的翅膀, 1999), Memories of the Waves (Hailang de jiyi 海浪的記憶, 2002), Old Sea Men (Laohai ren 老海人, 2009), Face of the Navigator (Huanghaijia de lian 航海家的 臉, 2011), Eyes in the Sky (Tiankong de yanjing 天空的眼睛, 2012), and Death of Ngalumirem (Anluo mienzhi si 安洛米恩之死, 2015). As disclosed in his autobiographical prose collection—Cold Sea, Deep Emotions, Rapongan straddles his Tao background and the Han-dictated education he received. Rapongan’s relocation from Taipei back to Orchid Island corresponds with the rampant Indigenous movement that celebrates the return to one’s native soil and cultural tradition. What is worth noting here is that Rapongan, while culturally semiSinicized, endures a painful process of re-adaptation into the Tao community. He

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has to re-learn the tribal language and adjust his cultural position in order to reclaim his long-lost identity as a Tao fisherman. Ironically, spearfishing has been widely recognized as nothing but a pastime in Orchid Island in the contemporary era. How to revive Tao traditions thus becomes the top priority in Rapongan’s daily practice and critical thinking. Therefore, Rapongan’s rewiring of oceanic Taiwan is not unlike a symbolic journey of self-redemption in connection with the greater Oceanic community. With a detail-oriented account, Rapongan showcases diverse aspects of Tao people, including oral storytelling, religious rituals, and fishing and navigation knowledge. The highlight of Rapongan’s writing is the vivid depiction of the Flying Fish Festival, which is the most important ceremony for Tao people. This traditional ceremony combines Tao people’s fishing practice and cultural ritual and further points to the profound relationship between humanity and natural environment on an ecological level. As Rapongan’s father told him, “The natural world provides for us Yami people. Don’t trust the books (i.e. science) because it is the arch-criminal that destroys natural ecology” (Rapongan, 1997, p. 140). To better promote ecological consciousness, Rapongan’s story also leads readers to ponder over the foreseeable environmental disasters to be caused by the storage of nuclear waste in Orchid Island. From 1982 to 1996, tons of barrels of nuclear waste were shipped to Orchid Island. The impending danger of radiation leaks has become a shared nightmare of the Tao people. Rapongan’s ecological concern is overlapped with his critical observation of the struggle faced by his fellow tribespeople. In this case, Rapongan’s promotion of sustainable natural environments is reinforced by his fight for the exclusive cultural and sociopolitical spaces for the Tao people. In a nutshell, Cold Sea, Deep Emotions functions as a strong entry into the understanding of Rapongan’s oeuvre because it captures how the author not only embarks on a prolonged quest for indigeneity but also offers a nuanced take on the illuminating dynamic between humanity and nature in the Pacific Ocean. In the following section, I bring into focus two recent works by Rapongan in order to examine his ongoing attempt to channel unease and anxiety of Indigenous subjects in the face of dire postcolonial situations and to embrace a sparkling narrative of the Tao spirit in Orchid Island and in the open sea. Floating Dreams in the Ocean is an autobiographical novel full of family history, personal experience, and cross-cultural encounters. This novel contains four chapters: “The Hungry Childhood,” “Exile in the South Pacific Ocean,” “Navigating through the Moluccas Strait,” and “In Search of the Codes of the Sea.” Readers can see in Rapongan the determination required for an Indigenous writer to voice for himself and for his tribal community. Rapongan opens the novel with his strong interest in the South Pacific Islands and Oceania. His dream is to travel from island to island and mix and mingle with various island peoples. As Rapongan (2014) makes clear in the book, “If ‘ocean’ is a nation, it is absolutely the republic where I seek shelter” (pp. 25–26). While desiring a panOceanic identity, Rapongan does not intend to undermine the individuality of each tribal nation. Tao is no exception. Tao, or Ta-u, means people. Although it is a Chinese-language novel, Rapongan relies on the romanization of certain Tao terms and expressions to preserve his tribal language. The original name of Orchid Island is “Pongso no Ta-u,” which means the “island of the (Tao) people” (Rapongan, 2014,

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p. 27). The author’s emphasis on the original tribal name points to his strong belief in returning to traditions, as Indigenous peoples in Taiwan are forced into a Han Chinese-centered setting and suffer from a coercive political and economic system. As the novel unfolds, the protagonist, Cigewat, which is Syaman Rapongan’s original tribal name, experienced how the state powers, Japan and the KMT alike, ruthlessly exploited the Tao people by force. At first glance, the colonial governments educated and civilized Tao indigenes in the name of modernity. It seems to have solved the food shortage and hunger problems in the Tao community, but it has also caused the side effect of modernity—that is, poverty. Rapongan cleverly places hunger and poverty side by side in differentiating the tribal primitivism and the oversophisticated civilization. Nevertheless, Rapongan underscores a different layer of his cultural practice while paying tribute to nature and tribal traditions through the knowledge of Tao senior citizens: From our perspective, [the Tao seniors] seem to only care about their food and survival. In reality, it goes beyond the basic level and involves the life practices and rituals of the cultural content in line with the harmony among family and villages and with the unity of seasonal changes and psychological states. (2014, p. 53)

The above statement is a salient justification of Tao people’s traditional values. Tribespeople may benefit from modern resources and facilities, but, consequently, they have to face the undesirable reality in which they gradually lose their communal space and cultural integrity to the hegemonic political regime and colonizers. One memorable scene in the novel is the author’s revisit to the government’s decision to build storage for nuclear waste in Orchid Island, which has made a massive impact on Tao people’s lives since the 1980s. It is the reason the author leads readers to investigate the discomfiting aspect of fiction coupled with reality in relation to the plight of Tao people and to understand his rebound from it by shaping Indigenous subjectivity in a profound way. Starting in the second chapter of Floating Dreams in the Ocean, Syaman Rapongan fulfills his ambition to re-create an overarching oceanic framework. In the story, the author not only criticizes nuclear waste storage in Orchid Island but also lashes out against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific by western countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Rapongan’s transpacific concern speaks to his close engagement with the cultural, linguistic, and genetic interconnectedness of Austronesian peoples across the Pacific. Interestingly, Rapongan does not limit his oceanic narrative to the Austronesian family. To expand his scope, he includes a section about his encounter with young fishermen who are Qiang people—one of the ethnic minority groups in China. Qiang people mainly live in the remote mountainous region of Sichuan near the Tibetan Plateau, but these Qiang characters in the novel join the distant water fishing crew in an attempt to make a living and save for the next stage of their life. Despite their different ethnicities, purposes, and fishing methods in the sea, Rapongan identifies these Qiang fishermen as wavechasers who catch fish and share the same marine space with him in the Pacific. It creates a profound minority-to-minority dialogue across borders in opposition to the one singular Indigenous voice and to the political clash between China and Taiwan.

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Rapongan’s border-crossing vision is further enriched in the third and fourth chapters of the novel. Chapter 3 revolves around Rapongan’s sea voyage on Sandeq Explorer, a replica of an ancient Indonesian boat, from May to July in 2005. Together with the Japanese adventurer Yamamoto Yoshiyuki and five Indonesian sailors, Rapongan started his journey from Indonesia but did not reach Los Angeles as originally planned by Yamamoto. After a phone call with his two daughters, Yamamoto decided to end his exploration early and return to his family whom he had not seen for 11 years. Yamamoto’s return to Japan is echoed by Rapongan’s homecoming towards the end of the chapter. Despite their shared love for sea exploration, Rapongan and Yamamoto return home respectively, which is indicative of family dynamic as one’s final destination. On a higher level, the author’s identity is complete with his return to family and Tao traditions in that his literary practice hinges on his unflagging love for his people, island, and the vast ocean. The novel ends with a brief account of the founding of the Island Indigenous Science Studio (IISS), which is tasked to fight for the preservation and promotion of the Indigenous island culture. At the close of the novel, Rapongan expresses his primitive hunger as a concluding remark, thereby reinstating his political agenda about tribal integrity and ideological resistance against oppressive state power. Four years after the success of Floating Dreams in the Ocean, Syaman (Rapongan’s, 2018a, b) work Mata nu Wawa, which literally means “eyes of the ocean,” was published in Taiwan to critical acclaim. In this account, Rapongan takes his readers on a richly imagined journey of navigating his lost years on the main island of Taiwan and his resolution to keep alive Tao traditions in Orchid Island. The author takes a further step to draw the fine line between the nation-state and Indigenous tribes while rethinking his cultural relationship with the Pacific. The self-sustaining community formed by Tao people in Orchid Island was violated and claimed by colonizers, and these Indigenous inhabitants have been downgraded to ethnic minorities, like other Taiwanese Indigenes on the main island, by the continental center, thus gradually losing their sublime connection with the ocean. In the Preface of the novel, Rapongan (2018b) makes explicit his challenge against the socalled “civilized people,” such as “pilots, lawyers, doctors, priests, and teachers,” all of whom are tasked to tame “the minorities” (p. 17). The novel draws on one special incident regarding the traditional ritual of honoring Yami ancestral spirits and how it was harshly disrupted by the symbolic outsiders—the local chief of police (Han Chinese) and the Catholic priest (Caucasian). As a witness on the scene, Rapongan (2018a) was inspired by his granduncle’s heated conflict with “the political colonizer” and “the religious colonizer” and thus developed a stronger connection with the “primitive belief” of tribal nations and their “ritual civilization” in response to “the natural and environmental laws” (pp. 39–40). Not only does the dominant power intervene the proceedings of religious ceremonies, it confiscates the land from the Tao people, re-names local places and people in Chinese, and stores nuclear waste in Orchid Island. In face of the total decline of his tribal culture, Rapongan illustrates his concern about the identity crisis faced by all Tao people. Little by little the new generations are being tamed and domesticated while accepting the makeover carefully crafted and executed by the nation-state. Take the author’s elder sister for

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example. Rapongan’s elder sister left behind her family and Tao roots and eloped with a non-Indigenous soldier belonging to the community of Han Chinese mainlanders because she wanted to start a new life across the sea. The decision made by Syaman Rapongan’s elder sister is not uncommon in Taiwan since more and more young Indigenous people have chosen to move to urban areas and adopt the Han Chinese lifestyle on the main island. Yet, to the author, it is a descent into anguish as an enlarged group of Indigenous subjects like himself are struggling to settle into the Han Chinese-dominated society. What Rapongan bears in mind is the practice of cultural resistance to contest the unjust and overpowering Other represented by the government. It is why Rapongan continues to push forward his provocative rhetoric of anti-Sinicization from the Tao perspective. As the author comments, I ask myself. Waves and I are oceanic ethnicities, but the Taiwanese government does not call us as such. They call us all mountain people, which is an official citizenship granted to us by the nation-state. In other words, we are openly discriminated by the “nation-state.” It is Han Chinese people’s collective hatred and discrimination against the foremost masters of the Taiwanese island. … It is a perverted country, a perverted ethnicity. (Rapongan, 2018a, pp. 197–198)

The author’s statement above exudes frustration and despondency that have been plaguing all Indigenous peoples in Taiwan for hundreds of years. While Taiwanese Indigenes’ wish to live a peaceful autonomous life is thwarted, Rapongan captures an insight into the deeply collective troubled mind of the people of his kind in contemporary Taiwan. In this case, his penetrating critique through literary writing presents a powerful challenge to the Taiwanese government and helps Indigenous subjects detox from a traumatizing past and generate a positive view of their cultural customs and practices. The last chapter of Mata nu Wawa is entitled “I Chose the Classical Literature of the Ocean,” which begins with Syaman Rapongan’s 2016 trip to Greenland—the largest island in the world. It is interesting to note that Greenland is located in the North Atlantic Ocean, separated from the Pacific Islands or Oceania. The fundamental takeaway here is twofold. On the one hand, Rapongan is revising and stretching his worldview. The façade of Rapongan’s oceanic writing is conformed to a cross-cultural construct compounded by the Pacific Islands as a whole and beyond. It is through the inclusion of Greenland that Rapongan’s island-oriented discourse is restructured and reconfirmed. On the other hand, Rapongan explores the immense potentiality of the ocean in reproducing classical literature for his people from a different angle. In the academic arena of Taiwan, classical literature is a specific field reserved for traditional Chinese and western canons. Therefore, the creation of Indigenous classical literature leads to a further examination of the relationship between islands and the ocean and between humanity and nature in the context of Taiwan. Switching from the grand oceanic worldview back to Orchid Island, Rapongan continues to impress with a sophisticated account of his antinuclear waste campaigns, labelled Exorcism of the Evil Spirits, in 1988 and 2012 respectively. Politically speaking, Rapongan’s radical acts brought into the limelight Orchid Island and the basic human rights of Tao people.

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As an oceanic writer, Syaman Rapongan criticizes colonization and promotes animism, which embraces the distinctive spiritual essence of all things, both the living and the inanimate. From Rapongan’s perspective, there should be no hierarchy among worldviews and religions. As mentioned in the novel, the author came to a great realization that Chinese-language literature is “land-based” and a literature that divides, whereas his “island literature” is an “oceanic” and “discriminated,” rather than “colonized,” literature—that is, his “unique translated literature of the ocean and islands” (Rapongan, 2018a, p. 258). Rapongan’s practice of translation is twofold. On one level, Rapongan uses the Chinese language as the medium to deliver his thoughts drawn from the tribal language of the Taos. On another, Rapongan elevates his translation by employing “ethnographic descriptions” to emphasize “local knowledge and expressions specific to the [Tao] tribe” (Chiu, 2009, p. 1075). In the light of cultural translation, this edifying novel concludes with the author’s comparison of two world maps. At the age of 10, Rapongan spotted a world map at the local school in Orchid Island. To his dismay, the Pacific Ocean on the map is divided in two and loses its entirety. Thirty-eight years later, Rapongan was thrilled to discover a Pacific Ocean-centered world map in Rarotonga, which is the largest island in the Cook Islands. This Pacific-centered world map is now hung up on the wall of Rapongan’s residence in Orchid Island. Being local and boundary-crossing simultaneously, the author declares his abiding love for the vast ocean and always seeks to facilitate the links among islands and islanders in Mata nu Wawa. Both Floating Dreams in the Ocean and Mata nu Wawa explore themes of Indigenous consciousness, cultural resistance against colonial subjugation, and sustainable connection with nature. These essential topics are welcome to the postcolonial discourse of Taiwan literature, which celebrates the emergence of ethnic and cultural diversity. Over the past few decades, Indigenous writings have become a crucial part of the heritage of Taiwan literature. Separated from the pursuit of modernity, Indigenous writers focus more on the issue of how to better represent their real-life experience and envision their tribal traditions. According to Shu-Ming Tung (2013), “Indigenous writers” like Rapongan “attempt to write about tribal customs, systems, regulations, and rituals” through their “memories of life” in order to “reconstruct” their “traditions” and recover their “values and meanings in modern society” (p. 69). On a deeper level, PohSuan Chen (2021) resorts to the “human” identity of each Indigenous writer and explores how their literary creation helps realize a real “practice of life” (p. 256) while speaking to tribal cultures and returning to tribes. The above findings lead to a further reexamination of Rapongan’s writing on the Tao community and his sociopolitical and ecocritical agendas. Undoubtedly, Rapongan demonstrates a special way to embody the peculiar character of Orchid Island and the Pacific, thus enriching the distinguished collection of Taiwan literature in the twentyfirst century. However, as Indigenous literature is “incorporated” by the Other, it is also “appropriated” as the “metaphor of ‘Taiwaneseness’” (Huang, 2006, p. 98). The cultural appropriation performed by the nation-state is disapproved of by Rapongan. Although Orchid Island is part of the Taiwanese territory, it is hailed as a free-floating Tao community linked with a wider world under Rapongan’s design.

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In the mental map drawn by the respected elders of the Tao community in 1929, Orchid Island is part of “the circle that includes their small island and the islands of Batanes in the Philippines” (Lamuran and Vayayana, 2016, p. 154), while the main island of Taiwan is excluded. Chen and Chiu (2021) also argue that Tao can be regarded as “part of a trans-Indigenous Oceanian culture” in response to “a broader cross-cultural context” (p. 62). It is a bold move for Rapongan to combat the dominant native-soil, or nativist, writing strategy of Taiwan literature developed from the twentieth century onward. While most nativist writers are trying to imagine and construct a collective Taiwanese subjectivity across ethnicities, Rapongan’s works evince no interest in a pan-Taiwanese identity but instead reflect the particular time and space experienced by Tao people and expand the horizons of his Indigenous writing through a nuanced narrative about the Pacific Ocean. As Hsinya Huang (2013) aptly argues, Rapongan’s Tao ancestors used to move freely in the Pacific Ocean, following the migratory route of the flying fish that are subject to the flow of the Kuroshio Current. This northflowing current on the west side of the North Pacific drives the flying fish migration, which, in turn, shapes and reshapes the migratory route of the island indigenes. Because of the regular movement among the islands, Pacific Islanders conceive of their environment as an extensive, communal body that follows the pathway of the current. The sense of community encompasses not only similar human beings on the seas but nonhuman species, generating a widening circle of associations. (2013, p. 124)

It is clear Rapongan is seeking to revive the traditional belief and ritual of the Tao community before the colonization of the island was initiated hundreds of years ago. Ditching the main island for the expansive Pacific Ocean, Rapongan’s writing represents a non-cooperative narrative within the literary arena of Taiwan and beyond. As Rapongan (2018b) ventures into Pacific-centered discourse, he does not identify himself as a Taiwanese writer but as “a writer of world islands” and “a writer of oceanic ethnicity” (p. 20). Evocatively, Rapongan’s writing is endowed with an entrancing interplay of islands and the ocean. Rapongan’s political agenda reminds readers of the “We are the ocean” theory presented by Hau‘ofa (2008), an influential Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist: There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands.” The first emphasises dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centres of power. Focusing in this way stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships. (p. 31)

One may use Hau‘ofa’s theory to grasp the core of Rapongan’s oceanic writing, in which the Tao community is encompassed in the Pacific Ocean in its entirety. Rapongan’s literary works trace journeys across the Pacific Ocean and reinforce connections to an extensive seafaring culture. His ocean-focused strategy extends the scope of Taiwan literature and creates a fascinating blend of Indigenous voices and tales of islands. It is a refreshing take to strengthen Taiwan’s cultural tie with the Pacific and even global Indigenous communities. In other words, Rapongan leads readers to reassess Orchid Island’s relevance to the main island of Taiwan and to the oceanic world by rejecting hierarchies among ethnicities and races and by challenging boundaries of nations and cultures. Through his oceanic writing about Tao

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people and Orchid Island, Rapongan not only achieves greatness by confronting colonial mindsets but also stimulates the literary production of worlding Orchid Island and Taiwan in the twenty-first century. When it comes to Taiwan as a contested island-state, from north to south, from Indigenous to Han settlers, the reconstruction of its collective cultural identity in opposition to the continental discourse of China is a topic impossible to miss. Orchid Island might be a small island of merely thousands of Tao people and has long been exploited and marginalized by the Taiwanese government. Yet, Orchid Island functions as a sea portal for justifying Taiwan as an oceanic island-state separated from mainland China. Given its cross-cultural and political significance, Rapongan’s rewriting of oceanic Taiwan is a narrative that never wears out.

References Chen, C.-F., & Chiu, K.-F. (2021). Indigenous Literature In Contemporary Taiwan. In C. Huang, D. Davies, & D. Fell (Eds.), Taiwan’s contemporary indigenous peoples (pp. 53–69). Routledge. Chen, P. H. (2021). 知識、技藝與身體美學: 台灣原住民漢語文學析論 [Knowledge, Artistry and Somaesthetics in Taiwan Indigenous Literature]. 元華文創 [eculture]. Chiu, K.-F. (2009). The production of indigeneity: Contemporary indigenous literature in Taiwan and trans-cultural inheritance. The China Quarterly, 200, 1071–1087. Feng, J. (2018, August 2). Reconceiving Taiwan as a pacific Island country. The Diplomat. Retrieved from https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/reconceiving-taiwan-as-a-pacific-island-country/. Hau‘ofa, E. (2008). We are the ocean: Selected works. University of Hawai’i Press. Hsieh, Y.-L. (2017). 性別、景致與家國 簡媜與蔡素芬的海洋書寫探析 [Gender, landscape and home country: Analysis on the ocean writing of Jian, Zhen and Tsai, Su-Fen]. 海洋文化學刊 [Oceanic Culture Journal], 23, 87–123. Huang, H. (2006). 「現代性」與台灣原住民文學: 以夏曼‧藍波安與利格拉樂‧阿女烏作品 為例 [“Modernity” and Taiwan Aboriginal Literature]. 中外文學 [Chung Wai Literary Monthly], 35(5), 81–122. Huang, H. (2013). Toward transpacific ecopoetics: Three indigenous texts. Comparative Literature Studies, 50(1), 120–147. Lamuran, S., & vayayana, tibusung0’e. (2016). 達悟族傳統生態知識與其永續性價值 [Tao traditional ecological knowledge and its value for sustainability]. 地理研究 [Journal of Geographical Research], 65, 143–167. Lin, C.-H. (2007). “臺灣海洋文學”的成立及其作家作品 [Taiwan ocean literature-establishment, writers and their works]. 明道通識論叢 [MingDao Journal of General Education], 3, 89–111. Liou, W.-T. (2017). The colonial palimpsest in Taiwan indigenous literature: an example of Syaman Rapongan’s writing. 台灣文學研究學報 [Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies], 25, 305–364. Rapongan, S. 夏曼·藍波安. (1997). 冷海情深 [Cold ocean, deep emotions]. Unitas Publishing. Rapongan, S. (2014). 大海浮夢 [Floating dreams in the ocean]. Linking Publishing. Rapongan, S. (2018a). 大海之眼 [Mata nu Wawa]. Ink Publishing. Rapongan, S. (2018b). (自序) 尋找生產尊嚴的島嶼–我在現場 [(Preface) In search of the island that produces dignity–I am on the scene]. In 大海之眼 [Mata nu Wawa] (pp. 13–20). Ink Publishing. Shih, S.-M. (2013). Introduction: What is sinophone studies? In Sinophone studies: A critical reader (pp. 1–16). Columbia University Press. Teng, P.-J. (2018, April 28). Top Taiwanese officials attend inauguration of Ocean Affairs Council. Taiwan News. Retrieved from https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3416958.

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Todd, B. (2021, September 6). Taiwan transitions and tribal tongues: The language of reconciliation. The Jakarta Post. Retrieved from https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2021/09/06/taiwan-transi tions-and-tribal-tongues-the-language-of-reconciliation.html. Tsai, S.-S. H. (2014). Maritime Taiwan: Historical encounters with the East and the West. Routledge. Tung, S.-M. (2013). 山海之內天地之外: 原住民漢語文學 [Within the mountains and seas and beyond the world: Sinophone aboriginal literature]. 國立臺灣文學館 [National Museum of Taiwan Literature]. Wu, M.-M. (2005). 「海/岸」觀點: 論臺灣海洋散文的發展性與特質 [Viewpoint of “Ocean/Shore”: On the development and the characteristics of oceanic prose writings in Taiwan]. 海洋文化學刊 [Oceanic Culture Journal], 1, 117–146.

Chia-rong Wu is an associate professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published with such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies.

Migrants of Today, Migrants of Tomorrow in Wu Ming-yi’s Literary Works Gwennaël Gaffric

Abstract In this chapter, I explore the theme of the figure of the “migrant” in the literary works of contemporary Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi (吳明益; b. 1971). Wu Ming-yi is the author of prose collections on butterflies and other animal species endemic to Taiwan, novels on the history of the Second World War in the Pacific, and short stories and novels exploring the coming climate crisis (his novel translated into English The Man with the Compound Eyes has even been the first novel to be referred to as “Climate Fiction” by American journalist Dan Bloom, known to be the first user of the “Cli-Fi” term). For Wu Ming-yi, the phenomenon of migration is to the history of Taiwan (especially in the twentieth century), to its present (such as recent immigration displacements from Southeast Asia), and to its future (climate refugees). In this chapter, I analyze how the theme of migration as it appears in Wu’s works is at the same time a marker of both human history and environmental history in Taiwan, as well as a condition of (co)existence that inevitably transforms the neighborhoods of yesterday and tomorrow. Based on reading several works by Wu Ming-yi (collections of sanwen—prose essays—and works of fiction), my contribution will put Wu’s literature in perspective with ecocritical and philosophical studies and authors from different regions. Keywords Wu Ming-yi · Migration · War · Taiwan · Climate fiction · Ecocriticism

G. Gaffric (B) Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_12

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1 Dynamics of Taiwan In his collection of essays, The Tao of Butterflies (Diedao 蝶道, 2003), it is during a walk in a tropical forest on the trail of a flight of staff sergeant butterflies (Athyma selenophora) that Wu (吳明益) (2003a, b)1 proposes his definition of the island of Taiwan: “Taiwan” is this hybrid word that is given to all living things and biotopes on this island, a constantly moving noun. Every day Taiwan dies a little more, is born a little more, and then becomes even more Taiwan. (p. 239)

It seems almost self-evident that a writer whose work was at the origin of the creation of the term “Climate Fiction” in English,2 and whose writing projects are intimately linked to the new paradigm of the Anthropocene, should situate the dynamic movements of his place of living and writing on a geological time scale. This scientifico-poetic definition perhaps sums up the way in which Wu Ming-yi built his entire literary approach to the “place,” whatever its scale: be it the Taiwan Island, the Chunghua market (中華商場) in Taipei, the Burmese forest, or the Pacific Ocean: these places are constantly fluctuant, both impacted and dominating the totality of the human and non-human individuals who inhabit them. This dynamic writing of the place in Wu’s prose and fiction also spreads out at different scales, from the description of the tectonic plates under the island, to the muntjacs running in the highest mountains of the main island of Taiwan, or to the tiniest beats of butterfly wings on Orchid Island. All living beings who are found in Wu Ming-yi’s literature are in perpetual motion, sometimes swept away by the often inexplicable and unexplained needs of their species, and also, in particular for the human characters, by the whirlwind of the catastrophe that is history.

2 Migration and the Continued Catastrophes When discussing Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” Walter Benjamin (1969) famously claims about history, “where we perceive a chain of events, he [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” 1

Born in 1971 in Taipei, Wu Ming-yi currently teaches literature and creative writing at the National Dong Hwa University (國立東華大學), on the east coast of Taiwan. He is the author of three novels, Routes in the Dream (睡眠的航線, 2007), The Man with the Compound Eyes (複眼人, 2011), and The Stolen Bicycle (單車失竊記, 2015); four collections of short stories, Closed for Holidays (本 日公休, 1997), Tiger-God (虎爺, 2003), The Illusionist on the Skywalk (天橋上的魔術師, 2011), and The Land of the Little Rain (苦雨之地, 2019); and four collections of prose essays (sanwen), The Book of Lost Butterflies (迷蝶誌, 2000), The Tao of Butterflies (蝶道, 2003), So Much Water so Close to Home (家離水邊那麼近, 2007), and Floating Light (浮光, 2015). 2 It is said that freelance writer Dan Bloom (based in Taiwan after the release of the English translation of The Man with the Compound Eyes) coined the term cli-fi in 2011 in a press release for Jim Laughter’s Polar City Red, and that he also used it to categorize The Man with the Compound Eyes.

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(p. 249). We can distinguish two kinds of catastrophes in Wu Ming-yi’s narratives: one, which is central in several of his fictional writings, is war, and in particular the Second World War; the second is environmental crisis (and the large variety of its impacts), that is part of a longer time frame. Despite many fundamental differences, these two archetypes of the disaster resemble each other in many ways: they are diluted, continued catastrophes that impact many spheres, from the living sphere to the non-living sphere (from humans to landscapes and the world of objects). At the time of Anthropocene, as Jean-Luc Nancy (2012), puts it, …there are no longer natural disasters, but civilizational disasters that spread anytime and anywhere. Like the war, it is a state of emergency, but one that we cannot see the end of. Unlike war, environmental catastrophe appears unlimited in time and its main attribute is less its immediate intensity than its degree of extension and harmfulness. (p. 57)

Beyond the spectacular description of catastrophes, the fictional situations imagined in Wu Ming-yi’s novels shed light on the daily and extended consequences of these disasters, and the need to build new forms of neighborhood and community after them. It is probably in this regard that the topics of migration, displacement, and memory are so central in his work.

3 Migrants of Yesterday In Routes in the Dream (Shuimian de hangxian 睡眠的航線, 2007), The Stolen Bicycle (Danche shiqieji 單車失竊記, 2015), and The Illusionist on the Skywalk (Tianqiaoshang de moshushi 天橋上的魔術師, 2011), as well as in his first two short story collections, Wu Ming-yi tells numerous stories about migrants who joined the Chunghwa market, where he grew up,3 whatever their place of origin—Indigenous, native people (benshengren), mainlanders (waishengren) —and whatever the reasons that pushed them to come. It is often through its ecosystem of languages that Wu (2007) portrays the inhabitants of the market: 3 Built in 1961 on the first section of Chunghwa Street (中華路一段), near actual Taipei Main Station, the Chunghwa Market was located not far from the bustling Ximen (西門町) district. The market enjoyed its golden age in the 1960s and 1970s, before declining due to competition from other newly built markets and the relocation of shopping malls to the east of the capital. The market was finally razed in 1992. The 1,700 or so people who lived inside the market in its heyday were offered the chance to move to the underground shopping malls of the Taipei MRT. A symbolic high point of Taiwan’s burgeoning capitalist economic development in the 1970s, the market’s name itself, “Chunghwa” (中華) (literally “China (Cultural)”), is enough to evoke its historicity and the conditions of production of this space into a place charged with cultural nationalism and liberal economics, instituted by the Kuomintang (KMT) government in the second half of the twentieth century. By its central location, by its toponymic significance, and by its very essence, the market corresponds to the embodiment of power, but was ironically inhabited by populations of humble extraction, who were deprived or left outside any kind of power, and above all, who were not from Taipei.

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It was possible that many of the young people of the second generation had not known the bamboo huts. Indeed, most of them were born after the completion of the construction of this concrete market, that did not let [in] rain or wind. But before that, people who came to the city to look for work were doing their business here in bamboo huts built haphazardly. Among them, some had abandoned the fields of their native village to reach the North, others had seen their business flow elsewhere, and others were soldiers [who] arrived at the same time as the Nationalist government … That is why we there spoke Japanese, the dialects of Fuzhou and Shandong provinces, and even sometimes the indigenous Pangcah language … Bamboo huts composed a world of complex language. Its inhabitants were fleeing the calamities of life, they had each been poor too long, and if they could certainly not always communicate in the same language, each one came to know a little of each other’s language by mutually playing riddles with the phrases of the interlocutors. The language that came from the radio had already become a new “national language”: Mandarin Chinese, that was dizzyingly arduous to you. It left that impression in you that no one could ever speak a perfectly standard Mandarin in bamboo huts, and a little like the “mixed diced vegetables noodles” that the Cantonese sold on the second floor, everybody here spoke a kind of “mixed diced language.” (pp. 86–87)

The novel Routes in the Dream tells the cross-story between a journalist of our time who loses all faculty of dreaming, and a young Taiwanese boy who goes to Japan to participate in the war effort during the Second World War. The readers eventually understand that the second character is the father of the first, and that the latter is dreaming his father’s secret past. Despite these permanent displacements (temporal and spatial) between Japan and Taiwan, it is in the heart of the Chunghwa market that a good part of the action takes place. Here is how the author writes about the two categories of population living in the market: From a geographical point of view, we could divide the inhabitants of the market into two categories: the first had deserted the countryside for Taipei in order to exercise their profession or to find a means of survival, while the second had followed the KMT nationalist government from Mainland China. However, the second ones were not fortunate enough to be able to live in juancun villages [garrison villages], nor to obtain a house by the government, and they had been forced to cultivate a small plot of land. All these people owed their salvation only to their skills and luck. But to be honest, they had no ideal and weren’t expecting anything exceptional from this life—they were just living day by day. So if you had been passing through the market then, you would have sniffed the hints of deadly boredom that reigned over the place at that time. People dragged their feet from one corner of the market to the other and stretched out in the afternoon on their deckchairs to take a nap while waiting for the night to come. (Wu, 2007, p. 132)

The cosmopolitan market population is also described in many of Wu Ming-yi’s works, and especially in the collection of sanwen, The Book of Lost Butterflies (Midiezhi 迷蝶誌, 2000), where Wu interweaves his observations of Taiwanese butterflies with philosophical, literary, political, or even scientific considerations. However, butterflies are never just a pretext or an anthropomorphized way to talk about human world and feelings: they are indeed at the center of his stories, with a lot of authentic entomological information. For instance, in a short text entitled “Lost Butterflies” (Midie 迷蝶) from this collection, Wu Ming-yi allegorically evokes the phenomenon of butterfly migration, especially those of the “common leopards” (Phalanta phalantha), which reminds

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him of the arrival of migrants from diverse origins in the Chunghwa Market, and in particular the people who left Mainland China with the Nationalist Party. The skywalks that crossed the market serve as platforms for these memories: These six … skywalks were the branches where a cloud of lost butterflies came to perch. They probably had felt a scent of life at the end of their antennas, or maybe the feeding milk of their place of birth was no longer enough to satisfy them all, or perhaps the brutal upheavals of their original environment had blurred their wings to the point where they crossed the Taiwan strait in search of a peaceful place to lay their eggs. Gently, they curved their abdomens, letting their eggs come to stick to the pulse of the plants. … In 1992, standing on the bridge above Chunghwa Street waiting to be demolished, I witnessed the destruction of the huge rotten trees that adjoined the market. By crossing the Wu-ch’ang and E-mei streets, I skirted territories that I imagined extending over ten million li. From this skywalk now given back to heaven, I watched the strange arms of the diggers slaughtering the playground of my childhood. Every time I walk through this page of the book of my youth, the image of these lost leopards populating the legends of sailors emerges again before my eyes. Their wings cling to the surface of the sea to spend the night, shivering under the rays of the sun, while the sea flares up. Like a riddle. (Wu, 2010, pp. 165–169)

In many ways, the issues of survival, death, and linguistic mix and communitarianism in Wu Ming-yi’s Taipei stories, echo Bai Xianyong’s (Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇) wellknown collection about the Taipei migrant population, Taipei People (Taibei ren 台 北人, 1971). But Wu Ming-yi goes further to explore how these living beings manage to build and develop a singular ecosystem in a capital structured by a very strong ideological architecture, and where the market, both by its capitalist value and its nationalist analogy, is the most striking symbol. In a short essay entitled “Koxinga” 國姓爺 (again in The Book of Lost Butterflies), Wu Ming-yi offers an underlying critique of population management and territorial dispossessions that have occurred in Taiwanese history. The text goes back over centuries, from the Dutch control over Taiwan to the Qing government, the Japanese colonial government, and the authoritarian regime of the KMT. Wu’s analogies between butterflies and humans do not serve purely as biological metaphors, but contribute to linking together the violence of migratory movements and land expropriations that have taken place throughout the colonial history of Taiwan. Wu (2010) concludes in his text with the following: In reality, the goal pursued throughout its existence by the small purple is nothing other than the search for a shrub where it can quietly allow its descendants to hang on and eat its leaves. But there are unfortunately reasons to believe that this research will gradually become longer and longer. … I know, however, that this land that the small purple has carried on its back since it bears its name is also that of many children in Taiwan. It belongs as much to those who have been “driven out” and “pushed back” as to those who have taken their place. (pp. 134–135)

These attempts to link human history to that of butterflies are also reminiscent of how the disasters of colonialism impact upon the entire living world. Butterflies lead Wu on paths that branch off far beyond the mere account of their sighting. The Book of Lost Butterflies and The Tao of Butterflies offer re-readings of Taiwan’s environmental and human histories, supplemented by the author’s field observations. Wu Ming-yi continually emphasizes the importance of Taiwan as a place of confluence, bringing

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together the migratory trajectories and destinies of living beings in the history of the island. For Wu, the environmental history of the island is one in perpetual motion, whether this dynamic is natural or constrained by human action, such as colonization and war. It is not uncommon for “butterflies,” and in particular the phenomenon of their migration, to serve as a trigger for awareness of the complex reality of an ecosystem and its threat of extinction. Thus, one can read a closed echo between Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior (2012), already considered a classic of climate fiction, and Wu Ming-yi’s short story “The Man with the Compound Eyes” (Fuyanren 複 眼人, 2003).4 In Kingsolver’s novel, it is through her observation and exploration of a migratory anomaly of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) in the United States that Dellarobia’s character becomes aware of the biological consequences of climate change, and begins to understand that, in the era of climate crisis, selfhood and identity “must not only be renegotiated in relation to the nonhuman, but also in relation to a large-scaled phenomenon such as global warming” (Mehnhert, 2016, p. 63). In the short story “The Man with the Compound Eyes,” the main character, intrigued by the migration of the Jade Moths (Papilio polytes), will finally become aware, during an encounter with the mysterious man with the compound eyes, of the importance of “seeing the world” through the eyes of the butterflies, thus choosing to de-anthroposize his gaze. In both stories, the evanescent presence of butterflies, global actors, and transnational agents par excellence, shows the need to think about migratory phenomena outside of traditional geographical, historical, and anthropocentric schemes. What is also at the heart of Wu Ming-yi’s sanwen collections is the participation of these migrating species (whether they stay in Taiwan or return) in the change of its ecosystem. These considerations echo the work of the American historian Alfred Crosby (2015), where he shows the impact of global colonialism (to be understood as “Western colonialism”) on the environment. However, Taiwan is precisely a challenge to Crosby’s work because the Taiwanese colonial experience shows how ecological colonialism is not exclusively European there, and Wu Ming-yi, with great scientific erudition, helps through literature to supplement Crosby’s hypotheses. One of the specificities of most of Wu Ming-yi’s writing is then to offer non-human gazes, perspectives, and even sometimes feeling and subjectivities. And the topic of migration in Wu’s work is no exception. In many of his stories, Wu Ming-yi hinges, for example, on the upheavals produced by disasters (be they ecological or warlike) on migratory trajectories, as well as the memory of these migratory ventures. Wu Ming-yi explores how their dreams of a new life are combined with their experiences of loss and death. He expresses the mourning experienced by these new immigrants in Taipei, sometimes dispossessed of their memory and even their native country or region, which nevertheless constitutes the new ecosystem of Taipei. The memory of migrants in Wu Ming-yi’s literature, as we shall see, is often reactivated and 4

This short story has the same title as the novel published in 2011, but the two stories are very different and located in different time-spaces. Still, attentive readers will be able to detect intertextual links.

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recomposed by dreams, which are the way the writer often choses to narrate traumatic experiences. In The Stolen Bicycle, Wu tells the stories of elephants and their physical, psychological, and geographical journeys into war; and in particular, the story of one of them that would later become a star in the Taipei zoo: Lin Wang (林旺), torn from his native forest in Burma (because he served with the Chinese Expeditionary Force during the Sino-Japanese War), and then relocated to Taiwan along with the KMT. As with human migrants, it is the experience of uprooting death that Wu Ming-yi is dealing with. It is through the medium of dreams and the use of magical realism that Wu Ming-yi gives shape and voice to what he does not and cannot know. At the end of the short story “The Man with the Compound Eyes,” the narrator complains that the imminent destruction of the Moon causes the extinction of many species. One of the characters agrees and says, “The birds will no longer migrate, or they will go astray, the hairtails [fish] will no longer spring from the waters, and the small purples [butterflies] will perhaps forget to wake up and go North to winter” (Wu, 2003a, b, p. 233).

4 Migrants of Tomorrow As sketched above, Wu Ming-yi places the history of recent human migrations (after the Second World War) in the living (and even geological) history of the whole Taiwanese archipelago. Indeed, if part of Wu Ming-yi’s writing focuses on the history of population movements on the island of Taiwan, another part that focuses on the migrant trajectories in Taiwan is still to come. In this regard, the awareness of the diversity of migrations should raise questions not only of future migrations, but also of reception and hospitality policies. It would be reductive to divide Wu Ming-yi’s fictional works into literary genres, with historical novels on one side and science fiction novels on the other, but it is true that Wu Ming-yi, in novels such as The Man with the Compound Eyes (Fuyanren 複眼人, 2011) and The Land of the Little Rain (Kuyu zhi di 苦雨之地, 2019), finds a privileged window with science fiction (or, more precisely, fiction inspired by science) to talk about relations between humans and non-humans, and the future of the place and its inhabitants, especially during the era of the continued catastrophe of the Anthropocene that forces human and non-human living beings to leave, move, and inhabit new places. As Indian science fiction writer Vandana Singh (2016) puts it: In one sense, science fiction can be considered as an exploration of our relationship with the nonhuman universe—from animals, aliens, and others to the physical universe itself, including technology. Most of the rest of literature labors under the absurd delusion that human beings live in a bubble isolated from the rest of nature; with nature reduced to a commodity, it can then be forgotten.

The Man with the Compound Eyes is an anticipation novel, but not set in a far place or future, just some years into the Taiwanese future. The major event of the story

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is a giant trash vortex in the North Pacific Ocean that, following ocean currents and tsunamis, hits the Taiwanese East coast on the same beach where two of the main characters of the story, Alice (a Taiwanese professor and writer) and Jakobsen (her Danish husband), have built their home. As it is even better known today than in the year of the novel’s publication (2011), the Pacific trash vortex is not fictional at all.5 To consider the very nature of this central object in the novel, it would be beneficial here to use a specific term—hyperobject. Morton (2011) defines the hyperobject as a sprawling object that is hard to map or represent, such as radioactivity, global warming, and oceanic pollution. It is an object that invites us to rethink our models of time and space measurements: “These are objects that are massively distributed in time and space,” Morton (2011) writes, “objects that become visible to humans in an age of ecological crisis. They’re nonlocal by nature, as they occupy a high dimensional phase space so it’s only possible for humans to see pieces or aspects of them at any one time” (pp. 207–208). The trash vortex, as a symbolic product of the Anthropocene both impacted by human actions and natural laws, fits, I think, perfectly with Morton’s definition of this kind of vast and unpredictable quasi-anthropogenic objects. The vortex appears extremely erratic in the novel, breaking up the rhythm of the currents and underwater earthquakes. Before it hits the Taiwanese coast, it is unclear where the fragmented pieces of the vortex are headed. To Japan? To Taiwan? Or to the further south in the Pacific? Like a radiation leak, the vortex is dependent on “natural” phenomena such as wind, currents, or tsunamis. The slow, progressive but inevitable accumulation of waste into the vortex eventually not only destroys places, whatever their size, but also destroys social ties and cultural practices, including those of the Indigenous Taiwanese who live and work in the coastal villages. The vortex is the trigger element that raises awareness of the oceanic and coastal destruction in the novel. But the alteration of the environment has already started several decades ago on the coast with river pollution, displacement of local populations (to the mountains), the proximity of toxic industries, major road works (like tunnels and highways), pervasive tourism, or awful architecture … everything that contributes to an ordinary, diluted disaster. In his preface to Wu Ming-yi’s novel, the Taiwanese writer and critic Yang (2011), borrowing Hannah Arendt’s expression “the banality of evil,” speaks about the novel of “the banality of destruction” (pp. 3–7). In other terms, he expresses the idea that the everydayness of ecological violence, as it is so fast in geological terms, is however 5

Also called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the trash vortex is a vast patch of garbage in the North Pacific Ocean that has been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. In this gigantic patch, there is six kilograms of plastics for every kilo of natural plankton and the patch weighs as much as 100 million tons. As recalled in Chap. 11 of Wu Ming-yi’s novel, the discovery of the vortex can be dated to 1997, when it was first observed and described by oceanographer and skipper Charles J. Moore, before it became the subject of several reports from Greenpeace. The consequences of this very important concentration of plastic substances are evident on biodiversity and marine ecosystems, especially for animals such as fish, jellyfish, turtles, and seabirds that mistake these plastics for food. Recent scientific studies have confirmed the scale of this huge patch of trash that spans more than 1.6 million square kilometers (Lebreton et al., 2018).

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not spectacular enough to make headlines, and we can say the same for climate change (Yang, 2011). According to Yang (2011), the banality and the permanence of destruction invite us to rethink our relationship to the risk within all spheres of our lives. Of course, it has a lot to do with what Ulrich Beck (1992) calls a “global risk society”: what should be considered a priority in our time is not so much the intensity of the risk, but the degree of its social extension. In the novel, a character whose name is Atile’i, reaches on the vortex shortly after his departure from Wayo Wayo Island, a Micronesian island untouched by colonialism under Wu Ming-yi’s design. Later, Atile’i and the floating island follow the oceanic currents and hit the Taiwanese coast, bringing him to a new world. The plot of the novel is therefore based on the crossed fates of several characters whose individual stories converge on the east coast of Taiwan. After drifting for days on the vortex, Atile’i finally docks on the coast along with the vortex. He is rescued by Alice, a Taiwanese writer, who lost her son and her husband in a tragic climbing accident. The consequences of the disaster caused by the vortex go far beyond Taiwan, and we also follow the fates of an entire community of characters (both human and nonhuman) including local residents, as Dahu, an Indigenous mountain guide, Hafay, an Indigenous ex-prostitute who manages an organic restaurant on the coast, Sara, a Norwegian ecologist, Boldt, a German tunnel-designer, Ohiyo, an abandoned cat also rescued by Alice after the vortex, Pacific whales, and many others, from all around the world and from all around the realm of living beings. Through the vortex, all the characters experience the reality of living in a common and interconnected space. Atile’i is certainly the one who has the bitterest experience of this reality: before he accidentally arrived in Taiwan, global geography was beyond his tribal knowledge. Atile’i, who believed the world was an island, gradually realizes over the course of his odyssey the world is actually an archipelago. If the topography of the place has not been transformed into concrete geographical or geological terms, the place as experienced by the characters has turned into a network of islands. So, the rift opened by the vortex changes the normative conception of place and by extension the place itself. Environmental awareness awakens the characters to what we might call “the finitude of the world.” The novel ends with the complete destruction of Wayo Wayo Island by a tsunami of trash. The swallowing of Wayo Wayo Island by the plastic waste tsunami brings wayoan (primitivist) “precolonial” society directly to the contemporary era of the Anthropocene, and shows the joint destruction of a cultural tradition and the environment in which it was born. In terms of migration, the novel raises the issue of the population movements in an age of climate change and environmental disasters. How do we consider the tragedies of those who are sometimes called the “climate refugees”—groups of people forced to leave their homes because of the degradation of the local environment or the threat against it? In the case of the Pacific Ocean, some residents of Tuvalu and Kiribati archipelagoes have recently made requests for asylum in New Zealand, emphasizing their status as climate refugees, but this request raises a number of legal uncertainties. The existence of these problems shows us the need to reinvent deeply the democratic practices of “hospitality” and “welcoming” the strangers. In The Man with the Compound Eyes, Alice does not hesitate to count Atile’i as part of

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the prolonged Taiwanese migration history. What is interesting is that, in the novel, these “climate refugees” include both those from the outside world, such as Atile’i and his wayoan fiancée Wursula, who is cast away to the Chilean coast, and local Taiwanese like Alice, Hafay, and all the inhabitants of the coast who are deprived of house, labor, and resources, and must take refuge further inland. The trash vortex, both as an event and as an object, is contesting the characters’ subjectivities: their relationship to the place and to the Other, the stranger, the neighbors, the refugees. The disaster ultimately redefines what is common between them, that is, to some extent, what they decide to share: the ocean, the coast, its natural resources, and even their memories. In other words, the vortex, as a metaphor for globalization and environmental crisis, helps the migrant characters to expand their identification circles. In the novel, the mysterious character with the compound eyes could be a symbol for the redesign (re-invention) of the coastal neighborhood. With this new deal, it then urges a need to rebuild new forms of place and community on the ruins of the vortex in the era where migration becomes a common phenomenon on a continued catastrophe. Because of the island and archipelago nature of Taiwan, it is obviously the ocean that constitutes both the route and the destination of the migration of tomorrow in Wu’s fiction. On this matter, the ocean is never a continuous territory; instead, it is made of broken lines (or lines of flight, as French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1980) would say). Wu (2019) writes this sentence in his short story “Eternal Mother”: “The sea seems to be endless and continuous, but in fact there are all kinds of sea lanes” (p. 188). This archipelagic interpretation of the world, conceived as a network of interconnected roads, echoes with recent reflections offered by such thinkers from Oceania as Epeli Hau‘ofa. A Fijian writer and critic, Hau‘ofa has written and reflected extensively on cultures and poetics in the Pacific Islands, which are closely connected with the migratory future of the globe. Hau‘ofa (2008) speaks of the region as a “sea of islands” operating in a network. For Wu Ming-yi as well, Taiwan is a dynamic hub or a crossing (oceanic) point that helps develop new communications and neighborhoods. Placed at the center of a network of islands, whose mobilities are by nature transnational, the navigation lines of the migrant butterflies function as a metaphor for Taiwan’s transcultural flows. What Wu Ming-yi (2000) suggests is that a place does not belong to anyone in particular, but to all the life forms that inhabit or pass through it, just as he writes in The Book of Lost Butterflies: A day may come when people will realize that what they call a “nation” is just a land whose true value lies in the plurality of its living beings. Because when the little purple loses its native land, humans will no longer have any land to remember. (p. 138)

The solidarity of the destinies of living beings migrating in and out of Taiwan gives rise to the hope of an “archi-citizenship,” that extends Hannah Arendt’s (1979) conception of “citizenship” (Arendt, 1979) during eras (both war or Anthropocene) where omnipresent statelessness, refugees and immigration are challenging the order of the world. By extending itself to non-human beings, Wu’s “archi-citizenship”

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could be conceived as a transspecies citizenship, which cannot be defined by race, culture, or heritage, but by the capacity to participate in and build a common world.

References Arendt, H. (1979). The origins of totalitarianism. A Harvest Book. (Original work published 1951). Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. SAGE. Benjamin, W. (1969). Illuminations: Essays and reflections (H. Zohn, Trans.). Shocken Books. (Original work published 1940). Crosby, A. W. (2015). Ecological imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille Plateaux : Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Éditions de Minuit. Hau‘ofa, E. (2008). We are the ocean: Selected works. University of Hawai‘i Press. Kingsolver, B. (2012). Flight behavior. HarperCollins. Lebreton, L., Slat, B., Ferrari, F. et al. (2018). Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic. Nature, 4666. Mehnhert, A. (2016). Climate change fictions: Représentations of global warming in American literature. Palgrave Macmillan. Morton, T. (2011). Sublime objects. Speculations, II, 207–227 Nancy, J. -L. (2012). L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima). Galillée. Singh, V. (2016). Science fiction in the anthropocene. Anthropocene Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2016/10/science-fiction-in-the-anthropocene/. Wu, M.-y. 吳明益. (2003a). 蝶道 [The Tao of butterflies]. Fish&Fish. Wu, M.-y. (2003b). 虎爺 [The tiger-god]. Chiuko. Wu, M.-y. (2007). 睡眠的航線 [Routes in the dream]. Fish&Fish. Wu, M.-y. (2010). 迷蝶誌 [The book of lost butterflies]. Summer Festival Press. (Original work published 2000). Wu, M.-y. (2011). 複眼人 [The man with the compound eyes]. Summer Festival Press. Wu, M.-y. (2015). 單車失竊記 [The stolen bicycle]. Rye Field. Wu, M.-y. (2019). 苦雨之地 [The land of the little rain]. ThinKingDom. Yang, Z. (2011). 毀滅的日常庸俗-讀吳明益的 《複眼人》[Banality of destruction–a reading of Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes], in Wu, M., 複眼人 [The man with the compound eyes] (pp. 3–7). Summer Festival Press.

Gwennaël Gaffric is an assistant professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France). His PhD thesis was about ecological issues in Taiwan literature. He is also translator of Chinese, Hongkongese and Taiwanese contemporary novels. His research interests include literary studies (especially science fiction), ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and translation studies. He has recently published a book entitled La Littérature à l’ère de l’Anthropocène: une étude écocritique autour des œuvres de l’écrivain taïwanais Wu Ming-yi (L’Asiathèque, 2019).

Anti-Japan or Becoming-Japanese: Li Yongping’s Writing on Japan in Postcolonial Taiwan Min-xu Zhan

Abstract Since the mid-1990s, Taiwanese society has gradually moved away from a nationalist critique of Japanese colonialism to positive recognition of the contribution of Japanese colonial rule to the transformation of Taiwan into a modernized society. This view is also seen in many Taiwanese literary works in the twenty-first century. To demonstrate the complexities of “Japan” found in Taiwanese society, this chapter focuses on the literary works of the Borneo writer Li Yongping (Li Yung-ping 李 永平), who lived in Taiwan for more than half a century, as well as examination of the changes represented in his writing on Japan. Li Yongping was born and grew up in Borneo and moved to Taiwan in the 1960s. Due to Borneo’s history of Japanese occupation, a strong anti-Japanism sentiment can be observed in Li’s early works. However, it is intriguing that Li’s writing on Japan has transitioned into a new phase in the twenty-first century after Li settled and lived in Taiwan for more than half a century. Hence, this chapter approaches Li Yongping’s writing on Japan by applying dual perspectives of “anti-Japanism” and “becoming-Japanese” and examines the translocal intersection of colonial consciousness between Taiwan and Borneo. Keywords Li Yongping · Anti-Japan · Becoming Japanese · Postcolonial Taiwan

1 Japanese Memory in East Asia This chapter is inspired by Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (2019), a critical monograph by Leo T. S. Ching. In his book, Ching describes the anti-Japanism that is reflected in contemporary film and television products in South Korea, China, and Hong Kong. This anti-Japanism originated in the early twentieth century, when Japan engaged in proactive overseas expansion to obtain more economic resources. Many countries in East and Southeast Asia were subjected to Japanese colonial rule although the duration of that colonization varied. As Japanese imperialism was put to an end with the conclusion of the Second World M. Zhan (B) National Chung Hsing University, Taichung City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_13

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War, new anti-Japan sentiment arose as a result of contemporary Japanese capitalism. According to Ching (2019), this new anti-Japanism that appeared in modern East Asian societies is no doubt “a symptom of the unsettled historical trauma of the Japanese empire and its legacy” (p. 2). In addition to the China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan cases mentioned in Ching’s book, a similar anti-Japanism is also observed in the ethnic Chinese people of Southeast Asian countries, where Japanese colonization lasted for three years and eight months. Wild Boars Cross the River (Yezhu duhe 野豬渡河, 2018), written by the Sinophone Malaysian novelist, Chang Kuei-hsing 張貴興, delicately describes the bloody scenes in which the Japanese army marched into villages in Borneo in the Second World War and abused, raped, and slaughtered villagers along the way. This novel is clearly a reflection of the criticism of Japanese imperialism expressed by the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. It is also interesting that Taiwan, which used to be a Japanese colony, today displays unusual pro-Japan sentiment, with this sentiment also closely influencing postwar political developments in Taiwan. Unlike in other former Japanese colonies, the Taiwan ruling power was handed over by the Japanese colonial government to the Kuomintang (KMT) government. The new government then resorted to a series of assertive authoritarian policies, such as political persecution and differentiated treatment of the Mainlanders from China and the Taiwanese, resulting in commoners’ growing dissatisfaction with the KMT and even nostalgia for the Japanese colonial days in the local Taiwanese people. As the ruling power of the KMT weakened, discourse that recognized positive aspects of Japanese colonial rule began to surface in that society around the 1990s. It placed special emphasis on the Japanese contributions to building modern infrastructure in Taiwan. This kind of pro-Japan sentiment is an affirmation of the colonial historical experience of Taiwan and expresses a radical position against both the KMT rule and Chinese nationalism (Ching, 2019; Liou, 2019). In the twenty-first century, many Taiwanese literary works have been created based on the themes of Japanese colonial memory so as to reconstruct the myriad intricacies that exist between Taiwan and Japan. The Japanese grandmother in Mazu’s Bodyguards (Haishen jiazu 海神家族, 2009) by Jade Y. Chen, the Taiwanese soldier serving in the Japanese army and fighting for the Japanese Emperor in Killing Ghosts (Shagui 殺鬼, 2009) by Gan Yao-ming, and the sisterhood between a Taiwanese and Japanese girl in Blooming Season (Huakai shijie 花開時節, 2017) by Yang Shuangzi are some distinctive examples. These works do not approach Japanese colonialism from an anti-Japanism perspective, but rather illustrate complex and multifaced pictures during the Japanese colonial period. This way of memorializing Japan is conducive to forming a Taiwan-centered perspective on Taiwanese history. As Liang-ya Liou (2019) points out, “re-memory of the Japanese period in Taiwanese postcolonial fiction is vital not only to the reconstruction of Taiwan’s national history, but also to countering the KMT’s Chinese consciousness and China’s neo-imperialism” (p. 187). Therefore, in the context of anti-Japanism in East and Southeast Asia, the writing on Japan in Taiwan literature of the early twenty-first century is indeed unique. Arguably then, what kind of sparkle

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will it generate when the anti-Japanism of East Asia meets the pro-Japan memory found in Taiwanese society? To explore this encounter of pro-Japan sentiment and anti-Japanism, this chapter focuses on the literary works of the Borneo writer, Li Yongping (Li Yung-ping 李 永平), who lived in Taiwan for more than half a century, and examines the changes observed in his writing on Japan. Li Yongping was born and grew up in Borneo, which was occupied by Japan during the Second World War. Indeed, a strong sense of antiJapanese sentiment can be observed in Li’s early works. However, it is intriguing that Li’s writing on Japan transitioned into a new phase in the twenty-first century. I refer here to Li’s transition into “becoming-Japanese,” derived from the idea of “becoming” coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). “Becoming-Japanese” is by no means suggesting that Li identified personally with the Japanese, but instead points out that Li found between Japanese culture and himself, “a zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can be no longer distinguished from” (Patton, 2010, p. 123). This chapter primarily engages with Li Yongping’s writing on Japan, reviews the changes observed in Li’s work in the twenty-first century, and outlines the transregional interactions of colonial consciousness between Taiwan and Borneo.

2 The Anti-Japanism and Chineseness in Li Yongping’s Novels in the Twentieth Century Li Yongping was born in 1942 in the British colony of Borneo and moved to Taiwan in the 1960s. He started to make his name as a writer in the literary community with the publication of his novels, including Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles (Jiling chunqiu 吉陵春秋, 1986), The Eagle Haidong Qing (Haidong qing 海東青, 1992), and the two-volume novel The End of the River (Dahe jintou 大河盡頭, 2008 and 2010). Li’s books are winners of major international awards, including the Overseas Chinese Zhongshan Literature Award (China), Dream of the Red Chamber Award (Hong Kong), and the National Award for Art (Taiwan), and some have been translated into English and Japanese. Among the Sinophone Malaysian writers who immigrated to Taiwan starting in the 1950s, Li’s outstanding literature achievements have made him an indispensable case study in the discussion of Sinophone literature in both Taiwan and Malaysia. Chineseness and Chinese nationalism are the most debated topics in the scholarship on Li’s literary works. Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles, Li’s most representative and well-known work, is distinguished for its use of pure and authentic Chinese language to create a Chinese village filled with exotic colors. The deep-rooted Chineseness in Li’s works should be understood from the complex and intertwined process of identity construction of the Chinese diaspora. As put bluntly by Ng Kim Chew (2002), a researcher on Sinophone Malaysian literature, Li can be regarded as a “true believer in retroism and nationalism and a supporter of the great Han culture” (p. 25).

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Tee Kim Tong (2006), another Sinohone Malaysian scholar, has stressed that Li’s decision to immigrate to Taiwan can, to a certain extent, be regarded as a returning of the Malaysian Chinese to their cultural homeland in Taiwan. However, it is perhaps too simplistic to consider Taiwan as Li’s cultural homeland. The remarks Li shared with me during an interview were interesting. He said he realized upon his arrival that Taiwan was very different from the “China” he had imagined, and it actually felt more like Japan. When I first arrived in Taiwan, I felt Taiwan was nothing like China, and more like Japan instead. It had not been long since Taiwan broke away from Japan’s rule, so Taipei city still carried a strong Japanese flavor, and the back alleys in Ximending and Dadaocheng were full of Japanese-style houses. My family had taught me to strongly dislike anything related to the Japanese. To be honest, I did not like Taiwan that much when I first arrived. (Zhan, 2016, para. 21)

The remark by Tee Kim Tong may be true in that Li is a representative figure and symbolizes a return to the home of Chinese culture. However, Li realized immediately upon arrival that the “China” in his mind, namely Taiwan, was just another Japanese colony, but one that displayed an indescribable admiration for Japanese culture. Li’s intriguing recounts of his personal experiences remind us of the complex ongoing/historical relationship between China, Japan, and Taiwan. It is hard to ignore the impact of Chinese nationalism when discussing Li’s writing on Japan, such as that in his classic work, The Eagle Haidong Qing. This novel is about a professor named Jin Wu, who just returned from the United States of America and takes a tour of Taipei accompanied by a young female neighbor. Through the eyes of the narrator, Jin Wu, the novel criticizes the evil capitalism and urban lifestyle of the late 1980s. Commentators point out that this novel adopts the historical perspective of the KMT based on Chinese nationalism with the goal of condemning Western imperialism for corrupting traditional moral values and the feudal code of ethics (Ng, 2002). Li also describes at great length the Japanese sex tourist group that is visiting Taiwan for prostitution services. These Japanese sex tourism groups are dressed in suits and strolling on the streets of Taipei, spitting and urinating wherever they wish. They also shout and sing Japanese military songs along the way: “May your reign, continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations” (Li, 2006, p. 19). Li’s writing corresponds, although accidentally, with Leo Ching’s anti-Japanism, used by the novelist to criticize the expansion of Japanese colonialism in the early twentieth century, as well as the threats of Japanese capitalism that emerged after the midtwentieth century to East Asian countries. Borneo was colonized by Japan, so Li’s portrayal of Japan is clearly influenced by the colonial history of his homeland. However, Li’s anti-Japanism writing should be read in the context of the social changes that occurred in 1970s Taiwan. Unlike the proJapan social atmosphere in the 2000s Taiwanese society, anti-Japanism was the dominant emotional drive in Taiwanese society during the 1970s. Taiwan suffered constant international and diplomatic setbacks during the 1970s, resulting in growing Chinese nationalism. Taiwanese nativist literature such as Sayonara, Goodbye (Sayonala zaijian 莎喲娜啦再見) by Huang Chunming (黃春明), and Rose, Rose, I Love You

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(Meiqui meiqui wo ai ni 玫瑰玫瑰我愛你) by Wang Zhenhe (王禎和), and God of All Merchants (Wanshang diju 萬商帝君) by Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) was dedicated to criticizing transnational corporations dominated by the United States and Japan, thus fully reflecting the anti-Japan trend. The Eagle Haidong Qing by Li was also in line with the then flourishing anti-Japanism in Taiwanese society and served to consolidate Chinese nationalism (Hsiau, 2021). Li said during my interview that the idea of Japanese sex tourists in The Eagle Haidong Qing came from the story depicted in Huang Chunming’s “Sayonara, Goodbye.” The intertextuality between these two literary works rests not only in the inheritance of novel characters, but also in the continuation of the anti-Japanism and anti-imperialism ideology that consolidated Chinese nationalism (Zhan, 2017). Thus, his anti-Japanism writing is complicated. It is both influenced by the colonial history of Borneo and at the same time echoes the political situation of 1970s Taiwan.

3 The Changes in “Japan” in Li Yongping’s Novels of the Twenty-First Century I have briefly outlined Li’s writing on Japan in an attempt to identify the connection between his anti-Japanism and the social atmosphere there since the 1970s. However, the emergence of pro-Japan sentiment in mid-1990s Taiwan also brought about a change in Li’s literary production of “Japan” beginning in 2002 with the publication of The Snow Falls in Clouds (Yuxue feifei 雨雪霏霏). The Snow Falls in Clouds is an autobiographical novel based on the novelist’s memory of living in his Borneo hometown and an account of Li’s childhood experience in that British colony. The book mainly focuses on a reflection of Western colonialism with very little description of Japan. However, in the last story of the book “Yearning for Hometown” (Wangxiang), the narrator originally refuses to have Miso soup, a representative of Japanese food culture, because of anti-Japanism sentiment. To his surprise, the narrator falls in love with the soup after tasting it by accident. The psychological change described in this episode portrays the decoupling of a (collective) nationalistic upbringing and his (individual) emotional experience. It reminds us of the contradictory coexistence of the anti-Japan sentiments and obsessions with Japanese culture that are hidden in Li’s novel. The End of the River further highlights the changes in Li’s writing on Japan. This two-volume novel is a masterpiece among Li’s recent works that depict his hometown in Borneo. The spectacular imagination and language he applies to describe the rainforests closely catches the eyes of readers. In addition to his stylized writing on the forest, his novel also presents an equally interesting description of Japan. I recall a scene from the movie Samurai Banners. The scene is very brief and simple. But listen carefully young girl, from the perspective of a teenager who came from an overseas Chinese society in Nanyang and was taught by his family to dislike Japan. The movie portrays the pinnacle of Japanese culture and the highest expression of samurai spirits. The defeated Suwa Yorishige was ordered by Takeda Shingen to commit suicide at a temple. It was spring

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in April and the cherry flowers were flying and dancing in the air outside the temple. (Li, 2017, p. 241)

This quote reveals an ambivalent emotion. On the one hand, the novelist highlights the strong anti-Japan sentiment and Chinese nationalism of the narrator, a teenager named Yon, and, on the other hand, reveals Yon’s overwhelming intoxication with the aesthetics of Japanese culture. In The End of the River, Li praises elements of Japanese culture, such as bonsai, stone lanterns, koi ponds, and the magical bamboo pipe as precisely as a Seiko watch. “Around the world, only the Japanese have the brains and delicate minds to conceive and produce these things” (Li, 2017, p. 241). Further, the influence of Japanese films and television productions can be observed as well in Li’s latest works. The teenager, Yon, in The End of the River enjoys imitating Japanese samurai on the big screen, such as their ways of walking, sitting, and wielding swords. The novel explains that Yon “suddenly fell in love with Japanese movies for no reason” (Li, 2017, p. 245) at the age of 15. He visits a second-class movie theater named Beauty Hall in Borneo every week without exception and becomes very familiar with every samurai movie in Japanese film history. Nonetheless, the novel does not explain the reason why Yon, a teenager who had never been fond of Japan since childhood due to his family upbringing, suddenly acquires an obsession with the world constructed by Japanese kendo movies. Coincidently, Li offers a similar statement in the preface of The Book of Zhu Ling (Zhu ling shu 朱鴒書), which was published in 2015. The novelist says he once refused to watch Japanese animation films because of his nationalist sentiments, but burst into tears when he unintentionally came into contact with a well-known Japanese animation film called Grave of the Fireflies and began to plunge into the fantasy world created by the Japanese animation masters, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. Li was deeply captured by the aesthetics of Japanese films. As noted by Alison Landsberg (2004), a scholar of memory studies, these commodified images are the platforms for the negotiation, wrestling, and occasional construction of social meanings, thereby demonstrating the complexity and diversity of individual identities and memories. In other words, anti-Japanism fails to fully explain the changes witnessed in Li’s works in the twenty-first century. The miso soup in The Snow Falls in Clouds, the bushido in The End of the River, and the Japanese animation film in The Book of Zhu Ling are cases in point. These three books share a similar narrative structure: “I” was an anti-Japanese subject since childhood due to family influence, but “I” gradually developed a favorable impression of Japanese culture as a result of unintentional experiences. It is also worth noting that, although these narratives may not be the focal points of Li’s works, they have appeared repeatedly and made up similar plots. Hence, if the writing on Japan in Li’s works in the twentieth century was driven by Chinese nationalism, his works in the twenty-first century, The Snow Falls in Clouds, The End of the River, and The Book of Zhu Ling, demonstrate an intertwined lovehate relationship with Japan. It would be over-simplified to analyze Li’s works in the twenty-first century solely from the perspective of anti-Japanism and disregard the shift that occurred in the creative concern of the novelist.

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4 The Diaspora and Translocalism Why did Li develop and express a new understanding of Japan in his creative efforts? I believe the reason is related to Li’s diaspora experience and the changes that occurred in his views on nationalism. As Cheow Thia Chan (2018) rightly points out, Li was reluctant to recognize himself as a Sinophone Malaysian writer in several interviews he gave in the twenty-first century and instead chose to highlight his Borneo identity (Borneo Island includes three nations—Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei). This focus suggests the writer refused to allow his personal (island) identity to be hijacked by national identity (Chan, 2018). It is a very inspirational perspective. In the following paragraphs, I further illustrate how Li’s gesture of rejecting national identity correlates with the changes that occurred in his writing about Japan. I start with the chapter “Heartbroken on the Eighth of August: A Day of Bewilderment for Yon” from the second volume of The End of the River. Li shifts the scene to the Pine Garden Inn located deep in the Borneo rainforest. The Pine Garden Inn was originally the Nihonmatsu Annex of a Japanese military officer club during the Second World War. It was carefully renovated by a Japanese hostess and turned into a commercial hotel to accommodate the endless flood of tourists to inland Borneo after the war. It is worth noting the Lunar calendar is applied to the titles of all the chapters in The End of the River, as in “The Seventh Night of July: Reminiscences of New Tang” and “The Noon of the Ninth of July: Change of Weather.” However, the one exception is the chapter entitled “Heartbroken on the Eighth of August.” The date of this chapter title was supposed to be the “Ninth of July”, based on the Lunar calendar, but the writer deliberately changed it to the “Eighth of August” using the solar calendar. The reason for the change, as explained in the novel, is that “August is the most miserable season for the Japanese” (Li, 2017, p. 243). Two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, in that month, causing instant collateral damage to tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and forcing the surrender of the Japanese army and the end of the Pacific War. This change of chapter title deserves attention. From the perspective of the victorious countries in the Second World War, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, August is a glorious moment of celebration marked by triumphant songs, the recovery of the territories occupied by the Japanese army, and the end of suffering for the comfort women who were working at the concentration camp in the Borneo rainforest. In this particular chapter, Li seems to adopt the views of the Japanese, as he titles it “Heartbroken on the Eighth of August” to highlight the suffering, struggle, and frustration of the Japanese army. In this miserable August, numerous headless ghosts of Japanese soldiers who were drifting in the jungles, are now rushing to the Nihonmatsu Annex to stay away from the rain. Colleagues and old friends are reunited in groups in the tatami rooms surrounding the lobby, catching up and exchanging news from home. All of a sudden, hundreds of tough voices simultaneously begin wailing loudly and singing military songs in hoarse, murmuring, and choked tones. (Li, 2017, p. 253)

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Wandering in the Borneo jungles and unable to return home, these scattered Japanese ghosts found accommodation in the Nihonmatsu Annex depicted in the novel. The writing style deserves to be noted. In the writings of most East Asian writers who have depicted them, Japanese soldiers have always been described as violent and bloody criminals. In Li’s writing, however, they are transformed into a group of Japanese ghosts—in other words, a group of victims who could not return to their homes. In addition, the meaning of Japanese military songs has also undergone dramatic changes. In The Eagle Haidong Qing, published in 1992, military songs were used by Li to refer to the invasion of Japanese colonialism. However, in The End of the River published in the twenty-first century, military songs become a powerful weapon for conveying nostalgia, and denouncing the violence and authority over personal life and death that are associated with nationalism. Li’s twenty-first-century works demonstrate the notion of becoming-Japanese. Such terminology is derived from the concept of “becoming” as introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), who created the expressions becoming-animal, becoming-woman, and becoming-minor in A Thousand Plateaus. As opposed to the more popular perception, “becoming” is not about imitation, learning, and identification. It refers to the efforts one makes by loosening the distinctive boundary between existing objects and thus allow the self to enter the zone of proximity to another existence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). According to the theory offered by Deleuze and Guattari, becoming has at least three deeply-reflective core connotations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Patton, 2010). First, becoming demonstrates the multiplicity of the subject. Second, the becoming process of the subject is in fact an awareness of the inseparable and unignorable connection between the self and the Other. Third, becoming is a form of political realization. Therefore, the act of becoming can be interpreted as purposely positioning the self as a deterritorialization status to maintain distance from norms, order, and mainstream values. Li specifically depicted the plot of becoming-Japanese in his novel. In the chapter entitled “Heartbroken on the Eighth of August,” Li illustrates that the ethnic Chinese narrator became insane after being possessed by a headless Japanese colonel, after which he carries two knives and tries to sexually assault the Japanese hostess and his Dutch companion, Christina. This scene is a clear portrayal of becoming-Japanese. The text reads, “The youngster Yon wears a long and a short knife in his waist and imitates unconsciously the walking posture of the Japanese Ronin in the movie” (Li, 2017, p. 257). “The face of youngster Yon is flushing … he shouts out Baga with a dry and choked voice and acts as if possessed by an evil spirit” (Li, 2017, p. 262). Ko Chia Cian (2012), a Sinophone Malaysian literature researcher, believes Li uses spirit possession as a metaphor for Japanese colonialism: “a lively performance of the sexual conquest in the wartime colony, a political allegory” (p. 53). The End of the River recreates scenes of the sexual assaults committed by the Japanese army during the Pacific War, with the intention to criticize Japanese imperialist ambitions. However, it must be emphasized that the design of the plots in the novel is too complex to be simply categorized as a critique of Japanese imperialism. First of all, the novel arranges for the Chinese teenager to be possessed by a Japanese ghost and then commit sexual assaults. Second, the victims are Japanese and Dutch women,

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both of whom come from the colonizers’ side. Hence, the plot design serves to weaken the memory politics driven by Chinese nationalism and instead turns its attention to gender politics by highlighting the humiliations suffered by females in a male-dominated world where the gender power structure remains intact, regardless of race, nation, and state. In other words, unlike the anti-Japanism writing that focused on criticizing the violence of Japanese imperialism, Li opts to let the Chinese narrator “become-Japanese” and become aware of the inseparable and unignorable common barbarity that exists between “self” (Chinese male) and the so-called “external other” (Japanese male). The plot design of “becoming-Japanese” bluntly challenges the previous binary opposition structure, which equates the Chinese to victims and the Japanese to perpetrators. On the one hand, it uncovers the “demon” hidden inside the hearts of the Chinese, and, on the other hand, deviates even more from mainstream Chinese nationalist views. One thing I must emphasize here is that Li’s novels of the twenty-first century are not intended to reopen the case of the violent acts of Japanese imperialism, a statement, however, that is an oversimplification per se. Rather, the novelist’s care and empathy for the headless Japanese ghosts of the Imperial army who died in a foreign land during the Second World War originate in the reflections of this Chinese diasporic novelist on nations, borders, migration, and nostalgia. The End of the River is an upstream journey of the narrator’s return to Borneo, and the entire book is dominated by emotions about both departure and homecoming. By the same token, the ghosts of the headless Japanese soldiers wandering in the jungle and the hotel hostess who stays alone in an isolated hotel are also seen as victims of transnational migration. A battle has brought them deep into a Southern rainforest, thousands of miles away from home, where they are separated by life and death and have no hope of ever returning home. Li indirectly projects his nostalgia on the lonely souls of the Imperial army in the rainforest and their hopeless desire to go home, an approach that has become a new aspect of Li’s writing on Japan in the twenty-first century.

5 The Production of “Japan” in the Transnational Context This chapter approaches Li Yongping’s writing on Japan from the dual perspectives of “anti-Japanism” and “becoming-Japanese” and attempts to outline the actual changes in his works. Li’s twentieth century novels reveal a clear anti-Japanese Imperialism sentiment based on Chinese nationalism and recount the history of the Japanese oppression, slaughter, and sexual abuse of ethnic Chinese. In contrast, Li’s twenty-first century works appear to project contradictory emotions by including both the elements of anti-Japan and the obsession with Japanese culture, to the extent that he even sympathizes with the powerlessness of the Japanese soldiers who left home to fight on foreign battlefields. I refer to this transition as the “becomingJapanese,” which is not at all the postcolonial mimicry that refers to imitation of the Japanese for identification. Rather it is a departure from the confinement within

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one’s own nationalistic epistemological framework and a realization of the dispensable commonality between the “self” and the “other.” As such, the transition that appears in Li’s twenty-first-century creations is truly intriguing. It is also worth noting that all the aforementioned novels by Li were completed in postcolonial Taiwan. Thus, Taiwan is inextricably related to these creations by inscribing the trajectory of the Japanese memory in a transnational context. The antiJapanism sentiment in Li’s novels not only reflects the experience of the Japanese occupation of Borneo but also echoes the surging anti-Japan phenomenon that has resulted from the diplomatic setbacks sustained by 1970s Taiwan, which endured the Diaoyutai incident, the termination of diplomatic ties with the United States, Japan, and others, and withdrawal from the United Nations. Meanwhile, Li’s “becomingJapanese” view is related to his personal experience with Taiwan. Li was an immigrant and lived in Taiwan for a long period of time, which made him extremely sensitive to such issues as migration, diaspora, and borders. Consequently, he managed to transcend the confinement of nationalism and become more sympathetic to the Japanese soldiers who could not return home. In the 1990s, when Taiwan began to appreciate and recognize the modern developments instituted by Japanese colonialism, Li coincidently departed from the Chinese nationalism framework and began to embrace multicultural values from the same period. The transition in Li’s twenty-first-century creation subtlely echoes social and public discourse in Taiwan since the new century, an overlap that is perhaps not just a coincidence. As mentioned earlier, Li may be a believer in “retroism” in the eyes of critics. However, Li can also be viewed as an immigrant writer who is mindful of the ongoing social pulsations in his new hometown. Thus, through Li’s works, we can clearly detect the most frontline and debated social changes in Taiwanese society and catch glimpses of the new perspective Taiwan literature is now taking in the twenty-first century.

References Chan, C. T. (2018). Indigeneity, map-mindedness, and world-literary cartography: The poetics and politics of Li Yongping’s transregional Chinese literary production. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 30(1), 63–86. Ching, L. T. S. (2019). Anti-Japan: The politics of sentiment in postcolonial East Asia. Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Athlone Press. Hsiau, A.-C. (2021). Politics and cultural nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, narrative. Columbia University Press. Ko, C.-C. (2012). 性、啟蒙與歷史債務: 李永平 《大河盡頭》 的創傷和敘事 [Desire, enlightenment, and historical debts: A study of trauma and narrative in Li Yongping’s The End of the River]. NTU Studies in Taiwan Literature, 11, 35–60. Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture. Columbia University Press.

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Li Yongping. 李永平. (2006). 海東青 [The eagle haidong qing]. Unitas Publishing. (Original work published 1992). Li Yongping. 李永平. (2017). 大河盡頭 [The end of the river]. Rye Field. (Original work published 2010). Liou, L.-Y. (2019). Taiwan’s postcoloniality and postwar memories of Japan. Ex-Position, 42, 169– 193. Ng, K. C. (2002). 漫遊者、象徵契約與卑賤物—論李永平的「海東春秋」 [Flaneur, symbolic order, and the abjections]. Chung Wai Literary Quarterly, 30(10), 24–41. Patton, P. (2010). Deleuzian concepts: Philosophy, colonization, politics. Stanford University Press. Tee, K. T. (2006). (離散)在台馬華文學與原鄉想像 [(Diasporic) Mahua literature in Taiwan and imaginary homelands]. Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, 22, 93–105. Zhan, M.-X. (2016). 與文學結緣: 李永平談寫作路 [Entangled with literature: Li Yongping on his literary career]. Dong Hwa Humanities. http://journal.ndhu.edu.tw/%E8%88%87%E6%96% 87%E5%AD%B8%E7%B5%90%E7%B7%A3%EF%BC%9A%E6%9D%8E%E6%B0%B8% E5%B9%B3%E8%AB%87%E5%AF%AB%E4%BD%9C%E8%B7%AF%E2%94%80%E2% 94%80%E8%A9%B9%E9%96%94%E6%97%AD/. Zhan, M.-X. (2017). 如何書寫台灣: 李永平小說裡的跨國地方認同 [How to write about Taiwan: Transnational place-based identity in Li Yongping’s fiction]. In C.-C. Ko (Ed.), 見山又是山: 李 永平研究 [A mountain appears to be a mountain: Studies on Li Yongping] (pp. 138–171). Rye Field.

Min-xu Zhan is an associate professor of Taiwan literature at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. His fields of specialization include modern and contemporary Taiwan literature, Sinophone Malaysian literature, and (im)migrant writing. He co-edited a special issue of Sun Yatsen Journal of Humanities entitled “Sinophone Literature in the Global South” (with Chia-rong Wu, 2021). He is currently working on his first monograph, tentatively entitled The Reception of Southeast Asian Migrant Literature in Taiwan, and an edited volume entitled The Afterlife of Taiwan Literature (with Chih-fan Chen, Yu-ting Wang, and Hsin-chin Hsieh), which analyzes the characteristics, concerns, and development of Taiwanese writers of the millennial generation.

Huang Chong-kai and the Taiwanese Novel of Ideas Nicholas Y. H. Wong

Abstract Readers have observed how Huang Chong-kai’s (黃崇凱) novels present new ways of writing the local literary history of Taiwan. In this chapter, I argue that Huang’s literary-historical intervention can also be understood in relation to his pursuit of questions of historical fate and freedom, which he raises through acts of gleaning as a writing method and a citizen’s inherent right, thus asserting a sense of common ownership to a place. I discuss Huang’s The Content of the Times (文藝春 秋, 2017) and The Formosa Exchange (新寶島, 2021) as examples of the “novel of ideas,” and how Huang’s works, when viewed within this typology of a gimmick, specifically, one that reflects borrowed space and time—for example, in virtual reality and population exchange—modifies the terms of Taiwan’s diaspora across the long twentieth century. Huang also presents literary history as media history, and his fascination with extraterrestrial forms and Latin America, in particular Cuba, thus providing readers with new frameworks and entry points into studying Taiwan’s literary pasts and futures. Keywords Huang Chong-kai · Gleaning · Novel of ideas · Literary history · Media history

1 Gleaning or Gossip In Agnes Varda’s (1928–2019) documentary film, The Gleaners and I (2000), food recovery or gleaning is presented as a citizen right backed by French law. After commercial harvests, potatoes left in the fields, or grapes left on the vine can be plucked and gathered for free, alleviating hunger and food waste. Gleaning encourages a sense of common ownership of yields, and the use of local farms rather than foreign sources. In Varda’s examination, gleaning is considered both an artistic subject and a representational method. One striking moment is when we follow the life of a PhD graduate, who gleans for food on the streets and teaches French language N. Y. H. Wong (B) The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_14

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to migrants at his apartment complex. The Taiwan writer Huang Chong-kai’s (黃崇 凱; b. 1981) novels feature similar subjects: for example, Robert Dixson (1908–1963) teaches English to Latin American factory workers in a bid to help them assimilate in the United States in the novel The Contents of the Times (Wenyi chunqiu 文藝春 秋, 2017). Most notably, Huang gleans his writing material from where he was born. This is what Chiu (2021) observes, too, of new millennial Taiwan writers besides Huang, who “make it a point to refer to Taiwanese writers and events in the works they create”. This trend, Chiu (2021) notes, crosses the supposed realism–modernism divide. It is possible to trace Huang’s method of referencing writers and political figures back to traditional Chinese genres of unauthorized biographies (waizhuan) and addendum (buyi), but also to new trends of an institutionalization of creative writing in the US and its impact on contemporary Taiwan literature, as Chang (2017) argues. Lo (2017) views Huang’s The Content of the Times as “a novel of ideas strung together by eleven life-histories”. A “novel of ideas,” loosely defined, tends to feature heavy dialogue and debate about ideas over plot development and character conflict. Huang (2021a) himself admits that his novels are thought experiments filled with “ornamental techniques” (p. 247) and “proposed concepts” (p. 306). Formal devices, essayistic ideas, and literary doubles are what make his work coherent. In the opening chapter, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Raymond Carver,” Huang (2017) imitates Carver’s (1938–1988) style and asks if conversations add up to more than the banality of marriage and literary gossip—a key to reading his works. In “Dixson’s Idioms,” chapter sub-headings come from a phrasal verb textbook, and one of the entries presents the subjunctive, and by extension, Huang’s mode of writing Taiwanese literary history (2017; Huang, 2021b). But Huang values historical facticity, and we can fact-check the biographical details of his subjects against public accounts and their memoirs. So, the tension of Huang’s works comes from situational rather than dramatic irony; rather than their transformations, which are predetermined, we view their lives from new angles. Huang Chong-kai writes mostly about political persecution during the White Terror period of the Kuomintang (KMT) rule, following the 228 Incident in 1947 until Taiwan’s democratization in the late 1980s. Readers learn that Bo Yang’s (柏楊; 1920–2008) books are combed for treachery, and his translation of a word in a Popeye comic strip landed him in prison (Huang, 2017). Political prisoners in Taiwan make cameo appearances in Huang’s works, but is the outcome gleaning or mere gossip about their lives? In Huang’s (2017) chapter, “Three Lives,” also the title of Nieh Hualing’s (聶華苓; b. 1925) memoir (2011), the retired spy narrator recounts his life of gathering intelligence on Nieh and appears to be obsessive–compulsive about her literary career and associations. He even resents Nieh for not writing much after her husband Paul Engel’s (1908–1991) death, revealing their one-sided yet symbiotic relationship. The effect is a paranoid Taiwanese literary history told by someone resentful of Taiwan’s liberalization, and condoning Taiwan’s history of censorship and persecution of dissident writers. In some quarters, writing literary history is an act of espionage. The narrator-documentarian’s omniscient voice is actually insidious voyeurism, and we ought to ask how much of vernacular accounts we produce about writers falls into a similar mode of attachment.

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Nieh’s spy narrator hypothesizes about a detail that only literary historians would fret over: the International Writers’ Workshop now exists not only because Nieh repeatedly asked Engle about this during their boating trips in Iowa, but also because Yin Haiguang (殷海光; 1919–1969) had inspired her. Over coffee, the spy narrator fantasizes that Nieh tries to invite Yin, whom she calls a “philosophical gardener” (Huang, 2017, pp. 47–48), to stay at this utopian village of writers and artists. Writing a history of literature can be vampiric, an obsessive pursuit from the shadows, allowing for self-reflexive, hypothetical questions about historical events. The spy narrator becomes disillusioned with the KMT rule but ultimately succumbs to drudgery. He rationalizes his work: “On some level, Lei Chen and Yin Haiguang have to necessarily exist. Without them putting up a last-ditch fight, our jobs have no meaning” (Huang, 2017, p. 47). He even tries to persuade people not to participate in what became known as the Kaohsiung Incident in 1979, after which he loses trust in the KMT. He vexes over counterfactuals, like “what if the marines were deployed to quell the incident?” (Huang, 2017, pp. 50–52). Huang (2017) gets in the mind of his enemies to see how they consider the questions of historical fate and literary freedom, before offering alternative frameworks.

2 Taiwan’s Diaspora on Mars The claustrophobic nearness of Nieh’s spy narrative shifts into a distance of Taiwan’s literary history as climate history in the next chapter, “How to Live on like Wang Zhenhe” (Huang, 2017). What does writing literary history mean when humanity as a whole is under threat, not just a select group? The surface gravity of White Terror victims and their stories becomes relative when research for them is used for student homework, many years later, on Mars. But Taiwan’s plight takes on eerily intimate tones when the diasporic Taiwan–mainland relationship is dramatized on a planetary scale of Mars and Earth. In the story, the grandfather encourages his grandson to use his homework essay on Wang Zhenhe (王和; 1940–1990) to “think about the relationship between Earth and Mars” (Huang, 2017, p. 71). The grandson-narrator ponders this and feels like he has already become a Martian. So, as Lo (2017) notes, the shift from studying Taiwan literary history from a local-diasporic onto a planetary scale has the effect of reorienting the actors involved. In this intergalactic view of the Taiwan problem, Earth—or what exerts a centripetal force—is not necessarily China, but could refer to the US or Japan. This imperial dimension of Taiwan’s history forms the backdrop of new settler-colonial extraction on Mars, which now supplies metals to Earth to produce their “toys” (Huang, 2017, p. 71). The grandson-narrator’s parents are laborers who run intergalactic delivery for this regime. The setting of “Wang Zhenhe” (Huang, 2017) is worth recounting, since Mars is invoked as a spatial concept for Taiwan’s diaspora. The year is 2140: the studentnarrator lives on Mars, his 157-year-old grandfather travels from Earth to take care of him and brings along some books. Reading habits have changed, so the grandfather’s oral history of Wang Zhenhe helps his grandson complete his homework essay. Born

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on Mars, the young narrator does not know the freedom of breathing and movement on Earth, but the Earth is mired in environmental pollution and energy wastage anyway. The food crisis is solved by 3-D printing, but Martians eat printed-out fruit without the satisfaction of real guava or wax apple. To return to Earth, one needs to rent a body, given the different atmospheric pressure. The first human arrived on Mars in 2037, hence the beginning of diaspora. Huang (2017) identifies a few types of Martians: the migrant, the tourist, the settler, the paternal teacher, and the adventurer. Besides the first-generation student-narrator, there are people who come to Mars to visit and buy Ray Bradbury memorabilia, such as his novel Martian Chronicles (1950). There are those who invade Earth, contract a virus, and then perish, as the grandfather recounts from a 19th-century novel. In another story, “Have You Read The Chinese Echoes of Xiao Baike” (Huang, 2017), the benevolent titular character of this children’s magazine (Echo Publishing, December 1984–November 1985) comes from outer space to teach Taiwanese children how to be exemplary Chinese citizens during the period of Taiwan’s nativist turn. Xiao Baike also tells of “patriotic” astronauts like the Chinese-American Taylor Gun-Jin Wang (b. 1940), who presented the PRC flag to Premier Zhao Ziyang. Huang (2017) notes with irony that Wang, despite CCP pressure, also brought the ROC Taiwan flag to outer space and back to present it to the chair of the Legislative Yuan. Huang (2017) transforms historical fate into literary freedom with the help of Martian bodies. While extraction is bad, gleaning is good. In “Raymond Carver,” when the writer Sh¯uji Terayama (1935–1983) asks, “Would you use your camera lens to change anything?” the Japanese photographer Daid¯o Moriyama (b. 1938), who was born in the same year as Carver, responds, “My family genealogy” (Huang, 2017, p. 28). Similarly, Huang’s works go beyond Taiwan–US and Taiwan–mainland China lines to present diaspora as a media relationship and a result of situational irony when a character is made to inhabit different times and spaces. Sometimes, this diasporic relation is an individual experience: when a Taiwanese writer joins an artist residency in Iowa, or, as in “Oleander” (Huang, 2017), when a student studying in China is made to feel Taiwanese, even though he is Beijinger by upbringing. Why are one’s origins attached to national shame? Huang (2017) points out the different treatment of Taiwanese soldiers stranded in Fujian and denied repatriation, as opposed to the soldier Teruo Nakamura (whose aliases include Lee Kuang-hui and Attun Palalin, 1919–1979), who was given a warm welcome home after holding out in Indonesia for decades after the Second World War. If Martians like the studentnarrator pine for Earth and want to visit, will they be denied entry? In the Martian Xiao Baike’s celebratory account, national origins are better obscured unless they can be manipulated; he does not reveal to the Taiwanese children whether Lee Kuang-hui is Pangcah, Japanese, or Chinese. In The Formosa Exchange (Xin baodao 新寶島, 2021), Huang explores Taiwan’s diaspora within a multiscalar literary history, beholden to more empires and places of return. The populations of Taiwan and Cuba switch places inexplicably just as Taiwan’s first Indigenous president takes office. What follows is a reorientation of Taiwan’s and Cuba’s geopolitics, agriculture, business, technology, and artistic production, and how Han Chinese and Indigenous Taiwanese characters take stock

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of the new historical connections made between Taiwan and Cuba, and the US and China, in terms of imperialism, settler colonialism, nationalism, and resource extraction.

3 Counterfactual Historicity: A Taiwan–Cuba Great Exchange Huang (2021a) aims to give readers a masterclass in counterfactuals and use his thought experiment of a Taiwan–Cuba Great Exchange to propose a further liberalization of Taiwan through constitutional protection of its Indigenous population and gay minorities. Huang deals with the mechanics of this exchange by asking questions: what happens to Cuban exiles; and are the outlying islands of Taiwan part of the exchange; if outside of the firing range of Chinese missiles, will Taiwan have a new constitution and change its name? In the Great Exchange, a story about Taiwan necessarily involves a story about Cuba; hence, parts of the novel detail Cuba’s troubles and revolutionary origins (Huang, 2021a, c). Cuba and Taiwan share historical, economic, and geographic connections that facilitate a comparison. Readers even get a brief history of nuclear energy in Cuba and Taiwan. Should the Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant, known as the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant near New Taipei City, reopen, Huang asks? In the 1980s, Cuba–Soviet development of nuclear energy was cut short by the tragedy of Chernobyl (1986) and the fall of the Soviet Union (1991), just as Cuba was committed to renewable energy. These questions about resource management emerge, so Huang (2021a, b) does not assume Cold War alignments allow for rapprochement between countries suddenly across from each other—China and Cuba, both communist, and the US and Taiwan. Huang’s (2021a, b) counterfactual histories are developed out of what he reads and watches, aimed at exonerating political prisoners. After the Great Exchange, the US closed Guantánamo Bay, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi (b. 1970), who documented his prison experience in Guantánamo Diary (2015), visited “Cuba” for the first time after his release (Huang, 2021a, b). Huang’s (2017, 2021a, b) work reappraises folk heroes such as the anti-colonial Liao Tianding (1883–1909), also known as the Taiwanese Robin Hood, while questioning the legacy of the KMT-endorsed national hero Wu Feng (1699–1769), who befriended Indigenous groups. Huang (2021a) ponders the issue of giving voice to Indigenous struggles as a Han Chinese writer in the last chapter of The Formosa Exchange, where he depicts the life of Wang Zhiming (1949– 1987), translator of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) into Chinese, an ethnographer who took on an Indigenous Paiwanese identity while doing fieldwork. A recent documentary by Hou Chi-jan (2020) on the singer professionally known as Panana, or Kao Chu-hua, whose Indigenous Tsou name was Paicu Yatauyungana, and whose father, Kao Yi-sheng (Uong’e Yatauyungana, 1908–1954) was a postwar Indigenous leader persecuted by the KMT, seems to have inspired Huang (2021a,

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b) to redress past injustices by depicting her son as the first Indigenous president of Taiwan. We learn, through interview responses, this new president Kao is hip and hosts a podcast to dialogue freely with his citizens (Huang, 2021a, b). He also plans to give a Mazu (Ma-tsu), or sea goddess, statue to the US, invoking France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty. His politics is tied to his literary background: switching from the Chinese department to study at the Taiwan Literature Research Center, Kao ascribes the awakening of his Indigenous consciousness to discovering the Bunun writer Tian Yage, or Topas Tamapima (b. 1960). Kao explores the 228 incident in 1947 and its violent suppression by the KMT from an Indigenous viewpoint in his Master’s thesis on Lin Yao-de (1962–1996) (Huang, 2021a, b). During his tenure, Kao even writes a book review of a novel called New Continent (Xin dalu), written by a supposed Huang Chong-kai. We as readers are only given an excerpt, called “China Dreams,” but can glean details from the subsequent book review, and the study group’s discussion of the novel. Note the mise-en-abyme structure: this novel, New Continent, presents a hypothetical situation of a continental exchange between the major powers of mainland China and the US, taking as its background the Taiwan– Cuba Great Exchange, which had happened in that author’s reality (Huang, 2021a, b). As a student describes, “the novel is divided into five chapters, the one called ‘China Dreams’ is about Xu Taisheng, a Taiwanese worker in Guangzhou, now located in Miami, while ‘US Dreams’ is about Ada Rodriguez, a Miami Cuban lady in Guangzhou” (Huang, 2021a, p. 247). This embedded narrative of a China–US population exchange in The Formosa Exchange, shown as literary fiction, raises the geopolitical stakes of Huang’s initial thought experiment. Huang (2021a) notes, in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), “Sparta annihilated Athens, but was served on a platter to ascendant Macedonia” (p. 218). However, small countries like Taiwan and Cuba peacefully handle the Great Exchange, leading to political gains, such as the US’s removal of the blockade against Cuba, and China’s cross-straits demilitarization. Presidents Biden and Xi meet in Taipei, supposedly neutral ground, to broker a peaceful resolution to the situation, strengthening Taiwan’s diplomatic status (Huang, 2021a, b). In contrast, when facing a similar situation, major powers like China and the US act differently. According to the study group, they feel threatened by a rising power and fall into the Thucydides Trap, acting out what John Mearsheimer calls “offensive realism” (Huang, 2021a, pp. 259–260). While Taiwan and Cuba allow free movement of their nationals, China and the US close off the borders after numerous Southeast Asian migrants cross the border into “China,” now the US, to find jobs (Huang, 2021a, b). Taiwan and Cuba are linked by their treatment by stronger nations. As Huang (2017) wryly suggests, what connects mainland China and Taiwan instead is either a bout of romance or the anticolonial Diaoyutai protest movement in 1971. War, revolution, the slave trade, and the redrawing of national borders lead to population exchange and human migration on a large scale, but inhabitants of Taiwan and Cuba switch places in The Formosa Exchange as a result of inexplicable chance, and deal with it in orderly ways. Did Huang handle this tactfully? Huang (2021a, b) presents other forms of exchange as reference: the Louisiana Exchange between

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Jefferson and Napoleon, Chinese migration to Cuba, and the Columbian Exchange after 1492. Sudden population exchange can ironically expedite social reforms, already in the making, and import political systems: Cuba’s revised constitution in 2019 to legalize gay marriage makes new “Taiwan” the first country in Asia to allow gay marriage. Huang (2021a, b) even draws on his reading of Ta Nehisi Coates, who makes the case for reparations for African-American communities, to argue on behalf of Indigenous rights in Taiwan. Going further than President Tsai Ing-wen’s official apology to Indigenous Taiwanese (2016), the Great Exchange prompts further protections to Indigenous land rights and clarifies Tsai’s notion of “traditional territory” (Huang, 2021a, p. 149). Huang (2021a) is attentive to Indigenous, not just Taiwanese Min—or, settler Hoklo and Teochew—suffering during Taiwan’s White Terror period, and shows that the Great Exchange did not blunt the force of Indigenous protests, now springing up in Havana. In the closing pages of The Formosa Exchange, the alter-ego novelist Huang Chong-kai, a photographer, and the real-life Cuban installation artist, Duvier del Dago Fernandez (b. 1976), introduced in the first chapter (Bradley, 2021), collaborate to produce a holographic installation art piece that is projected onto buildings in Dabang village, Alishan township. This artwork reimagines Indigenous Taiwanese sovereignty, in line with Duvier’s previous artworks that present an alternative history of Cuba after Che’s death in 1967 up until 2037. The “national Airbnb” (Huang, 2021a, p. 343) Taiwan implements in Cuba is attractive, but now the diasporic Taiwanese have to return home. Artworks test if they are changed by that experience. Diasporic Taiwanese on Cuba face a “transcendental homelessness,” to use Lukács’s (1916) theory of the novel, and a series of existential dilemmas produced by the Great Exchange. But, instead of home, diasporic Taiwanese are bound to two places through Huang’s (2021a) method of juxtaposition, which gives a new spin on ideas of historical fate and literary freedom. Huang’s “novel of ideas” approach can be dazzling, gimmicky even. It is breathless for the reader who fails to don the spacesuit in time. Huang’s (2021a) novelistic artifice always leads his readers back to “Taiwan factors” (p. 232). At best, this is gleaning with its implied human freedom and right of access to the Earth. But it can be heavy-handed, bogged down by details of accuracy with reference to the real world. Huang reveals his cards and asks readers to interpret them as he would. Hence, Huang’s work is not, strictly speaking, speculative fiction or science fiction, because its world-building aspect requires confirmation with reality to make sense. Literary theorist Sianne Ngai has written about the gimmick of the novel of ideas and defends its maturity as a genre against charges of its being “artful” and “relying on overly transparent stylistic devices” (Brazil, 2020). The Taiwan–Cuba Great Exchange is Huang’s gimmick par excellence, and to this we might add Huang’s use of counterfactual historicity, or what I also call “a poetic imagination that ironically derives from its facticity” (Wong, 2021, p. 102). As mouthpieces for his ideas, Huang’s novels explain “too much and too little” (Brazil, 2020) like a gimmick.

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4 Literary History as Media History For me, Huang does not limit his use of gimmicks to counterfactual historicity, that is, of exploring Taiwan’s alternative futures had things been different or set in another place—that itself raises another set of geopolitical tensions. Huang’s novels of ideas, more importantly, reframe Taiwan’s literary history as a space of “capitalist sublime” (Koenig, 2020), where the horrors, but also the benefits, of the event of literature in the era of late capitalism is the unwaged labor of everyone as a literary historian. But first, here’s how the novel of ideas, for Ngai (in Brazil, 2020), indexes capitalism through its gimmicky use of form: The most interesting instances of this aesthetically risky artform are therefore comedies that, in their presentation of readymade or pre-existing ‘ideas’, explicitly reflect on the commodification or reification – the becoming-thing-like – of thought in capitalist culture. And that in the effort to represent this reification – which is certainly alienating but also, counterintuitively, remarkably productive for making culture – lean into the gimmick’s aesthetically dubious form.

Huang’s gimmicks may have evolved from writing constraints that one can come to expect from his writing group, The Alphabet Lab (Su, 2017). But Huang’s facticity, or depiction of “readymade or pre-existing ‘ideas’,” uses various media forms, which has the effect of questioning the processes needed to make, transmit, and document them. Oftentimes, ideas in literary history are reproduced according to market logics of consumption and valuation. Huang knows the ethics of writing about and on behalf of minorities and political prisoners. To avoid the commodification and repackaging of their stories for yet another soundbite or gossip, Huang repeats them in a defamiliarized mediascape, with the sobriety of a factchecker and the grin of a prankster. By casting his subjects—from spy to president—as literary historians in disguise, Huang reveals the work of literature done in the shadows and also outsourced to many others. It is a thankless task not limited to professional writers and critics. Literary history is media history, Huang contends, and writers have to reckon with old and new methods of showing their work and personas using new digital tools and technologies of surveillance capitalism. So, this is more than just how virtual reality (VR) transforms our reading habits and perceptual experience (Chang, 2017). VR and its new mediascapes challenge the ways in which literary history is written and stored. Huang (2017) asks: will Martians remember Wang Zhenhe via a database, 20th-century Japanese movies, or his personal accounts about Taiwanese lyrics? Will Edward Yang (1947–2007) be relevant in the year 2070, only when scenes of his movies become scripts for re-enactment in a choose-your-own-adventure multimedia tourist playground? Isn’t Nieh Hualing’s informant a kind of spyware in analog form, revealing and fabricating details outside of Nieh’s memoirs? In The Formosa Exchange, Huang (2021a) allows computer users to simulate running the Legislative Yuan and bring one’s homeland before one’s eyes. In this case, VR reboots the literary relevance of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, whose double, the Uruguayan businessman Ramón, lives on as a holographic spectral presence in a “subscriptionbased virtual country” (Huang, 2021a, p. 320).

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Huang (2017) warns of this digital takeover, where literary forms are superseded by other media, through the chronology of The Content of the Times. Literature, discussed in the first half, is broadened to encompass all media or creative genres, by the second. Readers learn about Taiwan literary history via films, songs, movies, comic books, and language textbooks. One now has to study Taiwan literary history qua media history, and this cultural studies revolution is already happening—literature will be outpaced by more concise visual and aural forms. Huang (2017) labors overtime and wears several hats to educate and entertain his reader. Even the materiality of remembering a writer’s legacy changes: memorial halls, collected volumes, and letters, like those traded between Zhong Lihe (Chung Li-ho 鍾理和; 1915–1960) and Zhong Zhaozheng (Chung Chao-cheng 鍾肇政; 1925–2020), are insufficient (Huang, 2017; Zhong, 2014). The best way to memorialize a writer and their achievements is brain surrogacy, or letting them live forever, not just virtually, but through another person’s human body. In “Wang Zhenhe” (Huang, 2017), the student’s grandfather is revealed to be an author whose works had been stolen by another; readers were able to detect similarities between a young female author’s works and the grandfather’s nemesis, who most likely transferred his brain into her body. This same grandfather is no more ethical for having kept his daughter’s brain alive in another body after her death against her wishes, and then inseminated her frozen eggs to produce her husband, who turns out to be the student-narrator’s father. Stolen bodies and assisted reproduction prompt us to think of the survival of literary history without human productivity, but this is not a technologically determinist argument of the rise and fall of a literary culture, or of the disembodiment that awaits literary culture. On the contrary, Huang identifies literature as part of a larger universe of recording Taiwan. The dots connect, for example, in “Comic Strip of the Universe,” where the reader finds out about the avatar of the intergalactic, diasporic café on Mars called Alu-bar. The original Alu-bar, on earth’s Taiwan, is an art café that also rents out comic strips. He Jingbin’s (賀景濱; b. 1958) novel, Last Year at Alu-bar (Qunian zai aluba 去年在阿鲁吧, 2011), inspired its name (Huang, 2017), though cheekily, Alu-bar is also a Taiwanese term for when schoolboys hoist and ram their classmates’ privates into a pole. In this story, ang-a-tsheh (Taiwanese Min for comic books) characters like the Martian Xiao Baike already predicted intergalactic space travel by 2070 (Huang, 2017), and the bar owner Xiaohe has a premonition that Alu-bar will move to Mars. Both Alu-bars are where intergenerational exchanges take place, but with a twist: on earth, a grandson presents his activist views on Taiwan’s social movements (Huang, 2017), while on Mars, a student strongly identifies as a local there but is unable to use his homework on Wang Zhenhe as an analogy to articulate his resentment of Earth’s exploitation of Mars, until his grandfather intervenes. Here, the terms of Taiwan’s diaspora are constantly shifting: island–mainland, Taiwan–Cuba, and Mars–Earth, through Huang’s comparisons and old-school use of literary doubles across time and space.

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5 Language Lessons What’s exciting is that Huang (2017) writes both chapters, “Wang Zhenhe” and “Comic Strip,” using Taiwanese Min vocabulary and syntax. A few hundred years have passed, and Taiwanese Min is very much alive, and also the dominant written language for the new generation of Martians. How does Taiwanese Min survive in outer space, and what’s more, as a language of literary narration? It started from earlier times when Xiaohe conscientiously created such a space at his art café Alu-bar. The future is now in that Huang (2017) is showing how it is done. Here the postcolonial question of language use in Taiwan is resolved, although its use is exiled onto another planet. The journey there, to decolonize language use, is not easy: in the next story, “A Belated Youth,” Huang Lingzhi’s (黃靈芝; 1928–2016) continual use of Japanese, the language he grew up with alongside Taiwanese Min, rather than the newly ascendant, KMT-directed Mandarin Chinese, which he had to learn, subjects him to the harsh gaze of students who question his lack of national loyalty. Ironically, Huang (2017) brings a wish fulfilment to this bensheng (local subject), Japanese-language author’s life by narrating it in a lyrical, waisheng (mainlander) Chinese. Or, perhaps Huang Chong-kai’s style translates what Huang Lingzhi’s Japanese sounds like in Chinese. The latter Huang’s work is a minor, “non-national literature” whose transition seems overdue, prompting the students’ glib remark: “there’s no post-colonialism if you don’t stop writing in Japanese” (Huang, 2017, p. 97). Like Huang Lingzhi, Ke Qihua (1929–2002), the protagonist of “Dixson’s Idioms,” arouses suspicion for teaching Japanese and English (Huang, 2017, 2021b). Under KMT rule, Ke was imprisoned for over a decade, and found solace in editing and writing Chinese–English grammar books, used widely in Taiwan, and in assigning Martin Luther King’s famed speech, “I Have a Dream” (1963), as classroom material. Ke’s literary double is Robert Dixson, who was suspected as a Communist for teaching Brooklyn factory workers English, thus equipping them with tools to realize the American Dream. With his family, Dixson wrote many English-language primers, one of which was republished by Lai Shixiong in Taiwan. Language lessons thus meet class struggle and anti-imperialist revolt. Huang Chong-kai even relates language learning to sex work, extraction, and colonialism: the student in “Wang Zhenhe” (Huang, 2017) asks his grandfather if taking extracurricular classes on Earth is akin to a scene in Wang Zhenhe’s satire, Rose, Rose, I Love You (1984), where a manager of sex workers trains them to act stylish and speak in English. The student ponders Wang Zhenhe as he puts on a protective suit in the vast expanse of a dune filled with quartz and iron. He knows that the sex trade on Mars caters to Earth’s upper-level clientele, just as in the American occupation of Vietnam. Back to Agnes Varda’s paean to gleaning, this single-handed, age-old, earthy custom, is what I use to frame my discussion of Huang Chong-kai’s multiscalar launch of Taiwan into a future in space, or in the case of The Formosa Exchange, of burrowing through the earth into Cuba. Huang’s method of digging, of getting close to the earth, to capture the sights and sounds of Taiwan’s soil—rather than extracting from it like the mining entrepreneurs, arriving on Mars from Earth—yields several

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modes of survival: cultural, linguistic, and economic. Everyone needs a teacher like Huang to boost morale and imagination, considering fresh budget cuts in Taiwanese universities, and a general malaise and stagnation due to political intractability. How would Huang’s language lessons fare in the wake of Taiwan’s new policy to use English as a medium of instruction at universities? The gimmick of counterfactual historicity in Huang’s novels of ideas is portable to examine questions like these. It produces an innovative re-worlding of Taiwan via Mars and Cuba, beyond the diasporic–mainland axis, and considers Taiwan’s diaspora, and its questions of identity and sovereignty on a grander scale of VR and transplanted human bodies.

References Bradley, M. K. (2021). The Formosa Exchange. Books from Taiwan. https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/ images/books_img/THE%20FORMOSA%20EXCHANGE.pdf. Brazil, K. (2020). Interview with Sianne Ngai. The White Review. https://www.thewhitereview.org/ feature/interview-with-sianne-ngai/. Chang, Y. S.-S. (2017). 迴的文化傳 [A roundabout cultural transmission]. In Huang Chong-kai, 文藝春秋 [The contents of the times] (pp. 295–305). Acropolis. Chiu, K.-F. (2021). Millennial writers and the Taiwanese literary tradition. Taiwan Lit, 2.1. https:// taiwanlit.org/essays/millennial-writers-and-the-taiwanese-literary-tradition/. Huang Chong-kai. 黃崇凱. (2017). 文藝春秋 [The contents of the times]. Acropolis. Huang Chong-kai. (2021a). 新寶島 [The Formosa Exchange]. SpringHill. Huang Chong-kai. (2021b). Dixson’s idioms. In I. Rowen (Ed.), Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror (B. Skerratt, Trans.) (pp. 165–196). Cambria Press. Huang Chong-kai. (2021c). Ram´on, Adolfo, Ernesto, and Che (N. Y. H. Wong, Trans.). Renditions, 96, 101–128. Koenig, A. (2020). Gimme more: On Sianne Ngai’s “theory of the gimmick.” Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gimme-more-on-sianne-ngais-theory-ofthe-gimmick/. Lo, Y.-C. (2017). 哭笑不得的台灣心靈史 [Taiwan’s confounding inner history]. In Huang Chongkai, 文藝春秋 [The contents of the times] (pp. 313–326). Acropolis. Lukács, G. (1971). The theory of the novel (A. Bostock, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1916). Ngai, S. (2020). The gimmick of the novel of ideas. The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview. org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/. Su, L. (2017). Adventures in modern fiction: Taiwan’s literary imagination pioneers new dimensions (B. Humes, Trans.). Taiwan Panorama. https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details? Guid=ccf22130-39c1-4d36-a216-8ebccef9280c. Wong, N. Y. H. (2021). Translator’s Introduction. In Huang Chong-kai. 黃崇凱. Ramón, Adolfo, Ernesto, and Che. Renditions, 96, 101–103. Zhong, Z., & Zhong, L. (2014). Newsletter of literary friends: Correspondence between Zhong Zhaozheng and Zhong Lihe (D. Sterk, Trans.). In Y. S.-S. Chang, M. Yeh, & M.-J. Fan (Eds.), The Columbia sourcebook of literary Taiwan (pp. 174–178). Columbia University Press. (Original correspondence made in 1957).

Nicholas Y. H. Wong is an assistant professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. He teaches Chinese-English translation and is writing a book on the relationship

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between extractive capitalism and minority writing in Chinese-language literary and historical accounts from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. His translation of “Ram´on, Adolfo, Ernesto, and Che,” a chapter excerpt from Huang Chong-kai’s novel, The Formosa Exchange (2021), appeared in Renditions 96 (Autumn 2021).

Taiwan Literature in the Age of Globalization

Escape and Return: Ghostly Representations of Home and Abroad in Kevin Chen’s “Summer Trilogy” Pei-yin Lin

Abstract Kevin Chen (Chen Sihong 陳思宏; b. 1976) is a Berlin-based Taiwanese author known for his award-winning quasi-autobiographic family saga Ghost Town (鬼地方, 2019), which recounts the change of Chen’s hometown Yongjing, a rural township in central Taiwan. In 2020, Chen published Florida Metamorphosis (佛羅里達變形記), a dystopian tale about several teenagers’ unbridled adventures in Florida that ends in almost ineradicable guilt and resentment. In 2022, Chen completed his “Summer Trilogy” with the addition, The Good People Upstairs (樓上的好人), a novel straddling between Berlin and Yuanlin with a focus on the middle-aged heroine’s awakened sexuality and changed attitude toward homosexuality. Employing close reading, this chapter examines Chen’s portrayal of home (Yongjing and Yuanlin) and abroad (Florida and Berlin), especially its dialectics between the protagonists wanting to leave and being drawn back. It first analyzes the intertwining of homophobia and political authoritarianism, which makes Yongjing a ghost town. It then discusses the broken teenage protagonists’ failed escape from home and its implications in Florida Metamorphosis. Finally, it examines the repair of the “broken” body and familial relationships in The Good People Upstairs. It posits that Chen stands out from his peers for his continued exploration of many dark elements, such as homophobia, upon which his distinct “ghostly” narrative is constructed. The chapter also points out two special features of Chen’s trilogy—his nightmarish portrayal of home and body-focused writing—and that the three novels together demonstrate his unrelenting pursuit of freedom through his protagonists. Keywords Kevin Chen · Summer Trilogy · Homophobia · Authoritarianism · Ghostly narrative Kevin Chen (Chen Sihong 陳思宏; b. 1976) is an emerging Berlin-based Taiwanese author who won the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award for his novel Ghost Town (Gui difang 鬼地方, 2019). A quasi-autobiographical family saga, the work recounts the story of Chen’s hometown, Yongjing, a rural township in the middle of Taiwan, on its P. Lin (B) University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_15

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path to modernity. Its engaging plotline has facilitated international circulation of the novel in translation, with copyright being sold in English, Korean, and Vietnamese (Xu, 2020). In 2020, Chen published Florida Metamorphosis (Foluolida bianxingji 佛羅里達變形記), a dystopian tale about several teenagers’ unbridled adventures at a Florida summer camp that end in haunting guilt and resentment. With the latest addition, The Good People Upstairs (Loshang de haoren 樓上的好人), released in 2022, Chen completed his “Summer Trilogy.” Despite a few accessible interviews with Chen, research on Chen’s novels remains scarce. Fan Ming-ju (2020) proposes using the term “post-nativist” (houxiangtu) (p. 36) fiction to read Chen’s Ghost Town, while Chang Wen-hsun (2022) has provided a general overview of Chen’s “Summer Trilogy.” Thematically, Chen’s trilogy fits into the genealogy of standard nativist writing prevalent in Taiwan in the 1970s, particularly its depiction of small-town life and often marginalized characters faced with rapid modernization. Yet, Chen tends to link his hometown writing with references to foreign locales, a translocal feature also found in the works of his contemporaries, including Zhang Yixuan (b. 1973) and Lian Mingwei (b. 1983). Moreover, homosexual desire, usually less repressed when the protagonists travel abroad, permeates his trilogy. Combining these two discernible characteristics of Chen’s trilogy, one can deduce that the dialectics of escape and return constitute the recurring motif of the trilogy. Employing textual analysis, this chapter examines Chen’s portrayal of home (Yongjing and Yuanlin) and abroad (Florida and Berlin). It first traces the formation of Chen’s body-centered “broken” (huaidiao) poetics, a state in which his protagonists suffer from multifaceted suppression, including homosexuality, dysfunctional families, and political authoritarianism. More specifically, it explores the various reasons that make Ghost Town’s Yongjing a broken place. It then discusses the broken protagonists’ failed escape and its implications in Florida Metamorphosis. Finally, it examines the repair of the “broken body” in The Good People Upstairs. The chapter posits that Chen stands out from his peers for his sustained exploration of many dark elements, such as insanity and homophobia, upon which his distinct “ghostly” narrative is constructed. Through this narrative, repressed bodily desires are foregrounded and offer a possibility for (self-)reconciliation and a promising route towards freedom.

1 Repressed Sexuality in Ghost Town As early as The Three Anti-allergy Methods (Qu guomin de sanzhong fangfa 去過 敏的三種方法, 2015), Chen has associated hometown recollections with physical problems; in this case, a skin allergy. In Ghost Town, he goes further, turning the hometown into a ghostly place. Chen’s labelling of Yongjing as a ghost town evokes “ghost island” (guidao), a term that has been widely used to refer to Taiwan, and which gained momentum after Guo Guanying used it to express his pro-unification idea in 2009. It is now used by netizens to vent their dissatisfaction with Taiwan’s

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reality. In Ghost Town, however, it is deployed figuratively to highlight the violence and trauma experienced by the protagonist, Chen Tianhong, the youngest child in the family. In an interview, Chen explained that “ghost” has different layers of meaning. It refers to the time lag of a small town like his birthplace, Yongjing, where world events do not seem to matter, and can also refer to haunted political memories, such as Taiwan’s White Terror and Germany’s Nazi past (Zhai, 2019). The novel opens with Tianhong’s German partner, T, asking him about his hometown and family. This is a difficult question for Tianhong, who self-identifies as “a broken man” (Chen, 2019, p. 10) from remote and deserted Yongjing—a man who has many memories he prefers not to reveal. In Ghost Town, Yongjing is described as a “desolate and remote place that no one has heard of,” and a haunted small town “left behind by development” (Chen, 2019, p. 12), as its residents are detached from the big city’s lifestyle. When experiencing the first open-air film screening in the local temple courtyard, the spectacle is like the whole Yongjing population witnessing the ghosts together. Yongjing has many dark and embarrassing secrets. To narrate Tianhong’s agonizing past, Kevin Chen chooses the Ghost Festival as the backdrop for his protagonist to start his recollection, as his sisters have asked him to return home after the passing of their father. The story revolves around Tianhong’s family members, each of whom has his or her own problems. The eldest daughter, Shumei, is trapped in a marriage with a financially unstable husband whom she thinks of killing. The second daughter, Shuli, is a petty civil servant whose life is so predictable, despite her unusual hobby of watching gay porn films. The well-educated third daughter, Shuqing, is despised and sometimes abused by her hypocritical news anchor husband. The fourth daughter, Sujie, is troubled by the suicide of her revenge-seeking younger sister and love rival Qiaomei, whom her husband initially dated and intended to marry, to the extent that she confines herself to her ultra-luxurious mansion, White House. As sons are preferred over daughters in the Chen family, none of the daughters has had the opportunity to lead a “good” life. Ironically, the two sons also fail to meet the parents’ expectations. The elder son is imprisoned for corruption, while the younger one, Tianhong, is incarcerated for the homicide (of T) in Berlin. The illiterate mother, A-chan, has an affair with a magically resourceful neighbor nicknamed “snake-catcher.” As Shumei is the first to discover her mother’s infidelity, A-chan hates her. A-chan later becomes a successful fortune-teller in partnership with the snake-catcher, while her husband, Tianshan, is revealed to be a left-leaning gay man who narrowly escapes the government’s pursuit of political dissidents. Although Yongjing is a place people wish to escape—and even a place to which they swear never to return—they continue to be haunted by their Yongjing memories. Chen uses primarily natural odors, such as animals and rain, to evoke the past. In Ghost Town, the smell of ripening fruits in the carambola orchards, the scent of burning incense from the local temple, and the fermentation of beans from the nowdeserted soybean factory, are all mnemonic devices for Tianhong. The savory smell of Yongjing’s soybean factory contrasts with the sweet scent of a candy factory in Berlin. When Tianhong kills T, he recalls the dense honey aroma that wafted from the candy factory. The smell of sesame oil pork knuckles brought to him by his childhood

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friend, Little Boat, links Tianhong’s growing up in Yongjing with his émigré life in Berlin, and the drying up of his childhood swimming pool reminds him of the Baltic Sea, which he visits with T. After killing T, the wild swans in the Baltic Sea remind him of the hippo that escaped the small zoo inside White House on Sujie’s wedding day. Shuqing recollects her hometown through the smell of Zhanghua’s local food, especially the steamed meatballs (rouyuan), as the “fake” meatballs she tastes near her home in Taipei highlight her husband’s unbearably domineering conduct—which nearly impels her to kill him. Chen Tianshan also identifies the people around him according to various scents. His mother is “the smell of green herbal ointment,” his eldest daughter is “the smell of fabric,” his partner Betelnut is “the smell of carambola,” his youngest son Tianhong is “the smell of books,” and his older son is “the smell of coffins and then the smell of a Western suit” (Chen, 2019, p. 101). The members of the Chen family are unable to express love for each other, and desire is often suppressed or distorted. Tianhong’s mother views his budding adolescent desire for Little Boat as “abnormal” and “good-for-nothing (khioh-ka̍ k)” (Chen, 2019, p. 162). He has no chance to thank Little Boat for teaching him how to swim—a symbol of freedom—as Little Boat’s mother scolds Tianhong, calling him “a dammed homosexual pervert” (Chen, 2019, p. 187), and even assembling a group to beat up Tianhong. Tianhong’s brother, who cycles past, simply ignores Tianhong’s call for help. It is Tianhong’s classmate, who later becomes a striptease dancer, who rescues him. The Chen family has no clue about how to express their emotions through physical contact. When Shuqing visits Tianhong in prison in Berlin, she is unable to open her arms to hug him. Her discomfort contrasts starkly with Tianhong’s Vietnamese lawyer, who embraces Tianhong immediately upon arrival. In Ghost Town, home is not a place of solace and the homebound journey is full of pain. On reaching home in Yongjing, Chen feels muddle-headed and the piercing pain that resembles the snake bite. He feels suffocated there, but “must return as he really has nowhere to go” (Chen, 2019, p. 226). He escapes to Berlin, but Berlin is not home either. He is not welcomed by T’s parents and T leaves home as a result. T’s mother, like Tianhong’s, fails to understand her son, or to accept his sexual orientation. T is eventually dragged into a pro-Nazism group, thus linking Chen’s homosexuality with sociohistorical trauma. Generally, women in Ghost Town bear more pain than men. A-chan has no choice but to follow the marriage her mother arranges for her, and she puts up with immense pain when giving birth. Her grandmother undergoes the greater pain of being raped and ultimately hangs herself. Qiaomei seems doomed for her beauty—she is suicidal, tends to hurt herself, and suffers from serious skin allergies. She does not mind Tianhong’s sexual orientation and feels no pain when harming herself. Her body is atypical, for she enters menopause at 17 and is extraordinarily buxom, suggesting homosexuality is still associated with abnormality. But female roles can be destructive and have agency, too. The homophobic A-chan, for instance, reports Betelnut, causing him and his partner—A-chan’s husband—to go on the run, whereas she becomes a powerful medium with followers and manages to continue her relationship with her first love—the snake-catcher—in secret.

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A-chan’s husband Chen Tianshan, similar to Qiaomei, appears as a ghost. He explains he often remained silent while he was alive because “silence is escape” (Chen, 2019, p. 189). But death offers “a strange transition and all linguistic barriers are instantly removed after one becomes a ghost” (Chen, 2019, p. 52). Through Chen Tianshan, repressed homosexual desire is connected with the political suppression of Taiwan’s martial law period. Toward the end of the novel, Chen Tianshan’s homosexuality is unveiled, as the clandestine reading group meetings at the neighboring Mingri Bookstore attended by Betelnut, Chen Tianshan, and the gay couple who own the bookstore, are banned after A-chan reports them to the local authorities. A-chan’s intolerance of homosexuality contrasts with her husband’s tranquil demeanor. Her chatting and enjoyment of gossip are also antithetical to her husband’s quiet preference for privacy. Chen Tianshan reads Tianhong’s novels, appearing to be proud of Tianhong’s literary talent and understanding of Tianhong’s sexual orientation. His remorse concerning the fact that he and A-chan did not protect Tianhong once suggests a belated patrilineal acceptance of Tianhong’s homosexuality.

2 Ghostly Entrapment and Liberation in Florida Metamorphosis The theme of a suffocating home is sustained in Florida Metamorphosis, a novel with a dichotomous treatment of home as suppressive and foreignness as liberating. Nevertheless, no matter how much the protagonists wish to escape their highly controlled life in Taipei, Florida leads them only to a deeper remorse. In this novel redolent of Golding’s allegorical Lord of the Flies and Ishiguro’s eugenics-soaked Never Let Me Go, the ghostly narrative at home is manifested through temple (gongmiao) culture— the mysterious Lianguan (Lotus-observing) Foundation in Taipei, which claims to offer its members “the prettiest spiritual utopia” (Chen, 2020, p. 51) but actually functions as a major mechanism of control, similar to the parental expectations of its six teenage protagonists born in 1976, the popular Year of the Dragon. The novel unveils those children’s hedonistic summer in Florida, where they skip classes and travel to Key West—a trip involving the accidental death of a Cuban girl named BK, for which they can never redeem themselves. America and its culture are imagined as possible antidotes to Taiwan’s stifling sociopolitical atmosphere and relatively conservative value system in the early postwar years. For the children, America is spacious, free, and bold. Standing on the wide roads in America, Stanley discovers he is extremely short. He yearns to be like his father, a globetrotter who in pictures appears young and handsome. Stanley proposes a trip to Key West to find his father, who is believed to be living in a grand villa next to Hemingway. As seen by Elizabeth, a Taiwanese pop singer’s illegitimate daughter sent to study in the United States at the age of 10, America is where local people confidently face their body shapes, whereas those children who have just

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arrived from Taiwan are “too pale, thin, with the swimming costumes too conservative, and their bodies are tight with ligature marks” (Chen, 2020, p. 127). This rather positive image of America is already reflected in the parents of those teenage children. Ryan’s and Christine’s mothers are both fans of Carole King, particularly her song “Smackwater Jack.” They lead a hippie-like life imitating American youths. “Smackwater Jack,” read with other literary and cultural icons, including Ernest Hemingway and Vincent van Gogh, generates a thematic genealogy of rebellion against the world. All the Western cultural references, be they popular songs, arts, films, or literary works, also help shape Chen’s own “hipster” (wenqing) identity, a self-serving expression he made known in a recent interview when talking about his predilection for films (Zhai, 2022). This “hipster” feature can also be found in the works of other Taiwanese novelists, such as Huang Chong-kai. While Huang occasionally refers to Taiwan’s own literary tradition, for example, Huang Chunming’s fiction, Chen’s references are mostly Western, especially the highly iconic cultural figures, such as van Gogh, Hemingway, and Carole King. The lyrics of “Smackwater Jack” spin an old west tale about the confrontation between the outlaw Jack and “big Jim the chief.” Together with Carole King embarking on a new life in LA in 1968, three years before the album “Tapestry”—on which “Smackwater Jack” is a track—the yearning for personal reinvention becomes clear. King’s cat is called Telemachus, “son of Odysseus” (Chen, 2020, p. 204). If King’s “Tapestry” can be taken as her retelling of Homer’s Odyssey (Smith, 2019), then Florida Metamorphosis is Chen’s transcultural reiteration of King’s “Tapestry,” with a soupçon of Taiwan’s postwar political suppression. It is no coincidence that the name of the cat belonging to the Harvard-educated founder of the Lianguan Foundation is also Telemachus. To show their rebellion, Ryan’s and Christine’s mothers, then good friends from university, and after moving into the Foundation at a time when freedom of travel abroad was denied in Taiwan, even plan to “have the Carole King hairstyle and have children in the Year of the Dragon together” (Chen, 2020, p. 152). The founder’s domineering personality is enhanced by Taiwan’s isolation. She is fully aware that people in Taiwan “aspire [to] freedom and harbour projections and imaginations about remote places. Harvard, United States, Europe, a pure land, paradise are all distant imagination. Places one can never reach are prettiest” (Chen, 2020, p. 310). In Florida Metamorphosis, to be able to travel like Hemingway, and to be independently spirited like van Gogh, are aspects of the symbols of freedom represented by foreign lands. Chen confesses Hemingway is his idol because of Hemingway’s many overseas travels, and “‘leaving’ possibly is the destiny of island people” (Chen, 2021). Echoing van Gogh’s self-mutilation, Elizabeth cuts off her own ear after witnessing BK’s death. Unlike those children from Taiwan who run away, Elizabeth stays on-site. Her slashing her ear and working as a pornographic actress both symbolize her trying to come to terms with her guilt complex related to BK’s accident, which leads to her mental breakdown. The Foundation and Florida as anti-paradises can be considered two sides of the same coin, even though the latter appears superficially liberating. Upon arriving in Miami, the children still wear the white lotus-patterned T-shirts given to them by the

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Foundation, signaling the founder’s omnipresent control over those children whose parents believe in the founder. In Miami, it does not take long for the children to take off the lotus T-shirts and to put on “brand-new colorful clothes that do not fit” (Chen, 2020, p. 152) and become deformed. However, they not only fail to escape but fall into danger consisting of sexual ecstasy, incest, drugs, and guns. Their first encounter with Jack is similar to Stanley’s first foray into the darkroom of Jack’s underground bunker. In both incidents, it is Jack who initiates the invitation by saying “come,” illustrating the children’s passiveness. Several years later, Kevin encounters a branch of the Liangguan Foundation in Sri Lanka, once again illustrating that any attempts to escape would be futile. Stanley’s search for his father is equally frustrating. In real life, his father is a humpbacked old man with a beer belly working at a local Chinese restaurant. The stark contrast between imagination and reality shows the collapse of Stanley’s American dream. Stanley later publishes a book disclosing all the Foundation’s lies, which causes its immediate disbandment and indicates that “home” in Taiwan is just an illusion. Chen inserts a profound irony into the story. With Egghead establishing a Buddhist meditation center on the site that used to belong to Stanley, and his turning into the new tropical master who spies on those children he led nearly 30 years ago—a master who also knows all their secrets—the escape and return become a no-way-out vicious circle, as Miami turns out to be as oppressive as Taipei. The children grow up with their parents’ high expectations; their “accessories are not cheap fake products, their trainers are spotlessly clean, and their hairstyles are delicate … there is even no acne on their faces” (Chen, 2020, p. 32). They are portrayed as ultra-privileged, beautiful children, the opposite of the smelly, ugly tour leader Egghead, whose English is worse than that of the teenagers. However, the extreme heat and storms of that August in Miami already foreshadow destruction. Indeed, the novel opens with the adult Stanley’s planned suicide in Miami and his invitation to his former summer camp companions to attend his funeral. The first person to accept the invitation is Annie, a hospital director’s daughter who studies hard to please her often quarreling parents. Other protagonists include Amanda, who, although trained to be a concert pianist, hopes to rebel against her mother, who spies on her and meddles in everything she does. Christina’s wearing of the Foundation’s lotus T-shirt and the fact that her long-term stuffy nose problem is healed without medicine once she arrives in Miami symbolize her being constrained in Taiwan. Her half-brother, Ryan, is fed up with his mother’s fights with his father’s mistress, and cares only about his cat and Carole King’s songs. The novel shifts constantly between the present (2020) and the summer camp year of 1991. Although the children all try to forget the accident, none succeeds. Growing up proves to be no fun, either. Amanda’s boyfriend commits suicide after declaring bankruptcy. Everyone who bullied Ryan in the summer of 1991 has become “fat, poor, has debts, being imprisoned, under probation, lonely, none of the American dream has come true” (Chen, 2020, p. 211). For immigrants such as Elizabeth and the orphaned Cuban girl, BK, life in Florida is lonely and helpless. Without a valid identification, BK even has to keep her being raped quiet to prevent herself from being deported.

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Back in 1991, those children had the opportunity to escape their much-controlled life in Taipei, particularly at Jack’s Coconut Tree Motel, where they are invited to stay on their way to Key West. At the motel, there are “naked men and women, rhinos, flamingos, cats, and green iguanas who are welcoming sunrise at the pier” (Chen, 2020, pp. 191–192). The motel represents a “strange time and parallel to the world” (Chen, 2020, p. 209), and is the opposite of the pampered but confined world from which those children come. The wild animals Jack looks after represent those children’s wild nature; they are “like new-born babies who relearn everything” (Chen, 2020, p. 214). This period marks the beginning of Stanley’s same-sex romance with Jack, which occurs in an underground bunker built by Jack’s father to protect him and his family from nuclear bombs that never fall, and which also prevents any incursion from black people, Cubans, and homosexuals. Stanley being drawn to Jack can be interpreted as an act of rebellion against his adopted mother, who directs the Foundation that believes in eugenics to the extent that Stanley’s mother would categorize people hierarchically and offer shelter to the “low-class” people before sterilizing them. The connection between sexuality and politics in Ghost Town is retained in Florida Metamorphosis. Stanley’s adopted mother is the only daughter of a high-ranking Kuomintang military officer, and is privileged to travel freely, even amid the heavyhanded controls of martial law. She lives a life that is a mixture of the Beat Generation’s rebellious bohemianism (such as partying frequently with rock music) and the luxuries of the upper class (such as eating exquisite Western food and holding an American passport). The home of pure land (jingtu) she plans to establish is a deceptive place that is the refuge for various evils. She is intersex, which leads her to be bullied and later triggers her ambition to control others, especially those from affluent families who “are vulnerable and yearn for a sense of belonging” (Chen, 2020, p. 310). The teenage protagonists and their parents fail to escape her control. The Foundation in Taipei’s most prime location is the antithesis of Jack’s Coconut Tree Motel, although both the Foundation’s founder and Jack are bisexual, marginalized people who are bullied. The former place is full of artificial calculations, whereas the latter is a place where they can satisfy their primitive, sensual desires. In Florida, Kevin enjoys sketching. Annie and Amanda are in ecstasy after swallowing ants. Christine’s sense of smell becomes extraordinarily acute. While Christine and Stanley are both attracted to Jack, Ryan falls for Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the fun these teenagers are having begets regret when Ryan accidentally shoots BK, causing her to fall into the sea and drown. In Florida Metamorphosis, Kevin represents the possibility of a reconciliation with homosexuality. Although he is also connected with the Foundation, he is different from the rest of the children. He has a dark complexion, has never previously travelled abroad, and is not from Taipei but from a small town in central Taiwan, an origin he shares with the author, Kevin Chen. He is raised in a family with a mother and two fathers, who make a fortune selling pirated porn videotapes. He grows up “watching videos in which men kiss each other” (Chen, 2020, p. 117), and does not think homosexuality is “abnormal.” He discovers the lotus flowers in the swamps of Miami are yellow, a color that symbolizes his budding homosexual desire. A similar

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yellow symbol is found when Kevin is for the first time kissed by a local boy, with whom Kevin shares a mango. Years later, Kevin makes an award-winning gay film, in which he includes the mango-sharing scene. Although he never reveals to the public the incident is derived from his teenage experience, he epitomizes the prospect of transforming the “collapsed” Florida summer into art.

3 Gendered Liberation in The Good People Upstairs The last work of the trilogy, The Good People Upstairs, is similar to Ghost Town in its dual Taiwan–Berlin settings. Structurally, it alternates between two locales— Berlin and Yuanlin—and has the same organization as Florida Metamorphosis. As usual, home is the place from which the protagonist yearns to escape, but in vain. The novel focuses on an eldest daughter growing up in a single-parent family. While occasionally selling her body for additional income, the attractive hairdresser mother, Meili, values her sons only, especially her younger son who is good-looking and literarily talented. The mother–daughter relationship is strained. Meili blames her ugly and stupid daughter for her two sons’ absence—the elder one is on the run due to debts, while the younger one is a Berlin-residing gay academic about to get married to his Germanchef lover. Meili hates her daughter who discovers her occasional prostitution. She records her experience with different men in her secretive little notebook. Ironically, it is her daughter who comes upon it after her death. The tension between the two is highlighted in their contrasting sexual appeal. Meili’s effortless charm and popularity among her “clients” is antithetical to her daughter’s unattractiveness. The daughter’s budding erotic fantasy during adolescence is formed with reference to the mother’s sexual prowess; she wonders why “her body has never made that sound [as her mother during intercourse]” (Chen, 2022, p. 168). In addition to the sour mother–daughter relationship, the sister–brother relationship is also problematic: the heroine and her younger brother hardly communicate. When making contact via the internet, they “simply have nothing to say to each other” (Chen, 2022, p. 54). Even when she congratulates her brother after his autobiographical novel wins an award, she is keener to enquire why he has depicted her as a pervert. After the mother passes away, the heroine embarks on a trip from Yuanlin to Berlin to visit her brother. It is through the heroine that the two locales converge, and the book title’s double meaning becomes clear. It not merely refers to the mother’s clients (as she always takes them upstairs). It can also be interpreted as the hospitality the herione receives from her brother and his lover in Berlin. The heroine arrives on Berlin’s hottest day, a date that “earth is broken” (Chen, 2022, p. 49), foreshadowing her later change. It turns out to be a journey of reconciliation and bodily liberation for her. In a similar vein, Berlin is also a place where the heroine’s younger brother finds love. After being harassed by a gay man when he was young, he has become a neat freak, though his German lover Hartmut accepts the way he is. In Yuanlin, the heroine teaches at a high school, where her students

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naughtily tease her for being “an old maid” (lao chunü) (Chen, 2022, p. 17). She is also dragged into a Christian fellowship group and later becomes involved in homophobic parades in Taipei. When she wants to leave the group, its members threaten to isolate her. In Berlin, no one teases her for being an old maid, and all strangeness (such as the brother’s nameless “ghostly” neighbor, who appears in a bathrobe and occasionally screams) seems to be accepted. In Taiwan, the heroine’s mother refuses to be sent to a nursing home. In Berlin, however, Hartmut’s mother feels at ease in a nursing home. The heroine, despite her limited German, begins a conversation with Hartmut’s mother, like old friends. Hartmut’s food-picky mother even enjoys eating Taiwanese noodles, suggesting a translingual and cross-cultural compensation for the love the heroine fails to receive from her biological mother. This also applies to the heroine’s communication with Hartmut and Carsten, a German ticket inspector for a Berlin transport company she encounters. She struggles to pronounce Hartmut’s name and the names of the food he prepares, but, assisted by Hartmut’s limited Chinese, they strike up a conversation. Similarly, she sometimes communicates with Carsten using only the images and emojis on her mobile phone, suggesting words are not essential for effective communication. What counts are an open-minded attitude and a willingness to understand the other person. Although the openness of Berlin increases the likelihood the virgin heroine will be able to satisfy her wish to experience sex, her active initiation of physical intimacy with Carsten has more to do with her bitter feelings concerning her mother’s natural sex appeal—an appeal that drew men to her effortlessly—than it does any purely personal sensual longing. The heroine, on the other hand, “installs all kinds of dating apps on her mobile phone but is still worthy of the name, the last old maid in Yuanlin” (Chen, 2022, p. 246). Ironically, while she has reservations about her brother’s sexual orientation, what finally impels her to have intercourse with Carsten are the sounds of lovemaking emanating from the gay couple next door—sounds she hears while staying at a hotel following a quarrel with her brother over his homosexuality. While having sex with Carsten, the heroine thinks of salt-absorbing mud fish, a tip her mother taught her to prepare mud fish for cooking. For her, sex means two people, like those mud fish, “crazily mov[ing] for a few seconds and then becom[ing] motionless” (Chen, 2022, p. 258). She even lies to Carsten, telling him that her name is Meili. However, it is precisely the anti-romanticism of her first sexual experience, in which there is no need to pretend to be pretty, that allows the female protagonist to come to terms with her unattractiveness and sense of inferiority. The same-sex intimacy and the haunted image of the mother suggest that the more the heroine strains to escape Yuanlin and her familial ties, the longer they will continue to be part of her. In fact, her unlikely romance with Carsten develops after she inexplicably accompanies him into the “Kino International,” a movie theater in Berlin. Yuanlin had a film theater of the same name, but it was demolished in 2008. The inclusion of a movie theater not only serves as an ingenious device connecting the two different locales, it also reveals Chen’s fondness for films, which constitutes the most obvious element of Chen’s “hipster” style in this novel. The heroine’s seeing pelicans at sea with Carsten reminds her of the pelicanlogoed German Stresemann fountain pen Meili received from her lover, Mr. Pelican,

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a charming screenwriter (and later an established film director) who carries a Stresemann pen when he arrives from Taipei to Yuanlin in search of inspiration. As Meili was deeply in love with him, she excludes him from the little notebook in which she keeps a record of her “clients.” Mr. Pelican is the father of the heroine’s Berlin-dwelling brother. Compared with the heroine’s father—a plumber who died prematurely and the least handsome of the three different men with whom Meili had a child—Mr. Pelican implies Meili’s youthful artistic dreams and yearning for the beautiful things represented by Taipei. As Meili is trapped with three children, and is without a husband, her coldness toward her daughter can be read as her unconscious reinforcement of patriarchy. In addition to the same-named movie theater and the association of pelicans, and even though she is watching a Hollywood film outdoors by the sea with Carsten, the heroine’s memory returns to Cinema Paradiso, the last film she watched with her brother in Yuanlin before he left home for good. All these details demonstrate that her Berlin experience remains deeply connected with her Yuanlin past. The heroine’s bodily liberation affords her a fresh understanding of (her brother’s) homosexuality. But when she returns to her brother’s Berlin apartment, she is told that her brother has gone missing before the scheduled wedding. She finds him, in the same way she found him a few decades ago when he almost killed himself after being sexually abused by a villainous gay pedophile named Chimp, Meili’s obnoxious client and also her elder son’s creditor. In this chapter about Chimp, entitled “Yuanlin man no. 399,” the metaphor of the 1982 film Sophie’s Choice, starring Meryl Streep, becomes apparent. Meili is actually a pun on “Merle,” as in Meryl Streep in Chinese. In the film, the Polish immigrant Sophie, played by Streep, is forced by a Nazi officer to choose which of her two children will be sent to a labor camp and which will be gassed. Sophie picks her son for the camp and sacrifices her daughter. Chen revises this by having Chimp select Meili’s son to satisfy his same-sex desire. After her brother’s victimization, the heroine reproaches herself bitterly. Years later in Berlin, after finding her brother before his wedding—similar to her rescuing her suicidal brother previously—and by attending his wedding, the sister–brother relationship is reconciled concurrently with the heroine’s newfound self-perception and changed attitude toward homosexuality. Toward the end of the novel, the female protagonist transforms from the despised “old maid” into a confident woman who is willing to fly high, with her down jacket’s falling feathers becoming wings. This open ending suggests her final escape from Yuanlin and the attainment of freedom. Chimp’s death at the hands of Meili, and the fact everyone helps keep it a secret, suggests bullying behaviors are eventually “corrected,” and one may embark on a new chapter in one’s life.

4 Conclusion Chen’s “Summer Trilogy” can be seen as a coherent entity revolving around the theme of escape from homo-political oppression and a return to the self via bodily/sexual liberation. Each volume’s ghostly representation has a specific focus—authoritarian

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times in a forgotten small town, inescapably constrained youth in an America-longing context, and the shackles on unmarried middle-aged women in a patriarchal society. Together they demonstrate that Taiwan’s spectral narratives are “affiliated with the critical discourses of history, ethnicity, and gender politics” (Wu, 2010, p. iii). Foreign locales may at first appear liberating, but they may lead to further regrettable entrapment, as memories of Taiwan linger. This is made clear at the beginning of The Good People Upstairs, when Chen, quoting from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, suggests one may not necessarily escape from oneself by moving from place to place. Chen’s problematizing of home—a place commonly presumed to be filled with love and care—corresponds with the quasi-romanticized treatment of foreign locales in his writing. Overall, life abroad still provides better prospects for the protagonists’ desired transformation, associated usually with the image of heat, and their ultimate liberation, or new realization. Chen’s trilogy was completed in Berlin, with the second book being revised in the midst of the pandemic. This helps explain the gloomy tone and contrasting sensory depictions in Florida Metamorphosis. Berlin affords Chen a distance to reflect on his hometown—the ghostly town of Yongjing. As Said (1993) observed, a person in exile “has a double perspective, never seeing things in isolation” (p. 121). Yongjing, in turn, serves as a reference point for Berlin. The feeling of entrapment is not necessarily limited to Yongjing, but can be interpreted as one’s symbolic hometown, the site of multilayered suppressions and persecutions. Although traumatic memories may flash back, one can still fight for one’s freedom. Ghost Town can be categorized as a nativist novel, but its translocal imagination and dystopian portrayal of a hometown that offers no redemption distinguish the novel from previous nativist works of the 1970s. In addition, Chen’s nativist writing contains a distinct “hipster” trademark style owing to his extensive use of Western literary and cinematic references. It is also worth noting that Chen quite consistently pays attention to bodily experience in his fiction, particularly sexual awakening or homosexual desire. In Ghost Town, the authoritarian political climate aligns with people’s general intolerance of samesex love. But The Good People Upstairs hardly touches upon Taiwan’s political suppression. Instead, it foregrounds the desire of an ordinary middle-aged woman and her changed perception of homosexuality. By concluding the novel with a blessed same-sex marriage and the heroine’s overcoming her inferiority complex, Chen adds a decidedly optimistic hue to his trilogy.

References Chang, W. (2022). 「你家才是鬼地方, 你樓上樓下都是鬼地方」 評陳思宏「夏日三部曲」 [Your home is indeed a ghost place, and your upstairs and downstairs are both ghost places]. In K. Chen, 樓上的好人 [The good people upstairs] (pp. 329–335). Mirror Fiction. Chen, K. (2019). 鬼地方 [Ghost town]. Mirror Fiction. Chen, K. (2020). 佛羅里達變形記 [Florida metamorphosis]. Mirror Fiction. Chen, K. (2022). 樓上的好人 [The good people upstairs]. Mirror Fiction.

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Chen, Y.-T. (2021, February 27). 對談》 作家出走異地「變形」 [In dialogue: Writers leaving Taiwan and transforming in foreign lands]. 中央社文化+雙週報 [CNA Culture Plus]. https:// www.cna.com.tw/culture/article/20210227w004. Fan, M.-J. (2020). 向大師取經, 向大眾學習 [Learning from masters and the masses]. Wenhsun, 422, 36–39. Said, E. (1993). Intellectual exile: Expatriates and marginals. Grand Street, 47, 112–124. Smith, J. L. (2019). Reading Carole King’s Tapestry as a Penelopean retelling of the Homeric odyssey. American Music Research Center, 28, 41–73. Wu, C.-R. (2010). Encountering spectral traces: Ghost narratives in Chinese America and Taiwan. Doctoral thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bit stream/handle/2142/16537/1_Wu_Chia-rong.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y. Xu, W. (2020, December 11). 人魚紀、鬼地方 台書英譯走入國際 [The Mermaid’s Tale, Ghost Town, Taiwanese novels’ English translation entering the international market]. China Times. https://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20201211000871-260115?chdtv. Zhai, A. (2019, December 16). 陳思宏談 《鬼地方》[Kevin Chen on Ghost Town]. Mirror Fiction. https://mirrorfiction.com/news/307. Zhai, A. (2022, February 24). 梅莉史翠普在員林 專訪陳思宏 《樓上的好人》[Meryl Streep in Yuanlin: An interview with Kevin Chen on The Good People Upstairs]. Mirror Fiction. https:// www.mirrorfiction.com/news/674.

Pei-yin Lin is an associate professor at the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. Her main reasearch area is modern and contemporary Chinese ltierature. She was a Harvard Yenching Institute visiting scholar in 2015/16 and Chair of Taiwan Studies at Ledien University in Fall, 2020. Her monographs include Colonial Taiwan: Negotiating Identities and Moderntiy through Literature (Brill, 2017), and Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (National Taiwan University Press, 2021) in Chinese. She has also co-edited several books. More recent ones are Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2023), Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (Routledge, 2019), and East Asian Transwar Popular Culture: Literature and Film from Taiwan and Korea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Sketches on a Blank Slate: Shawna Yang Ryan’s Future-Oriented Memories of the Past Irmy Schweiger

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. Susan Sontag (2003, p. 86)

Abstract This chapter has a threefold agenda. First, it aims at positioning Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan and her literary work in the context of literary Taiwan, illustrating how identity policy, transpacific politics, and national desire intersect. Second, it demonstrates how the February 28, 1947 “impact event”—key to Ryan’s Taiwan-oriented novel Green Island—is charged with perceptual patterns that share at least three common features: a national trauma, a forced collective amnesia and, a history of betrayal. Third, it shows how Green Island employs family history to reanimate and interact with these cultural patterns by embracing and reconfiguring the traumatic experiences of the generation of witnesses/victims from a transgenerational and transnational perspective. Her ideology-oriented narrative not only formulates ethical concerns and builds a future-oriented historical consciousness, but it also creates a transpacific space from which the trans/formation of Taiwanese American identity can be negotiated against the background of trans/national history. Keywords Shawna Yang Ryan · February 28 Incident · Green Island · National trauma · Family history

I. Schweiger (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_16

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1 Positioning the Writer and Her Work 1.1 Biographical Notes The daughter to parents who met in Taiwan during the Vietnam War, Shawna Yang Ryan was born in 1976 and raised in Northern California as a second-generation Asian American. Her mother is from Taiwan with family history in China; her father is American with German ancestors. Apart from being the author of two novels and a number of short stories and essays, Ryan is also a scholar of creative writing, currently acting as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawai ‘i at Manoa. Ryan is a well-established writer in literary circles of the west coast area and an activist of a growing and vibrant Taiwanese American community. She is one of the brains behind the website Our Taiwanese American Story (2017) dedicated to “connect[ing] Taiwanese Americans across generations through storytelling.” In addition, she is currently a board member of the North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association (2015), “an organization founded in 1980 in resistance to Taiwan’s repressive White Terror era policies.” Her debut Water Ghosts was first published in 2007 under the title Locke 1928 and re-published by Penguin Press two years later. The novel addresses a factual Chinese immigrant community, the town of Locke,1 remediated as cross-cultural, interracial space, where Christian belief encounters Chinese folk religion, conservative morality contrasts the roaring twenties’ decadence, brothels and gambling halls console homesick Chinese bachelors. Based on historical facts like the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act (Lew-Williams, 2018), which banned Chinese women from migrating and joining their husbands in the United States, the novel reflects on American immigrant history through the lens of early Chinese diaspora and the narrative device of ghost-writing.2 Her second book, Green Island (2016), published in the US and Taiwan simultaneously, chronicles Taiwan’s White Terror era with its mass arrests and killings under the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship in the context of American Cold War ignorance and complicity. Spanning from the February 28 Incident in 1947 to the SARS crisis in 2003, the story unfolds across two countries and three generations through the prism of family history.

1

Shortened to Locke in 1920, the story of Lockeport began as a swampland parcel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, deeded to founder, George W. Locke in 1883. In 1912 three Chinese merchants started to erect the first buildings, including a shop/beer saloon, a gambling hall, and a hotel/restaurant (the main settings fictionalized in Ryan’s novel). After the Chinatown of nearby Walnut Grove was destroyed by a fire in 1915, many Chinese immigrants resettled and further developed Locke. In 1990, Locke has been designated a national historic landmark district and become part of the US National Park Service. See Locke Foundation (2004). 2 For an elaborate reading of the novel as a “spectral representation of Chinese diaspora in the context of Chinese America”, see Wu (2012, p. 39).

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1.2 Multiple Belongings—The Author With Ryan’s mixed-heritage provenance and her writing across cultures and geographies, the writer and her work perfectly illustrate the constructedness of the naturalized category of the nation-state. Zooming in on Taiwan and its people, however, the nation-state appears far from anything optional or blurred but as an extremely real and urgent imperative. Against the background of international de-recognition and constant military threat from across the Strait, national self-determination and sovereign control over its territorial space is but the island’s Achilles heel. During an interview about her second book in 2016, Ryan accommodates this double-bind when she puts her writerly situatedness and the directionality of her literature in a nutshell: “Entrenched in a very American view of identity as revolving around race, sexuality and gender, I saw other ways identity could be shaped by shared struggle and also by enforced education. Taiwan taught me to think about national identity and helped me understand the ways communities can be formed beyond the limit of borders. … I also began to admire what I see as a real vein of optimism and strength in Taiwan” (Farrelly, 2016). Ryan’s accentuation of different concepts of identity formation and a futureoriented worldview in post-authoritarian Taiwan as identificatory points of reference is telling. American identity politics of the last decades has after all facilitated the individual exploration of subjectivity, heterogeneity, hybridity, and diversity. Not least, politicized skirmish in academic discourse has pushed theories of differentiation partway to a degree of disintegration and cannibalizing common points of reference.3 While early immigrant diasporas at the beginning of the twentieth century had to relinquish their origins and histories for the sake of a common national project—the American Dream—by the turn of the millennium the pendulum had swung back. The myth of a common identity and the promise for a better future had largely been replaced by acknowledging diverse heritages and divided pasts. Furthermore, generating hyphenated identities that oscillate between diasporic, immigrant, or cosmopolitan identities, this past-oriented identity policy has been opened up for multiple belongings. In contrast, transitional Taiwan, with its serial colonial pasts, at last enforced by martial law (1949–1987), has only recently emerged from Kuomintang (KMT)dictated memory politics and Sino-centric identity that had been imposed by decades of coercion, indoctrination, and compliancy. A thorny, albeit existential, process of political, cultural, economic, and social transformation toward a consolidated, integrative, democratic collective identity gained momentum in the 1980s. Safeguarded by the institutionalization of civic values, this transition foregrounded the island’s historical layers and state-endorsed cultural diversity in radical differentiation from the People’s Republic of China (Lin, 2018). In the 1990s Taiwan had turned into an island of contending memories (Lin, 2018) and conflicting historical narratives 3

Mark Lilla (2016) is but one example of liberal academics who blame identity politics’ “obsession with diversity” as catalyst for the rise of Trump and the American Right as well as the shift away from building solidarity and communality.

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where bottom-up and top-down memory cultures went hand in glove to promote a Taiwan-centric subjectivity. With the turn of the millennium, however, a complicated and existential process of securing national solidarity by overcoming past divisions through selective remembrance gained momentum. This is to say, Taiwan started consolidating an inclusive common civic vision by balancing collective remembering and collective forgetting, thereby agreeing on “founding events” of the past in order to build a sustainable future.4 For those living on the island, the success of creating a solid national identity and gaining political independence has existential implications. Taiwan’s sovereignty is just as crucial for second-generation Taiwanese Americans whose parents supposedly belonged to the swarm of Taiwanese students in the 1960 and 1970s who escaped the harsh political White Terror climate to pursue their American dream and/or their political ideals. Disidentification from Chinese American community requires the building and reinforcement of a Taiwanese American identity.

1.3 Water Ghosts—Challenging the Nation-State In both her novels, Water Ghosts (2009) and Green Island (2016), Ryan tackles these various identificatory points of reference. Her debut confronts Chinese-American immigrant history through the lens of traumatic memory, displaying a repressed past claiming to be integrated into cultural memory. Water Ghosts formulates a feminist critique of ethno-history, which, Smith (1996) argues, is built by “the sense of collective belonging to a named community of common myths of origin and shared memories, associated with an historic homeland” (p. 583). Ryan is barely occupied with the legacy of a mythic past that haunts Chinese American immigrants—a dominant pattern associated with the novels of first-generation Chinese-American writers. Instead, she renarrates Chinese-American immigration history as a chapter of American history, thereby empowering the silenced and marginalized Chinese left-behind women “without pasts or stories” (Ryan, 2009, p. 58). Figuring as water ghosts, they cross the Pacific in order to join the Chinese settlement of Locke and seek revenge and redemption. Ryan’s active engagement with the past by way of creating a history-based cross-cultural ghost story not only endows the victims with agency but also counteracts the power of a mythologic Chinese past as it debunks its myth of homogeneity. Moreover, she addresses minority history that has been written out of national history per se: “There are ghosts up and down the Delta. … Ten thousand dead between here and Suisun alone. Ten thousand! Hell, the Locke house itself is built on an Indian burial ground” (Ryan, 2009, p. 67).5 Water Ghosts is 4

Since long cultural memory studies have been engaged with the balance of remembering and forgetting, a connection that goes back to Ernest Renan’s lecture “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” of 1882. See Renan (1992). 5 The delta swampland on which Locke was built had been home to Native American Miwok and Maidu tribes for hundreds of years. Tribal burial grounds still exist on the Locke parcel.

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hardly “obsessed with China” but challenges dominant historiography by claiming space and significance for minority cultures in American history. By implication, the memory of a traumatic past of Chinese immigrants does not preclude memories of displaced Native American tribes; on the contrary, Chinese immigrant history cross-references other minority histories and enables different histories of violence. It co-exists in mutual recognition of each other’s historical trauma, or what Rothberg (2009) famously coined as “multidirectional” memory in contrast to “competitive” memory. In sum, Ryan’s feminist reading of Chinese-American/American history challenges the image of a homogenous American nation-state by giving agency to multiethnicity as she reframes “historical violence as a struggle for a cause rather than as a matter of victimization” (Rigney, 2018, p. 371).

1.4 Green Island—Pursuing the Nation-State Ryan’s second book Green Island (2016) embarks on dealing with transnational Taiwanese-American history. Taking Taiwanese nativism as identificatory point of departure, it engages with Taiwan’s political challenges of the present by attempting to create a transpacific public sphere for the island’s entangled and, outside Taiwan, widely unacknowledged violent history, to confront a prevailing Sino-centric historiography and, last but not least, to illuminate the US’ neglect confronting compliant Cold War policy. Green Island engages with what “according to official history, had not happened … did not exist … was simply unspoken” (Ryan, 2016, p. 61) and reflects a process of political awakening and building historical consciousness by chronicling the female narrator’s path of life. The author’s nameless alter ego transforms from a naïve and nescient object of KMT state propaganda to a politically informed and distinct ethnic subject affiliated with two cultures and taking action on the basis of a “Taiwan-centric” localist agenda. Utilizing family history as site for mediating Taiwan’s traumatic history, Green Island actualizes a complex history for a transpacific community. It produces ethical reflections and mobilizes identity and memory work by inviting the reader to experience the emotional truth behind historical figures and facts and to identify with a unique and exclusive dystopian image of a past that requires action in the present and places trust in the future. Rooted in Taiwan’s nativist calling, Green Island triangulates three threads across 380 pages. By responding to contemporary Taiwan’s “memory imperative”, it not only addresses the US’ ignorance and denial to confront its complicity in Cold War policy but it also “puts Taiwan on the map” and, by implication, “rewrites China.” Although Ryan is grappling with a destructive, humiliating, and traumatic chapter of the twentieth century’s history, Green Island flags for a future-oriented worldview by reframing historical violence “as a matter of civic engagement rather than of paranoia” (Rigney, 2018, p. 371).

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1.5 Multiple belongings—The Literary Works While Water Ghosts mainly deals with local history, Ryan’s second book Green Island addresses for the most part transnational history. In the US both of her novels received various prizes.6 In Taiwan, Water Ghosts received not much of an echo, all the while Green Island was met with warm appreciation and swiftly turned into a popular research topic for scholars and graduate students at English and Foreign Studies departments. Its role as an activating and memory-producing medium circulating globally is already given by the fact it is written in English but reinforced by its translation into Chinese and its transpacific directionality. The thematic choice in Water Ghosts, together with the author’s provenance, initially assigned Ryan’s work to the field of Chinese/Asian-American literature, a venue launched by writers like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, yet an ascription the author resolutely wards off (Hioe, 2016).7 Her chronicling a Taiwan-centric narrative confirmed her conscious shift away from a generalized pan-ethnic “Chinese diaspora” toward an ethnically and geographically specific assignment within the Asian-American bubble. This conveniently allows for canonization in Taiwan’s literary history and participation in the project of Writing Taiwan (Wang & Rojas, 2007). As already stated in 2007 by the editors of the correspondent anthology, any attempt to ground the identity of Taiwan literature or its writers on “a single necessary and sufficient condition” (Rojas, 2007, p. 2) is, due to their inherent diversity, doomed to failure. Surely, Green Island is a welcome contribution to the ongoing process of continuously reconstituting Taiwan literature “through the act of writing itself” (Rojas, 2007, p. 4). This also dovetails perfectly well into the project of “worlding Taiwan” (Chiu, 2018) as it facilitates the recognition of Taiwan in the world by relinking Taiwan’s history of victimization and reconciliation with global traumatic history and implicitly with its ethical framework based on human rights and civic values. Although neither Water Ghosts nor Green Island is penned in Chinese, these works’ situatedness resonates with what Shih (2010) identifies as the critical position of Sinophone communities: “When routes can be roots, multidirectional critiques are not only possible but imperative” (p. 46). In her Taiwan story Green Island, Ryan reverses Shih’s premise by turning her place-based homeness (roots) into her mobile homeness (routes). Situating herself in Taiwan enables her to speak back to the US as well as to Taiwan and, by implication, to China. In a postcolonial gesture of “writing back to the center,” Green Island chooses the KMT as its Janus-faced embodiment: as political-repressive agent of China that colonized people’s land and bodies and as ally of the US that colonized and seduced people’s minds and souls.

6

This includes the Association for Asian American Studies Best Book Award in Creative Writing (2018), an American Book Award (2017), the Elliot Cades Emerging Writer Award from the Hawai ‘i Literary Arts Council (2015), and the UC Davis Maurice Prize (2006). 7 In an interview with Hioe (2022) Ryan harshly disclaims the idea she is “another Amy Tan wannabe, white-washed Asian woman.”.

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2 Resonating with the Foundational Myth 2.1 Impact Event When martial law was lifted in 1987, Taiwan started its journey of transmuting from an authoritarian into a democratic society, a process in which public remembrance was as much about shaping the future as about recollecting the past. Collective memory work in general is informed by “the belief that future peace and stability depend crucially on finding ways of ‘coming to terms’ with past violence” (Rigney, 2012, p. 251) in order to create national solidarity. This, however, seems to be even more true for transitional societies. Due to its brutality but above all due to the political constellation at the time, it was the February 28 Incident8 and its bloody follow-up, the White Terror era, that turned into the “foundational myth” and became the “national trauma of Taiwan” with many individuals and interest groups claiming ownership to follow.9 Smith (2008), among others, has demonstrated how the incident was constructed into a symbolic mythology by later generations and made into a crucial historical event and contentious tool by the different political players, while Chang (2014) has traced how it gradually turned from a symbol for “Taiwan’s ethnic tension”, into “a symbol of tragic history and collective suffering”, before it became a “national holiday for remembrance and peace” (p. 233). As summed up by Hillenbrand (2005), “February 28th has come to acquire almost sacrosanct status as the foundational metaphor of Taiwanese consciousness (yishi), the originary myth of modern Taiwanese history, and the rallying cry of Taiwanese democracy” (p. 50). Since the February 28 Incident had been subjected to forced amnesia and locked into individual and familial memory for decades, it was charged with overwhelming emotional capital and predestined to turn into an “impact event” (Assmann, 2015, p. 52) that by definition generates monumental collective emotional energy. Impact events need to be channelled in cultural elaborations in order to be acknowledged in the first place and to secure their afterlife in cultural memory. This is to say they need “impact narratives” that revolve around these “historical occurrences that are perceived to spectacularly shatter the material and symbolic worlds we inhabit” (Fuchs, 2021, p. 10), but can never fully capture and converge with them. Such events trigger thus a plethora of impact narratives, which alter and stretch over the course of time and adapt to changing political, cultural, and economic circumstances. 8

Depending on its framing narrative and perspective, the denomination “February 28 Incident” is but one of the many signifiers for this event. Lin (2007) lists “Incident” (shijian), “Popular Uprising” (minbian), and “Revolution” (geming), as well as terms used in earlier government announcements such as “riot” (baodong), “political and military event” (shibian), “rebellion” (panbian), or “massacre” (can’an) (p. 10). Despite its implied euphemism, I will use the rather commonly employed term February 28 Incident throughout. 9 I abstain from retelling the events surrounding the incident as they are well known. For a balanced summary, see Smith (2008) for primary sources, and see the website Memorial Foundation of 228 ( 二二八事件紀念基金會) (2017), a government established NGO “with the mission of keeping the memory of the 228 Massacre alive through education and cultural activities.”.

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2.2 Impact Narratives Green Island resonates with existing perceptual patterns of the February 28 Incident and their associated emotions, which were vital for enabling people to experience and speak about the event in the first place. The novel also displays how these patterns and emotions affect later generations by renarrating “the excess of the Real” (Fuchs, 2021, p. 1) in a trans-generational dimension.10 Choosing the February 28 Incident as movens for the story to unfold, Green Island is imbued with numerous perceptual figures inherent in prominent historical accounts of the event, which were key in the reconstruction of Taiwan as a distinct historical subject (Liao, 1993). One of the first publications that brought this chapter of Taiwan’s history into the American context and functioned as an eye-opener was Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed (1965), which gives a detailed witness-based account of the February 28 Incident but was met with rather modest public resonance at the time of its publication. The book came only to prominence in 2009 when film director Adam Kane utilized the material to produce a political thriller that was screened all over the US, including a special screening for Members of Congress.11 Of great relevance also were Peng Ming-min’s A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Formosan Independence Leader (1972),12 a kind of manifesto for the overseas Taiwanese Independence Movement, as well as Su Beng’s anticolonial ethnonationalist narrative Taiwan’s 400 Year History (1986),13 rendering a blow-by-blow retelling of Nationalist atrocities inflicted on the Taiwanese. What characterizes these and similar publications apart from their linguistic accessibility, is the fact that they are based on individual witness accounts and personal testimonies that were disseminated and circulated as polemic pamphlets by the overseas resistance movement. They propagated detailed descriptions of the outrageous brutality afflicted on the Taiwanese under Chiang Kai-shek’s Janus-faced dictatorial regime of “Free China” when Taiwan was still under martial law. Long before memory culture became mainstream,14 these publications pointed out the February 28 Incident as historical origin for the political Fall of the KMT regime and the Birth of the Taiwanese nation. By conveying a notion of urgency, they strove 10

On different occasions Ryan has explained that physical, mental, and emotional immersion into the local settings and historical sites along with witness interviews and explorative reading are vital parts of her writing process. When writing Water Ghosts, she moved into the historical town of Locke for some months; for Green Island she spent a couple of years in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar (Tsai, 2016). 11 The film differs in large parts from the book, yet is inspired by two factual events: the murder of Taiwanese American professor Chen Wen-chen by Taiwan Secret Police during his visit to Taiwan in 1981 and the assassination of Taiwanese American writer and journalist Henry Liu at his home in California by a KMT-sponsored criminal Triad in 1984. 12 Peng was a noted activist for democracy and Taiwan independence who took refuge in the US and returned after 22 years in exile to become the first presidential candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan’s first democratic elections in 1996. His path of escape (via Sweden) and his arrest are incorporated in Green Island at great length. 13 This book had first been published in Japanese (1962) and then in Chinese (1980). 14 The “memory boom” is generally diagnosed as starting in the 1990s. See Chang (2014).

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for lifting the massacre in which tens of thousands of Taiwanese were tortured, imprisoned, and murdered out of its invisibility and oblivion. By unlocking and sharing repressed memories, which still were deeply buried in private and public secrecy, these publications helped nourish resistance against the KMT authoritarian regime and create counter-narratives to the ruling ascription of “Chineseness” (Wang, 2011). Together with the English translation of Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia in 2006—the literary incarnation of Taiwan’s anti-colonial spirit and non-belonging par excellence15 —these publications had a significant spillover-effect across the Pacific. From a political perspective, they fed into the KMT resistance dissident groups and into the overseas Taiwan Independence Movement,16 as well as in the dangwai (literally “outside the [Nationalist] party”) movement that functioned as an umbrella organization for the different ideological camps opposing the KMT. In terms of visual impact narratives, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s award winning film City of Sadness (1989), which explored Taiwan’s historical past as trauma through the lens of family, was probably the most powerful artistic creation that resonated with audiences in Taiwan and the global community alike.17 From a perceptual perspective and its associated emotions, it was not only the event that shattered the understanding of the world and being in the world that was significant; there was also the notion of an overly pro-Chinese and completely unprepared Taiwanese elite in shock and agony in the face of the brutal military crackdown followed by the systematic obliteration of the event from historical records and people’s memories. As all of this took place under the eyes of Taiwan’s role model for democracy it formed the images of Formosa Betrayed and Orphan of Asia, which were reinforced in the 1970 and 1980s. Decades of systematic and institutionalized forced amnesia explain the sensation these early taboo breakers created at the time. In the late 1990s, memory sites commemorating victims of the February 28 Incident started plastering the landscape of Taiwan. Under the leadership of President Chen Shui-bian (2000–2008), memory work materialized in numerous February 28 lieux de mémoire spread out all over the island. In 2001, the infamous Green Island was turned into a Human Rights Culture Park honouring political prisoners who formerly had been incarcerated there. Likewise, the National February 28 Memorial Museum,18 located in a history-charged spot in Taipei, mourns the “countless

15

Originally written in Japanese (1945), the novel saw a number of Chinese translations (first 1962) and an English edition in 2006. Wu has in the meantime become an iconic figure in Taiwan with streets, memorial museums, and a Research Council dedicated to him and his work. 16 For a succinct summary of the transnational Taiwan Independent Movement, see Fleischauer (2016). 17 Interestingly enough, Hou always denied that City of Sadness was a film about the February 28 Incident. For a critical appraisal, See Tam and Dissanayake (1998). 18 The Taipei February 28 Memorial Museum (台北二二八紀念館) is located in the February 28 Peace Memorial Park (二二八和平紀念公園) next to the February 28 Memorial Monument (二二 八紀念牌). Detailed information is available at the government sponsored website National Human Rights Museum (2017). In the novel, the narrator pays a visit to these historical sites to reflect on Taiwan’s memory policy (Ryan, 2016).

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victims and their families”19 while its key message points toward national healing and reconciliation (Denton, 2021). While changing over the course of time, these textual, visual, and monumental impact narratives convey mainly three perceptual concepts, which premediate how the event is perceived of and how the reader-observer is affected: a national trauma that shattered the material and symbolic world, forced collective amnesia and Chinese identity imposed by KMT ideology, and a history of betrayal and abandonment that deprived Taiwanese of their identity and Taiwan of international recognition and its place in the world. As historical narratives within a highly politicized context, they are historical themselves, moving from the notion of breaking a taboo and exposing historical atrocities in the name of truth and transparency to the notion of developing a common sense and national reconciliation for the sake of building collective identity. Green Island reanimates and interacts with these cultural patterns by employing family history as privileged site of transmitting individual experience to the next generation. Diachronically, the novel processes from a traumatic past to a promising future, from dictatorship to democracy, from betrayal to reconciliation, from leaving to homecoming and last but not least from Taiwan to the US and back again.

2.3 Family as a Site to Retell Trans/National History and Build Identity At first sight, Green Island seems to suggest a reading as second-generation comingto-terms-with-an-inherited-historical-trauma narrative. The author herself points into this direction when she emphasizes how her project was motivated by showing how “something as traumatic as 2/28 and the White Terror … gets carried on through generations” (Farrelly, 2016). This inclination is reinforced by her choice of a “selfappointed witness/victim” as narrative perspective. However, I argue that Ryan is less concerned with the idea of how trauma travels from one generation to the next nor that her artistic work is a working through of aftereffects of an inherited trauma but that her “trauma narrative” mainly serves as a vehicle to articulate her ethical concerns and her desire to engage in creating a transpacific political and cultural space. This is to say that the author embraces and reconfigures traumatic experiences of the generation before from a transgenerational and transnational perspective. Marianne Hirsch (2012) has defined the concept of “postmemory” as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (p. 5). Thus, “postmemory” is charged with an activist potential that might produce ethical considerations, involve individuals still alive, disseminate historical awareness, create social activism, repair links with a broken past, or connect memories across lines of differences, geographies, 19

Quote from the plaque on the memorial.

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or cultures, and so on. This suggests a shift of focus from the traumatic experience and its possible intergenerational imprints to the artistic generation of experiential knowledge and leads to the question of how and to what end the author relates to the traumatic past of her ancestors. By constructing her “self-appointed witness/victim” as autodiegetic narrator, Ryan establishes a double epistemological position, which comfortably allows her to describe the factual “historical trauma” as motivation to embrace and reconnect with the past on the one hand and to articulate the process of generating her imaginative work on the other hand. The reader is thus navigated by a nameless narrator, split in an experiencing and in a narrating “I”, through “a stunning story of love, betrayal, and family”20 set against a devastating history whose outcome is already known. As Halbwachs (2020) has shown, family is a critical unit in the production of individual as well as of collective memory. Stories shared within families are crucial for our understanding of the world and being in the world. Literature is a privileged medium through which to engage in family history as a site to practice national identity work, to tell, to rationalize, to challenge, or legitimize national memory. Reciprocally, national memory can frame what is forgotten and what is remembered in a family as well as how things are remembered and passed on (Barclay & Koefoed, 2021). Fictionalizing facts, and blurring boundaries of testimonials, historical accounts, and life writing, the author utilizes family history to reflect on how these historical realities shape and are shaped by familial relationships and identities across cultures, geographies, and three generations. Green Island is fueled by a dynamic that fluctuates between the familial and the national, the local, and the global. Family life operates as site harboring the individual, as a domain consistently penetrated and imperiled by state-induced violence and repression, leaving death and survival. It serves as locus of silence and secrecy but also of political awakening and resistance. Family works also as site to negotiate betrayal and abandonment along with reconciliation and solidarity. Juxtaposing the familial and the trans/national domains, Green Island chooses a history of victimization to frame the past, a history of resistance and reconciliation to frame the present, and points to a future as continuation of the past and the present.

2.4 The Victimized Individual and the National Trauma—THE PAST The novel opens with the birth of the narrator-protagonist that coincides with the death of the first victim of the February 28 Incident—the bloody prelude to the subsequent White Terror era. While a brutal machinery of people disappearing, incarceration, torture, and killing is set in motion, a new life, the fourth child of the Tsai family, is

20

Quote from the book jacket.

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born.21 It takes only two weeks before the public domain invades the familial space and turns life up-side-down, “on March 14, 1947, my father disappeared” (Ryan, 2016, p. 26). Trained in the colonial metropole and running a clinic in Taipei, father represents the Taiwanese elite, who “did not believe in the war, or in Japan’s project— the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Ryan, 2016, p. 37) but “wanted Taiwan to rule itself” (p. 56). Being a doctor, he is committed to healing people’s bodies, since “the body, unlike a poem, is tangible” (Ryan, 2016, p. 46). However, it is not only the wounded bodies that need a cure but also people’s minds. To complement the image of the Taiwanese intellectual, the narrator marks her father explicitly as soulmate of his supposedly coeval Huang Shih-hui by assigning Huang’s famous lines to his vision: “You are Taiwanese. The Taiwanese sky hangs over you and your feet tread on Taiwanese ground. What you see are conditions unique to Taiwan and what you hear is news about Taiwan. The time you experience is Taiwanese time and the language you speak is Taiwanese” (Ryan, 2016, p. 45).22 After father’s disappearance, the private and the public develop into separated domains of knowledge and experience. Eleven years of imprisonment and “reeducation” in the infamous New Life Camp on Green Island split family life and catapult him into a perverted space with “solitary confinement … meant to elicit introspection and remorse … absent of outer light … the size of a wardrobe, a psychological effect that implies insanity while simultaneously encouraging it” (Ryan, 2016, p. 59). While both domains play out according to their own rules and logic, they drift apart, turning each other into separate entities linked only by the narrative voice. Baba’s space is where the denial of life is systematically afflicted on bodies and minds by soldiers acting at the will of the Nationalists: “they were so young. Just boys” (Ryan, 2016, p. 26). An efficient, yet faceless, machinery of perpetrators without any sense of wrongdoing is maintained by soldiers, “as ageless as a recurring nightmare” (Ryan, 2016, p. 55). Language is but a tool to weave a fabric of falsehood and arbitrary rule: “Truth. ‘Sincerity,’, ‘honesty,’ and ‘accuracy,’ were all synonyms, but with different connotations. What kind of truth did they want? What kind of truth—if any—would set him free?” (Ryan, 2016, p. 55). The presence of absence is a leitmotif throughout the novel and leaves family life at a loss. Island-wide “thousands of husbands disappeared in those weeks. Sons as young as twelve. Brothers. Friends” (Ryan, 2016, p. 28). Hope and survival center on what is tangible, what is visible, “books Baba had read and stones he’d collected … things he had touched and made, scents still lingering. My mother felt like an archaeologist, excavating proof of his existence” (Ryan, 2016, p. 49). Objects, sounds, and 21

Similarly, the eldest daughter sees light of the day “the year Japan went to Nanjing [1937]” (Ryan, 2016, p. 13). 22 Like others before, Ryan decontextualizes Huang’s widely quoted lines to support the novel’s nativist ideology. Huang’s lines were at the time directed against the cultivation of the Mandarin baihua and classical wenyanwen at the cost of Taiwanese baihua. As Henning Klöter (2012) confirms, “Huang Shihui’s role as an ideological trailblazer of a distinct Taiwanese cultural identity has been overstated in previous studies. Indeed, dichotomies like ‘pro-Taiwanese’ vs. ‘pro-Chinese’ do not apply to his sociolinguistic agenda” (p. 66). Huang’s article “Why not advocate nativist literature?” (怎樣不提倡鄉土文學) was published in 1930.

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smells embody the disappeared, family members are no longer spoken of: “a taboo paralyzed my mouth; ‘Baba’ sat on my tongue like a stone” (Ryan, 2016, p. 70). The omnipresence of the missing rules everyday life, the private and the public converge in present absence: “March 1947, according to official history, had not happened. My father had not disappeared. Nobody in my family spoke of him. My father did not exist. … The disappearances were an island-wide secret. … it was simply unspoken … we would not know for decades that the dead measured in the tens of thousands” (Ryan, 2016, p. 61). Individual experience is encapsulated in collective amnesia, generating an atmosphere of fear and mutual suspicion to dissolve the familial bond. Father’s return after 11 years turns the family into a dysfunctional social unit, leaving each single member to cope with a traumatized individual, a “man who ruled the dinner table with his mood, who punished his children like soldiers, who set loose his son’s pets” (Ryan, 2016, p. 111). His traumatic experiences seem to haunt him, making him an outsider of his time, an alien to his family, “a hungry ghost deaf to the world” (Ryan, 2016, p. 110). His future is closed off as he is unable to confront and work through his traumatic experiences. Conditioned by his perpetrators’ logic, he is instrumentalized to sustain the machinery of state persecution, and compelled to become a “traitor,” a mechanism that forces his youngest daughter into complicity: “I had brought the paper and pen to Baba. Just like Baba, I also had not refused. I was just a little girl, I told myself. Yet a man sat in jail because of me” (Ryan, 2016, p. 119). The negotiation of guilt and remorse is unresolved, there is no redemption—“‘your burden is your own’” (Ryan, 2016, p. 152). Survivor guilt makes life unbearable and unfeasible: “he was six months out of prison. He had dreamed of the sky, and then discovered its endlessness a burden” (Ryan, 2016, p. 117). On the surface, family life is reigned by the banalities of the everyday, but disturbing tensions simmer below, breaking through as bewilderment and hostility, displacement and alienation. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress overshadow family life and the four children’s growing up.

2.5 The Victimized Nation and Reconciliation—THE PRESENT Historical truth and familial secrecy can only be disclosed when the protagonistnarrator gains spatial and temporal distance by migrating to the US to join her Taiwanese American husband Wei, a successful professor at Berkeley. Across the ocean, her understanding of the world no longer passes through the prism of her familial environment dominated by her father’s trauma but by her educated and politically well-informed husband, who basically carries on Baba’s abortive mission in the overseas resistance movement. Leaving Taiwan triggers the formation of the narrator’s outspoken Taiwanese identity. Her explicit creed—“‘Ba,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ I had never spoken these words to him” (Ryan, 2016, p. 179)—is symbolically confirmed by a jar of “soil from our garden” (Ryan, 2016, p. 182). The narrator needs

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to step on American soil, however, to start realizing the implications of her decidedly ethnic identity and performing it: “In America, I had stopped calling myself ‘Chinese’ and started calling myself ‘Taiwanese’. In America, I had met my first Chinese national and discovered the gulf that separated us, despite the language we held in common” (Ryan, 2016, p. 189). As she starts seeing through the fabric of KMT propaganda and US complicity, realizing “none of the terror could have happened without the tacit agreement of the American government” (Ryan, 2016, p. 189), she cannot help but support her husband’s cause. The author transfers the familial–national constellation into a transnational context by juxtaposing the narrator’s departure to California with Nixon’s visit in China 1972, the diplomatic prelude of removing Taiwan from the international political stage and turning the island into “an empty signifier” (Ryan, 2016, p. 177). While the reverberation of February 28, 1947 follows her as “ghost across the ocean … where I heard it for years. Where I still hear it” (Ryan, 2016, p. 182)—the US abandons Taiwan officially when on “February 28, 1979, the American consulate in Taiwan closes” (Ryan, 2016, p. 188). Burdened with a past imperiled by serial colonialism, the notion of Taiwan as victim of hostile Cold War logic starts to prevail: “By 1971, the vocabulary of the world had changed. … Somehow, we ended up on the other side of that road, in a world of two Germanys, two Vietnams, and two Chinas, one Free and one Red” (Ryan, 2016, p. 121). Although the ghosts of Taiwan’s history re-echo in her American family life, it is no longer the nation that frames the secondgeneration family narrative. On the contrary: untold family memories gain agency and unfurl their potential to challenge the national narrative by disclosing family secrets and unearthing “historical truth.” The notion of betrayal and abandonment continues as leitmotiv. Set in the US, Green Island continues as love story turned political thriller driven by the de facto absurd and ridiculous chicaneries of KMT overseas surveillance and the brutal killings by the Nationalists’ henchmen. While people do get killed and the history of victimization proceeds, it is Taiwan and its overseas extension that is focalized. The notion of “Formosa Betrayed” lingers through all family matters like Wei’s unfaithfulness, the narrator’s forced complicity with the KMT secret service, the couple’s marriage crisis, their daughter’s “situation”, or asylum for their friend/political dissident. They all make up the dense, fast-moving story, yet are only symptoms rattling through the second generation’s family life. Fraught with historical facts, the transpacific space emerges as a complex transnational entanglement where Taiwanese student activism is both encouraged and smashed by Cold War logic, which eventually aborts Taiwanese activists’ aspiration for self-determination and traps them and their families in a present past of betrayal and abandonment. Burdened with a past of alleged salvation from Japanese colonialism by the KMT that turned out to be an agent of Chinese hegemony, as well as fighting in a present safeguarded by freedom and democracy that turns out to be a state-sanctioned hide-out of KMT accomplices, there is only the future left to be negotiated and fought for. The narrator-protagonist is torn apart by feeling perfectly at home in her “American Dream … as if I had taken over another women’s life” and her “story” condensing in an “immigrant’s tale told a million times over”, and finally resorts to her origin: “I

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had been born on the first night of the crackdown, in my parents’ bedroom, guided by my father’s hand” (Ryan, 2016, p. 189). However, the birth of the nation is not yet completed and American romance has become a dead-end street, as has the love story with Wei. Building a future can only be achieved by remembrance, reconciliation, and creating a collective common sense at the cost of individual desires and subjectivities: “A shared experience, a shared history, a shared trauma: this is what made us family. … Now I understood there was something stronger than fate. Choice. It was ugly and quotidian and laced romance, and that was exactly what gave it its strength. So, like my mother, I chose to stay” (Ryan, 2016, p. 344).

2.6 Activist Memory to Create a Trans/National Space—THE FUTURE Green Island maps familial memories from both sides of the Pacific onto each other, thereby affiliating histories across generationally and geographically separate sites. Both Taiwanese nationalism and American long-distance nationalism are driven by the same “impact event” and its emotionally charged conceptual patterns. The pursuit of Taiwanese independence and political sovereignty links both sides of the Pacific as a precondition for and an effect of a trans/national identity. The future is not framed as promising utopia but as a consequence of the past and the present. “Wei’s side had won. Taiwan had full enfranchisement and freedom of speech. Now, it could focus on the kind of contemporary concerns brought on by freedom, like global epidemics” (Ryan, 2016, p. 346). Taiwan’s third generation is filled with devastating optimism; the island’s future is trusted in the hands of Taiwan’s third generation. Ryan’s ideology-oriented narrative not only shows political concern and creates historical awareness across the Pacific, but it also establishes a transpacific space from which the trans/formation of Taiwanese American identity comfortably can be negotiated against the background of trans/national history. Although it is a space of ambivalent and mutually exclusive identificatory points of reference, a place of multiple belongings and non-belonging, it is not only the most exclusive but also the most inclusive space: “We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate” (Ryan, 2016, p. 372).

References Assmann, A. (2015). Impact and resonance: Towards a theory of emotions in cultural memory. In T. Stordalen & S.-A. Naguib (Eds.), The formative past and the formation of the future: collective remembering and identity formation (pp. 41–70). Novus Press. Barclay, K., & Koefoed, N. J. (2021). Family, memory, and identity: An introduction. Journal of Family History, 46(1), 3–12.

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Chang, L.-C. (2014). Island of memories. Postcolonial historiography and public discourse in contemporary Taiwan. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2(3), 229–244. Chiu, K.-F. (2018). “Worlding” world literature from the literary periphery: Four Taiwanese models. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 30(1), 13–41. Denton, K. A. (2021). The landscape of historical memory: The politics of museums and memorial culture in post-martial law Taiwan. Hong Kong University Press. Farrelly, P. (2016). Shawna Yang Ryan discusses her novel Green Island. The China Story Journal. Australian Centre on China in the World. https://archive.thechinastory.org/2016/06/shawna-yangryan-discusses-her-novel-green-island/ Fleischauer, S. (2016). Taiwan’s Independent Movement. In G. Schubert (Ed.), Routledge handbook of contemporary Taiwan (pp. 68–84). Routledge. Fuchs, A. (2021). After the dresden bombing: Pathways of memory, 1945 to the present. Palgrave Macmillan. Halbwachs, M. (2020). On Collective Memory (L.A. Coser, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1925). Hillenbrand, M. (2005). Trauma and the politics of identity: Form and function in fictional narratives of the February 28th incident. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 17(2), 49–89. Hioe, B. (2022). Interview: Shawna Yang Ryan. New Bloom. Radical Perspectives on Taiwan and the Asia Pacific. https://newbloommag.net/2016/06/20/interview-shawna-yang-ryan/ Kerr, G. H. (1965). Formosa betrayed. Houghton Mifflin. Klöter, H. (2012). Taiwan literature and the negotiation of language from below: Huang Shihui and his ideological convictions. Studia Orientalia Slovaca, 11(1), 65–77. Lew-Williams, B. (2018). The Chinese Must Go. Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America. Harvard University Press. Liao, P.-H. (1993). Rewriting Taiwanese national history: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle. Public Culture, 5, 281–296. Lilla, M. (2016). The end of identity liberalism. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/ 11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html Lin, S. S. (2018). Analyzing the relationship between identity and democratization in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the Shadow of China. The ASEAN Forum. https://theasanforum.org/analyz ing-the-relationship-between-identity-and-democratization-in-taiwan-and-hong-kong-in-theshadow-of-china/ Lin, S.L.-C. (2007). Representing atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 incident and white terror in fiction and film. Columbia University Press. Locke Foundation. (2004). Retrieved June 30, 2022, from http://www.locke-foundation.org/lockehistory/ 二二八事件紀念基金會Memorial Foundation of 228. (2017). Retrieved June 30, 2022, from https://www.228.org.tw/ 國家人權博物館National Human Rights Museum. (2017). Retrieved June 30, 2022, from https:// www.nhrm.gov.tw/w/nhrm/Index North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association (NATPA) 北美洲台灣人教授協會. (2015). Retrieved June 30, 2022, from https://taiwaneseamericanhistory.org/blog/natpa/ Our Taiwanese Story. (2017). Retrieved June 30, 2022, from https://www.ourtastory.org/ Peng, M.-M. (1972). A taste of freedom: Memoirs of a Formosan Independence Leader. Holt. Renan, E. (1992). ‘What is a Nation?’, text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11th. (1882). In E. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (E. Rundell, Trans.). Presses-Pocket. Rigney, A. (2012). Reconciliation and remembering: (how) does it work? Memory Studies, 5(3), 251–258. Rigney, A. (2018). Remembering hope: transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. Rojas, C. (2007). Introduction. In D. D.-W. Wang & C. Rojas (Eds.), Writing Taiwan. A new literary history (pp. 1–14). Duke University Press.

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Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press. Ryan, S. Y. (2007). Locke 1928. El Leon Literary Arts. Ryan, S. Y. (2009). Water ghosts: A novel. Penguin Publishing Group. Ryan, S. Y. (2016). Green island. Knopf. Shih, S.-M. (2010). Against diaspora: The sinophone as places of cultural production. In J. Tsu & D. D.-W. Wang (Eds.), Global Chinese literature. Critical Essays (pp. 29–48). Brill. Smith, A. D. (1996). LSE centennial lecture: The resurgence of nationalism? myth and memory in the renewal of nations. The British Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 575–598. Smith, C. A. (2008). Taiwan’s 228 incident and the politics of placing blame. Past Imperfect, 14, 143–163. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. Picador. Su, B. (1986). Taiwan’s 400 year history: The origins and continuing development of the Taiwanese society and people. Taiwanese Cultural Grassroots Association. Tam, K.-K., & Dissanayake, W. (1998). Hou Hsiao-Hsien: Critical encounters with memory and history. In K.-K. Tam & W. Dissanayake (Eds.), New Chinese Cinema (pp. 46–59). Oxford University Press. Tsai, H. C. (2016). The path to green island: Interview with Author Shawna Yang Ryan. YouTube. Retrieved June 30, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm5XMUlalQ Wang, D.D.-W., & Rojas, C. (Eds.). (2007). Writing Taiwan. Duke University Press. Wang, J. S. H. (2011). In the name of legitimacy: Taiwan and overseas Chinese during the Cold War Era. China Review, 11(2), 65–90. Wu, Z. L. (2006). Orphan of Asia (I. Mentzas, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Wu, C.-R. (2012). Revisiting local history and ghostly memory in Shawna Yang Ryan’s Locke 1928. Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, 3, 39–52.

Irmy Schweiger is a professor of Chinese language and culture at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests are situated in the realm of modern and contemporary literature and culture of China and Taiwan. Among other things she is interested in historical trauma and cultural memory, cosmopolitan and vernacular dynamics in literature and literary history, literature as counter narrative to official discourse, transcultural encounters and urban literature. Currently she is working on a project that deals with the future of memory and the memory of future, exploring contemporary Taiwanese literature and culture. In teaching she pursues community-based learning strategies to enrich student’s learning experience and to impart civic responsibility.

National Border on the Tip of Tongue: The Limit of Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon Sophia Huei-Ling Chen

Abstract This chapter explores the effects of cosmopolitanism on racialized immigrants in the context of Taiwan and Japan. Using the two female characters, a Taiwanborn Japanese lesbian citizen and a Japan-born Taiwanese straight-identifying citizen, in Li Kotomi’s novella Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon (2019/2021), this chapter argues that the practice of cosmopolitanism should not be necessarily considered as empowering; instead, it must take into account broader factors such as immigration policies or national discourses in the cosmopolitan subjects’ host nations. The chapter provides two examples of the practice of cosmopolitanism, the speech of secondary language and the consumption of foreign cuisine, to demonstrate that the embodied effects of characters’ cosmopolitan practices can be both connective and restraining. It introduces the concept “minor transnationalism” proposed by Lionnet and Shih (2005) to accentuate the connectivity generated across the minoritized immigrant characters. Keywords Li Kotomi · Cosmopolitanism · Immigration · National discourse · Minor transnationalism

1 Influx of Three Cultures and Their Queer Love Traditions Born in Changhua County of Taiwan, Kotomi (1989) migrated to Japan in 2013 after obtaining her bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature from National Taiwan University. In the late 2010s, while she worked in corporations, Li began to compose fiction in her leisure time. She launched her literary career in 2018, which saw a Gunzo award nomination for her first novel. Since then, she has been working as a novelist and translator by profession. To date, Li has published three fictional works in Chinese, translated by herself from Japanese: Solo Dance (Duwu 獨舞, 2019), Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon (Daoshu wumiao yueya 倒數五秒 S. H.-L. Chen (B) University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_17

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月牙, 2021), and Polaris (Beijixing saluo zhi ye 北極星灑落之夜, 2022). Her other novel, Island of Blooming Higabana (彼岸花が咲く島, 2021), has been nominated for the Mishima Award and then won the Akutagawa prize, making her the first Taiwan-born author to win this accolade. Well-versed in classic Chinese literature, Li regularly makes cultural allusions to classic Chinese history and literature and has composed two classic Chinese poems in her novella Crescent Moon (2019/2021). As an avid scholar of Japanese language and culture, Li’s writing is also steeped in Japanese literature, especially in girl love or “yuri” genre. In addition to her knowledge of Japanese and Chinese literature, Li is also indebted to Taiwanese queer female authors such as Chen Xue and Qiu Miaojin, whose fictional pieces make appearances in Solo Dance. In turn, Li’s fiction presents a transnational hybrid of literary influences across the Taiwan Strait and Japan, where one finds the schoolgirl characters confirm their love through an exchange of quotations from Eileen Chang’s famous prose work “Love” and Taiwan’s queer cult classic Notes of a Crocodile (1994) in Solo Dance, for instance. Li’s fiction revolves around queer love, or its beginnings, between (predominantly) two lesbian women. Its plots evoke the “yuri” tradition in Japan’s romance fiction and comics as well as quoting the genre of “schoolgirl romance” in modern Chinese literature, which is extensively surveyed and astutely argued in Fran Martin’s Backward Glances (2010). The ending to queer characters’ love stories can often be gloomy, which, to a certain extent, parallels the inhibition her characters, all sexual minorities, face. The plots of her stories largely consist of flashbacks of characters’ sexual histories interspersed with episodes of love/sex-related encounters in urban landscapes. The protagonists in her stories regularly philosophize on sexual identity with rhetoric that clearly bears the mark of LGBT politics. Her fiction, particularly Solo Dance and Polaris, shows the discourse of LGBT politics has entered contemporary Taiwanese queer literature, as characters’ sexual orientation is rendered as a political subject and narratives of homoerotic intimacy are transposed onto the political register. Like to her characters, Li is bellicose about her identity as a lesbian immigrant to Japan. Seen in numerous reports and columns are Li’s unreserved, at times controversial, opinions about queer rights and personal experience as a Taiwanese expatriate. Middle-class, politically vigilant, and cosmopolitan lesbians in their 20 and 30 s populate Li’s fiction. Such character portraits mirror her public persona. Her characters are highly geographically mobile, traveling to and from China, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and the United States. Narratives of transnational traveling and migration are characteristic of her fiction. All Li’s fictional pieces deal with the theme of adaptation into one’s new country—predominantly Japan—with characters originally from Taiwan, China, and Japan. Polaris, a linked short story collection, unpacks the burden of nationality through these foreign characters’ daily experiences of dating, speaking, and eating while they negotiate their sexual orientation in Shinjuku Ni-chome, the renowned queer neighborhood in Tokyo. The novella Crescent Moon, similarly, set against metropolitan Tokyo, features a pair of female graduate school friends meeting up on a summer day in June and exchanging the bittersweetness of being foreigners

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to Japan and Taiwan. Li’s fiction shows the notion of nationality at work not only at the level of national apparatus but also at the mundane level of everyday practices. Using Crescent Moon as an example, this chapter argues that Li Kotomi’s character portraits present a notion of cosmopolitanism at its limits. It shows that nationality does not disappear even if a character is highly mobile, both geographically and socially. Instead, these characters find themselves inconveniently interpellated as ethnic others in their daily speech and diets. Notwithstanding an ideal to traverse freely among cultures and languages, the notion of cosmopolitanism as embodied by Li’s characters shows that such a notion must be—to the character’s inconvenience and at times against her agency—grounded by the situated reality of being an ethnic and/or sexual other in a nation to which they she has immigrated. If the effect of ethnicity in this story is restraining for characters, then, in contrast, the effect of queer love, albeit its elusiveness in this story, is cohesive. It mobilizes the narrator “I” attempt of crossing the barriers of cultures at an everyday level. It formulates a human relation situated in what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih theorize as “minor transnationalism” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005, p. 8). Within this relation of “minor transnationalism,” the narrator and her secret “crush” present a lifestyle, in their exchange of cross-cultural living experiences and their dieting preferences, that is underrepresented in Japan’s mainstream discourse of immigration.

2 The Inscription of Nationality, or What Does It Mean to Speak? Crescent Moon presents a story of dual protagonists—the first-person narrator “I,” a female Taiwanese immigrant to Japan, and Mio, a Japanese middle-aged female immigrant to Taiwan. The story’s design of the two protagonists’ migration routes formulates a kind of identity reversal, as “I,” who is born as a Taiwanese in rural Changhua County, moves to metropolitan Tokyo and acquires citizenship in Japan, and Mio, born as a Japanese and appears to come from Tokyo, is married to someone from the rural region of Taichung and acquires citizenship in Taiwan. This identity reversal, to an extent, introduces a mutual understanding between the two characters about the difficulty of acculturation and integration into host countries. In a way, it provides a cosmopolitanism that neutralizes the ethnic differences of two characters. Further, the two characters are cosmopolitan to the degree that they are both geographically mobile: Mio is an exchange student to Xi’an in China in pursuit of her undergraduate degree and moves to Taichung due to marriage, and “I” comes to Japan for postgraduate study and eventually settles in Japan. They are also cosmopolitan to the extent that they are comfortable with foreign cultures. While Mio develops a predilection for ethnic-Chinese Hui cuisine during her time spent in Xi’an, “I” appreciates Japanese aesthetics, as embodied by the wearing of kimono. Such character portraits, however, are undermined by interpellations from national and ethnic discourses that frame the cosmopolitan characters, particularly Mio, as

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unwelcome ethnic others. Being a cosmopolitan figure, Mio is attentive to various cultural differences between China and Taiwan. The difference that stands out the most, experienced by Mio as a micro-discrimination against her linguistic habitus, is the phonological differentiation between Putonghua and Guoyu, or Chinese Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin. Before narrating the racial othering process enacted on Mio, the narrator provides Mio’s brief language learning history in order to give an account of the making of her linguistic habitus: “Mio learns her Mandarin first in Japan and then studies abroad in Xi’an, which makes her Mandarin sounds closer to the pronunciation of Northern China, namely, Putonghua” (Li, 2019/2021, p. 81). The narrator’s historicization of Mio’s linguistic habitus suggests transnational mobility is inscriptive, as it inscribes on Mio’s Mandarin speech. Further, its effect on speech does not easily disappear as one relocates to other places. As Mio moves to Taiwan, her Putonghua speech, a historical result of transnational mobility that might give her a cosmopolitan look in other countries, is framed as a linguistic proto-disservice to Taiwan’s nation-state. Agreeing there are phonological differences between Putonghua and Guoyu, the narrator describes a series of phonological “deviations” that distinguish Guoyu from Putonghua: Guoyu [Taiwanese Mandarin] isn’t spoken with the same strength. The four tones are relatively flat, and the retroflex consonants [ch- sh- zh-] aren’t very retroflex [and so are pronounced the same as c- s- z-]; also an inability to distinguish between alveolar nasals [n] and velar nasals [ng] is ubiquitous. Not only that, but when Taiwanese people speak Chinese they always pepper it with Taiwanese Hokkien words, which gave Mio, who had just arrived in Taiwan, a hell of a time when it came to making out what people were saying. Moreover, often Mio would start to speak Chinese and people would laugh at her, “The way you speak Chinese is like China-Chinese.”1 (Li, 2019/2021, pp. 81–82)

Through a series of phonetical deviations, as indicated by the linguistic terms that convey scientific rigidity, Mio’s Mandarin speech is racialized and othered. Her speech, far from being neutral or apolitical, becomes a contest ground of the ethnic-national discourse of Taiwan state. Her language practice is reconfigured as a parameter or benchmark of her Taiwanese citizenship, albeit as a wife to a Taiwanese man; Mio is allegedly a Taiwanese citizen. Further, despite many citizens in Taiwan not speaking Taiwanese-Hokkien—for instance Indigenous people, people of Hakka ethnicity, the younger generation born after 2000, descendants of Chinese mainlanders who came to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War, and South-East Asian immigrants—and despite the use of Taiwanese Hokkien, from a linguistic perspective, suggesting a root in the southern regions of China, Taiwanese Hokkien, in popular imagination, is indeed still considered an authenticator of Taiwanese-ness. In light of this linguistic chauvinism, her speech, then, “gives her away,” which makes her not only a racial other, but further, due to the long-standing political tension across straits, comes across as a betrayal to Taiwan’s nation-state. Mio’s linguistic alienation pushes her to acculturate herself in order to bring her Mandarin speech closer to the national-ethnic discourse of Taiwan. The following 1

Special thanks to Dr. Josh Stenberg at University of Sydney to help me edit the translation, and to Yahia Ma at the University of Melbourne and Vincent M. Chen at Ohio State University for their generous discussions.

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narrative shows vividly the ways in which the discourse of nation is not only inscribed at an institutional level, such as the making of immigration policies, but is further inscribed at an individual, bodily level, as Mio makes it a personal agenda to reform her speech: Mio does not want her speech to be called “China-Chinese,” and is determined to approximate the style of Taiwanese Mandarin. She flattens her four tones, softening the retroflex consonants and nasal sounds. Meanwhile, Mio carefully observes the tones and diction of Taiwanese and begins to imitate them. Two years fly, when she goes back to Japan to visit her Mandarin teacher, her teacher laughs at her, “your Mandarin becomes Taiwan-Mandarin.” To which Mio is perplexed: cannot the Mandarin I myself speak be my own, but must it be China’s or Taiwan’s? Mio begins to feel that many things cease to be hers anymore. (Li, 2019/2021, p. 82)

Mio’s acculturation, to a greater extent, is against her will; as I argue above, it is compelled by a micro-level discrimination. The process of linguistic acculturation, quoted above, indicates that nationality, as a discourse, is capable of transforming Mio’s body. Indicated by the verbs “flatten” and “soften,” the narrative shows that Mio, interpellated as a racial other and even traitor by Taiwan’s nation-state discourse, subjects her body to a self-refashioning project that should make her speech pass as “Taiwanese.” This self-fashioning project of speech is not unfamiliar in postcolonial nations and regions. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples, as discussed by Chow (2014) and many others is the training of a British accent for call-center staff based in India but overwhelmingly serving customers based in the UK and North America. While in the case of call-center staff in India, the racialized reformation of accent, as argued by scholars, should be considered a continual perpetration of British colonial legacy now rerouted as a “rational” distribution of human labor in a globalized economy, in the case of Mio, the racialized reformation of speech should be considered a result of two competing national-ethnic discourses between Taiwan and China. Quite against her will and notwithstanding her highly geographical mobility, Mio’s speech reformation shows cosmopolitanism at its limit. Despite her embrace of foreign cultures, as can be inferred from Mio’s preference of ethnic-Chinese Hui cuisine and her cross-cultural marriage, the practice of cosmopolitanism is challenged in the face of racialized interpellation. And the challenge is to such a great extent that Mio begins to reflect whether the practice of language speaking is of one’s agency. Mio’s reflection clearly puts the effect of national-ethnic discourse on spotlight. It shows that national-ethnic discourse plays an active role in fashioning the character’s language learning and that language is not a neutral or transparent medium passively waiting for the character to make a personal claim, but is a battlefield of different national-ethnic discourses. The racialization of Mio suggests that the practice of cosmopolitanism, as a lifestyle and an ideal, must take into account the national-ethnic discourses of host nations. In the case of Mio, cosmopolitanism turns out to carry a risk of racial othering, subjecting her to a self-fashioning project in reforming her speech. The story of Mio might provide a somber reflection on Taiwan’s national-ethnic discourse. While the discourse promotes the independence of Taiwan by emphasizing the

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distinctive word choices and phonological deviations of Taiwanese Mandarin, Mio’s story cautions us to notice the citizens and immigrants who might be racially othered along the promotion of Taiwan’s cultural autonomy.

3 The Unsayability of Queer Love, or Why It Must Be Left Unsaid? “Spoken language, inhabited place, working environment—although I’ve grown into the age where I can decide many of these things on my own, nonetheless, only such thing I cannot make up my mind easily. I lend myself to uncertainty to make it decide for me. I close my mind, and begin to count, five seconds.” (Li, 2019/2021, p. 113)

In “Plural not singular”, Chi Ta-wei proposes “the model of arousal” to capture what he considers less easily identifiable characteristics of homosexuality in modern Taiwan literature (Chi, 2016, p. 47). He characterizes the representations of homosexuality that fall within this model as those that portray “subjects with ‘crushes’,” subjects that are “sexually or romantically aroused, and those who thrive on voyeurism and those who dare not speak love’s name” (Chi, 2016, p. 47). The subject of homosexuality in Crescent Moon is captured by this model. Chi’s capture of the elusiveness of homosexuality, as he suggests, finds a similar vein in American literary-historian scholar Valerie Rohy’s argument about some pre-twentieth century American literature in which some characters are felt to be lesbian-like, or exhibit a “lesbian-effect,” rather than necessarily be recognized nominally as lesbian by their self-expression or sexual acts (Chi, 2016, p. 27). These characters who existed prior to the advent of LGBT activism and contemporary understanding of identity politics, as Chi demonstrates in his close reading of some of the early works of Bai Xianyong, helps us approach queerness in broader terms, even in present-day Taiwan where queer people can choose to embody a well-carved, distinct identity, with increasingly differential divisions on the spectrum of gender and sexuality. Such elusiveness of homosexuality, which Chi’s model of arousal tunes us into, helps us think through queerness not merely in identitarian terms but in terms of human rights. In other words, it helps us envision queer love and practices that resist coded relations and expressions couched in heteronormative dominant culture and institutions; it also helps us capture queer love and practices that suggest, however subtly, the restraints of identity politics and a refusal to be pinned down as a tangible form of identity. Adopting this model of arousal, I argue that the text express a form of queer love that cannot be easily pinned down in identitarian terms. In Crescent Moon, there are not many plots, insofar as we understand plot to be action or movement in the exterior world: the two female graduate school friends meet up for the first time five years after their graduation on a transient mid-summer day of June; the two, “I” and Mio, have a lunch at an ethnic-Chinese Hui restaurant, and then walk to a riverbank park to set off fireworks in the evening. However,

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“something” is in the air. It remains floating, unarticulated throughout the story. Between “I” and Mio, and then relayed to the reader through the inner monologue of “I” and her flashbacks, this “something,” with its inscrutability and ineffability, is hard to translate into specific terms. It might refer to a lot of things all at once, and yet at the same time those things do not exhaust its meaning. Furthermore, even to the first-person narrator, it is difficult to register this “something” in concrete and specific terms so that even at the end of the story, the narrator, in her terminology, manages to refer it as “such thing” at best, as shown in the epigraph above. It, in turn, requires readers to speculate and infer what “such thing” might suggest—it should be emphasized that the speculation demanded by the text for the reader further enhances the elusiveness of “such thing.” The wraparound cover band of Crescent Moon translates it into “a characterless cross-nation affection” (yiduan qingdande kuaguo lianqing), while the author in the afterword translates it into “an elusive onesided love” (ruoyousiwu de danlian) (Li, 2019/2021, p. 183). Using the adjectives “characterless” and “elusive,” both translations underscore its lack of contour. The two translations, similarly, underlie its inactive dimension. While the former registers it at the emotional level, seemingly to capture it as foremost an activity of inner world; the latter underscores its solitary dimension, highlighting that it is barely perceivable to others than the narrator. This something, if we were to demarcate it with a pretension to theoretical rigor, might be called “the unsayability of queer love,” which Halperin (2019, p. 406) elegantly and profoundly demonstrates in “Queer Love”. In his essay, Halperin, by an insightful close reading of the two poems by two gay American poets, Robert Hayden and William Meredith, published before the advent of gay activism in United States, suggests there is a resisting and futuristic dimension about the poems’ reticence around queer love. Instead of reading the poems’ silence around queer love as a homophobic effect, as being compelled into the closet and being compelled to shut up, Halperin argues for a kind of reparative reading around this silence of queer love. Halperin further argues that this silence, or the lack of referents and terminology for love that is queer, points to the limits of dominant heteronormative norms in expressions and practices of intimacy. The challenges to the two poets Halperin (2019) analyses, then, is about giving an expression to “a love so uncategorizable that it exhibits no known form and assumes no available representational shape” (p. 406). Similar to the poems Halperin closely reads, Crescent Moon is about giving an expression to queer love, and the story itself is an impossible demonstration of the unsayability of queer love. Right on the first page of the story, the narrator is confronted by her incapacity of expressing love. As the time of meeting up her long-separated graduate school friend soon approaches, the narrator finds herself paralyzed at both verbal and non-verbal levels: “when the appearance as memorized shows up to my eyes, I become perplexed about which expressions should be donned to greet her and how to make myself heard to converse with her. The muscles on my face, fiber by fiber, stiffens and do not respond to my command” (Li, 2019/2021, p. 17). Vis-à-vis the subject of queer love, the narrator is compelled to fall into aphasia. Language fails her, both verbally and non-verbally, as she is left in total

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inarticulation. The story, from the very start then, is the first-person narrator’s verbal attempt of coming into terms with the unsayability of queer love. The ending, which is presented as the epigraph to this section, suggests, similarly, the impossibility of articulating this queer love. Throughout, the first-person narrator never manages to confess her love to Mio. The story begins and ends with the narrator’s inarticulation of her love for Mio. Some readers might find this plot arrangement unresolved and even circular, as it seems to end where it begins. Nonetheless, I want to argue that, despite its apparent inactiveness, the narrator’s queer love is cohesive and capable of crossing the boundary of nations. Further, it brings us to a daily landscape of multiculturalism that is neglected by Japan’s mainstream discourse about immigration. While in Halperin’s (2019) argument for queer love, he underscores the creative expression poets craft in response to the ineffability of queer love—which one also sees in the narrator’s crafting of two heptasyllabic regulated verse, or qiyan lüshi (Li, 2021). I emphasize the mobilizing effect that queer love creates for the narrator in contrast to the sense of restraining that arises out of racialization, which I demonstrate in the previous section. I intend to accentuate that, although the narrator never puts her love in any specific or concrete terms, this queer love mobilizes the narrator to formulate a transnational relationship that is cohesive and suggests the diversity of Japan’s immigrating cultures, which one does not regularly find in the mainstream discourse of Japan, and which should be considered as a significant contribution Crescent Moon makes to Japanese literature. Sociologists’ observations that the discourses of nationality in Japan have been saturated with the myth of homogeneity are well-established, despite it being increasingly difficult to maintain such a myth since ethno-cultural globalization began in the late 1980s (Iwabuchi et al., 2016). Nagy (2014), in discussing the pragmatic difficulties of implementing multiculturalism in the East Asian context, more directly points out that East-Asian states such as Japan and South Korea “have maintained restrictive immigration policies … following the destructive aftermath of WWII” in order to maintain national and territorial cohesion along the ethno-cultural “homogeneous” lines (p. 163). While so-called traditional countries of immigration, such as Canada, the US, and Australia, have worked towards a notion of citizenship that is not aligned with a racialized notion of nationality, in East Asia, Iwabuchi et al. (2016) conclude that citizenship continues to be identified with a racialized concept of nationality that shores up a public imaginary of mono-ethnic nations. It is in such a sociopolitical environment that Crescent Moon, a story about the cross-cultural love interest of two immigrants, stands out. Crescent Moon not only depicts a rare portrait of Taiwanese immigrants in Japan, but it also represents a landscape of immigrating cultures in Japan, particularly through a depiction of diet. The urban scenery of Tokyo, represented in Crescent Moon, is predominantly seen through and traversed by the immigrant narrator; further, the central scene of the story, the ethnic-Chinese Hui restaurant in which the narrator’s affection towards Mio gradually thickens and a cultural exchange takes place, is represented as a multicultural site, in spite of the narrator’s affectionate mockery of the “inauthentic” rendering of Taiwanese cuisines. Before conducting a close reading of this central scene, I suggest that Li Kotomi’s representation of Japan

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as an immigrant society is perhaps her most salient feature. On the wraparound cover of the Chinese version of her award-winning short-story collection Polaris, one finds a Chinese translation of a commentary from the judges from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan: “[T]he author comes from Taiwan. With her powerful penmanship, she brings a refreshing air to the introverting [neixiang qingxiang] contemporary Japanese fiction. This work is a gem, worthy of the reward” (2020/2022). Given the brevity of this comment, it is hard to pinpoint what the judges imply by “introverting.” Nonetheless, in light of the context outlined above, I construe the term “introverting” along the line of ethnic and sexual monolith, such as tending to represent a more mono-ethnic, heterosexual dominant cultural landscape of Japanese society. Li Kotomi’s works, then, configure an underrepresented picture of immigrating and sexually othered lives that might enrich the mainstream discourses of Japan that still seek to affirm the myth of homogeneity. In the central scene of the story where the main cultural exchange takes place, Tokyo is represented as a multiethnic site. The narrator is led by Mio to an ethnicChinese Hui restaurant for their lunch. As if transported to a space elsewhere, the narrator accentuates the “foreignness” of ethnic-Chinese Hui restaurant in great cultural specificity, noting particularly the “untranslatable” dimension of the cuisines’ names on the menu. To the narrator’s eyes, even the typography of the menu foregrounds this untranslatability: The menu is written both in simplified Chinese and Japanese, but for the Japanese part, perhaps due to a wrong choice of formatting, the Chinese characters and Japanese kana characters appear to be misfits for each other, the lines of characters resembling strings of beads in all different shapes and sizes. (Li, 2019/2021, p. 36)

In their visual representation, the Japanese kana and Chinese characters stand as distinct to each other. Comparing the characters to “beads,” the narrator’s simile compellingly conveys the sense of distinct materiality of these two different written languages. The incongruity of the two languages, then, shifts unilaterally to the untranslatability of ethnic-Chinese Hui cuisines: “What is ‘yangroupaomo’?” after the waiter leaves, I ask Mio. It is a dish I never hear[d] before. And the menu only uses kana to spell the pronunciation of the dish. It is probably again a dish that they don’t know how to translate, then they leave it untranslated. That is quite straightforward. “Ugh … this is a bit hard to explain. You will know when you see it,” Mio naughtily beams, “I really love to eat it.” (Li, 2019/2021, p. 37)

Suggesting the narrator’s gentle irony and Mio’s linguistic frustration, the untranslatability of the dish points to a material dimension of ethnic-Chinese Hui culture that cannot be easily integrated into the linguistic register of Japanese culture. It is not only too difficult to be translated into written words in another language, but it is also difficult to represent the dish in verbal terms. The dish appears to be comprehensible only by the act of eating, as if Mio’s positive experience of eating it shall be sufficient. However, the untranslatability of the dish is soon forgotten as the dish is served. Instead of clinging to the issues of translation rather pedantically,

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the narrator turns to observe the sensorial aspects of the dish—the oiliness and solidness of pancakes, the richness of mutton broth and the sensation of ripping off the pancakes into pieces (Li, 2019/2021)—all these sensorial aspects of the dish seem to prove again its untranslatability. It should also be emphasized that the narrator’s diet of “yangroupaomo” is motivated by her queer love for Mio. As indicated by the narrator herself, she has never heard of or tasted the dish before; it is Mio’s request that the narrator visit a restaurant predominantly marked by its features of ethnicity. Further, it also draws the narrator close to other immigrant groups of Japan, which she otherwise might not encounter. The queer love, in this regard, has a potential to facilitate culture crossing. And the result of this culture crossing is positive, as the narrator rather surprisingly finds the dish to be delicious (Li, 2021). In turn, in this episode of consumption of a racialized dish—with its untranslatability and by extension incongruity to Japanese society—the narrative presents a rare scene of Japan as a multiethnic society, depicting it as being occupied by at least Taiwanese immigrants and ethnic-Chinese Hui immigrants, even if the ethnic-Chinese Hui culture is portrayed here as somewhat difficult to assimilate into Japanese culture. If the immigrating culture is represented as encapsulated by the dominant Japanese culture in Crescent Moon, the story, however, also suggests we look for relations transnationally. Seen from a nation-state scale, immigrant culture in Japan appears to be at marginal and minoritized; in the narrator’s words, “some freedoms, if not approved and stamped by those big people who sit in legal institutions and the bureau of national border control, cannot be achieved even if one struggles” (Li, 2019/2021, p. 108). However, seen from a horizontal, transnational scale, the immigrating culture as depicted in the story, appears to be more porous and more outwardly extensive toward other cultures. Over the conversation between Mio and the narrator in the Hui restaurant, the singing of the Asian popular music superstar Teresa Teng, or Teng Li-chun (1953–1995) can be heard: The TV in store broadcasting an old popular song in [the] Chinese-speaking world, Teng Li-chun wistfully sings: When does the bright moon appear? Toasting to the blue sky one asks. One wonders, in the celestial palaces, what year is it this evening? (Li, 2021, p. 42)

The lyrics are borrowed from the song ci “Water Melody” (Shuidiaogetou), written by the Chinese poet Su Shi (1037–1101), commonly known as a poem lamenting separation. The bright and full moon in the sky is ironic compared to the separation of people on the earth. While the moon is “full” (yuanman), the people separated are not. The lyrics, sung graciously by Teresa Teng, foreshadow the upcoming separation and brief reunion of the narrator and Mio. While the author’s quotation of Teng’s lyrics is more likely designed to convey an elegiac ambience for their approaching parting, I shift the focus from the content of the lyrics to mention of the singer, Teresa Teng. Her vocal appearance in the story, I argue, suggests a transnational articulation with other regions and cultures in Asia that the immigrating groups in host nations,

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in this case ethnic-Chinese Hui immigrants and Taiwanese immigrants in Japan, are more capable of formulating than native citizenships. Teresa Teng’s rich trajectories of migration and traveling, her multilingual singing skills, and her cosmopolitan fashion have all contributed to her immense popularity in Asia in her lifetime and beyond. Teng is immensely popular even more than two decades after her untimely death in 1995. A search on the video-sharing website YouTube for her popular song “The Moon Represents My Heart” shows that she has accumulated over 10 million views over the past ten year (Lifeisgood181, 2010). Her fame across Asia is reflected by the comment section of YouTube, as audiences write in different languages such as Mandarin, Indonesian, and English. Asserting Teresa Teng’s popularity is “pan-Asia” and even “global,” Yao (2020) compiles a list of Teng’s greatest hits sung in different regions in different languages. The list includes “Across the water” (Zaishui yifang), a Taiwanese Mandarin song designed for the romance writer Qiong Yao’s film adaptation; “My Honey” (Tianmimi), a Chinese Mandarin song adapted from an Indonesian folk song “Dayung Sampan”; “Stroll on the Road of Life” (Manbu renshengru), a Cantonese song released in Hong Kong; and several Japanese songs such as “Airport” (k¯uk¯o) and “Atonement” (tsugunayi) (Yao, 2020, p. 521). This list, at the very least, attests to the transnational reception of her songs in Asia, in addition to Teng’s polyglot talent. On the other hand, this transnational and multilingual dimension of her songs, as scholars have demonstrated, cause problems of “ownership” in the sense that the cultural legacies of Teng should belong to particular cultures or regions. Khiun (2014), for instance, presents a case study on the uploaded audio-videos of Teng’s performances on YouTube, demonstrating the complex and competing frameworks of cultural politics behind the apparent apolitical and affective appreciation of Teng’s stage performances in the comment section of the videos. However, it is not the intent of this chapter to read Teresa Teng as a figure of contested cultural legacy. Instead, Teresa Teng functions as a cosmopolitan figure capable of providing an affective linkage for cultures across Asia through her visual and vocal presence. Read in this way, even if only in passing, the fictional appearance of Teresa Teng in the story appears to suggest a transnational network underpinned by the popular memories of Teng shared by Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. The musical appearance of Teresa Teng, which serves as an affective base for Mio and the narrator’s conversation, also configures what Lionnet and Shih (2005) theorize as “minor transnationalism” (p. 8). They define “minor transnationalism” as opposed to what they call “the vertical models of resistance” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005, p. 3), based on which ethnic minority groups’ cultural practices are worth studying insofar as they resist the major and dominant cultures. They also define “minor transnationalism” against postcolonial studies, which they argue are mainly concerned with the conflicts and compromises between decolonized nations and precolonist nations, but not the possible allegiances or shared problems across ethnic minority groups or across decolonized nations that have been (previously) subjugated to the same major cultures. Conceived against the vertical models of resistance and postcolonial studies, “minor transnationalism” aims to “recognize the creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national

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boundaries” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005, p. 7). The broadcasting of Teresa Teng in the Hui restaurant and subsequently the narrator and Mio listening are plausibly more mundane than creative, but the network does nonetheless form. And even if this minor-to-minor network is not strong in its proto-political potential or deep in its cross-cultural bonding, the network is still there. Further, in my reading of this mundane minor transnationalism, the subject position of Mio is, to some extent, configured as minoritized. Mio is no longer a “proper” or dominant subject from the major culture, in this case Japanese society. As a temporary Japanese returnee, her active choice to have lunch in a minoritized ethnic restaurant suggests her tendency to position herself outside the comfort zone of the major culture to which she once belonged. Moreover, given ethnic-Chinese Hui people have tended to be minoritized in the state of People’s Republic of China, Hui people as immigrants in Japan arguably are doubly minoritized. Mio’s choice, then, might be interventive enough. Facilitated by Mio’s choice to circumvent the major culture and underpinned by the transnational network conjured up by the cosmopolitan voice of Teresa Teng, this network of minor transnationalism foregrounds the two participants, Mio and the narrator, primarily as minorities reaching out, at an everyday level, for articulations that reside beyond nation-state borders. It should also be emphasized that it is within this network of minor transnationalism that the narrator’s queer love is revealed to readers, as if without such a network the queer love, already elusive, cannot even emerge. In contrast to the restraining effect of nationalism exercised on the body of Mio, queer love, situated within and articulated with “minor transnationalism” is cast as a form of connectivity, despite its unsayability throughout the story. Crescent Moon shows that the practice of cosmopolitanism might lead to very different effects, sometimes opposing, in different geo-cultural scenarios. It is thus necessary to take into account broader factors, such as immigration policies, national discourses, and hierarchical ethnic discourses before arbitrating the practice of cosmopolitanism as universally empowering. In the case of language speaking, we observe that Mio’s fluency of secondary language, an attribute of cosmopolitan citizenship, is racialized and minoritized as a proto-betrayal of the ethnic-national chauvinist discourse of Taiwan regarding its “native” tongue. In the case of diet preference, we observe that, in choosing an ethnically minoritized restaurant, the narrator and Mio formulate a human relation situated within “minor transnationalism,” supported and saturated by the cosmopolitan voice of Teresa Teng, which evokes a broader and more complex inter-Asian network that de-territorializes the national border of Japan.

References Chi, T.-W. (2016). Plural not singular: Homosexuality in Taiwanese literature of the 1960s. In H. Chiang & Y. Wang (Eds.), Perverse Taiwan (pp. 44–63). Routledge. Chow, R. (2014). Introduction: Skin tones-- about language, postcoloniality and racialization. In Not Like a Native Speaker (pp. 1–18). Columbia University Press.

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Halperin, D. M. (2019). Queer love. Critical Inquiry, 45, 396–419. Iwabuchi, K., Kim, H. M., & Hsia, H. (2016). Rethinking multiculturalism from a Trans-EastAsian perspective. In K. Iwabuchi, H. M. Kim, & H. Hsia (Eds.), Multiculturalism in East Asia (pp. 1–17). Rowman & Littlefield. Khiun, L. K. (2014). Rewind and recollect: Activating dormant memories and politics in Teresa Teng’s music videos uploaded on YouTube. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(5), 503–515. Kotomi, L. 李琴峰. (2021). 倒數五秒月牙 [Count Down to Five Seconds Crescent Moon] (Li Kotomi, Trans.). Unitas Publishing. (Original work published in 2019). Kotomi, L. (2022). 北極星灑落之夜 [Polaris] (Li Kotomi, Trans.). Sharp Point Publishing. (Original work published in 2020). Lifeisgood181. (2010). 月 亮 代 表 我 的 心 [The Moon Represents My Heart] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiFm7AWP9n4 Lionnet, F., & Shih, S.-M. (2005). Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, transnationally. In F. Lionnet & S.-M. Shih (Eds.), Minor transnationalism (pp. 1–23). Duke University Press. Martin, F. (2010). Backward glances: Contemporary Chinese cultures and the female homoerotic imaginary. Duke University Press. Nagy, S. R. (2014). Politics of multiculturalism in East Asia: Reinterpreting multiculturalism. Ethnicities, 14(1), 160–176. Yao, S. (2020). Teresa Teng in Diaspora: Affective replacement in Chinese world-making. Comparative Literature Studies, 57(3), 520–529.

Sophia Huei-ling Chen is a PhD candidate in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her thesis examines the theme of transnational mobility and the technique of genre subversion in contemporary queer fiction from Taiwan.

Index

A Aestheticization strategy, 70 Affect, 6, 59, 62, 65, 66, 72–74, 86, 88, 106, 142, 224 Akira Higashiyama, 4 Akutagawa prize, 236 American neo-imperialism, 96 Ami, 50 Amis (Pangcah), 154 An Erotic Feast for Lovebird (鴛鴦春膳), 5, 27–29 Animal studies, 97 Anime-realism, 6, 41, 51, 52 Annette Lu, 4 Annotations on the Book of Changes, 86 Anthropocene, 166, 167, 171–174 Anti-imperialist, 198 Anti-Japanism, 8, 177–182, 185 Anti-romanticism, 212 Aohua Atayal, 140 Arjun Appadurai, 60 Atayal, 136, 140, 146, 154 Auerbach, 63, 65, 71–73 A Wife’s Diary (人妻日記), 7, 116, 123

B Baby-boomers, 60 Backed Against the Sea (背海的人), 60, 72, 74, 76 Bai Xianyong (Pai Hsien-yung; 白先勇), 169, 240 1066 Battle of Hastings, 48 Becoming Bunun (成為真正的人), 46, 49, 50 Becoming-Japanese, 8, 177, 179, 184, 185

Beef Noodle Soup (牛肉麵), 5, 27–38 Beigang Incense Burner of Lust (北港香爐 人人插), 28 Benshengren (本省人), 128, 167 Bildungsroman, 42, 47 Bloody Sacrifice with Color Make-up (彩妝 血祭), 28 Blooming Season (花開時節), 23, 178 Book of Changes (易經), 86 Book of Evil Women (惡女書), 7, 12–116, 121, 122 Book of Songs (詩經), 83 Borneo, 177–186 Bo Yang (柏楊), 190 Breakfester, 7, 111, 112, 115–118 Buddha, 99 Bunun, 46, 49, 50, 54, 140, 154, 194

C Cao Lijuan (曹麗娟), 126 Carnal love, 85 Central Daily News, 45 Chang Kuei-hsing (張貴興), 178 Cheng Nan-jung (鄭南榕), 105 Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), 2, 19, 20, 99, 225 Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成), 105 Chen Xue (陳雪), 7, 111–113, 116–118, 121–123, 126, 236 Chen Yingzhen (陳映真), 4, 181 Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), 1 Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), 1, 19, 28, 32, 98, 218, 224 1893 Chicago world’s fair, 51 China Times Book Review, 45 Chinese Civil War, 1, 15, 128, 137, 238

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Wu and M. Fan (eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century, Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1

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250 Chinese Communist Party (CCP; 共產黨), 1, 15, 18, 20, 32, 34, 36, 37, 98, 192 Chinese Mandarin, 168, 198 Chinese nationalism, 8, 178–182, 185 Chinese National Party (Kuomintang; KMT), 28, 125, 128, 153, 178 Ching Kai-shek Memorial Hall, 19 Chi Ta-wei (紀大偉), 131, 240 City of Sadness, 225 Claustrophobic, 191 Cli-Fi, 165, 166 Climate Fiction, 8, 165, 166, 170 Clipping Wings: A Chronicle (剪翼史), 6, 59, 60 Closed for Holidays (本日公休), 166 Cold Sea, Deep Emotions (冷海情深), 156, 157 Cold war, 10, 101, 102, 193, 218, 221, 230 Collective amnesia, 217, 226, 229 Colonial history, 7, 28, 169, 180, 181 Cosmopolitanism, 9, 235, 237, 239, 246 Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon, 235 Counterfactual historicity, 9, 193, 196 Cross-cultural, 3, 7, 9, 157, 160, 162, 163, 212, 218, 220, 237, 239, 242, 246 Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, 100 Cultural Elitism, 59, 62, 70 Cultural identity, 96, 139, 163, 228 Cyborg, 104 D De-anthroposize, 170 Death of Ngalumirem (安洛米恩之死), 156 Deconstructionist, 96 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), 2, 4, 16, 19–22, 31, 99, 100, 224 Diaoyutai Incident, 186 Diaoyutai protest movement, 194 Diaspora, 9, 154, 179, 183, 186, 189, 191, 192, 197, 199, 218, 219, 222 Diasporic, 7, 126, 127, 131, 185, 191, 192, 195, 197, 219 Diversity, 2–4, 17, 156, 161, 171, 182, 219, 222, 242 Dream Devourer (噬夢人), 6, 7, 95, 97, 98, 103–106 Dream of the Red Chamber Award, 44, 179 E East of the Country—The Mountain-pass Ghost (國域之東頂番婆的鬼), 28

Index Ecocriticism, 5, 97, 155 Ecological, 2, 6, 96, 157, 170, 172 Egoyan Zheng (伊格言), 6, 95, 97, 102 Eileen Chang, 236 Encyclopedic Narrative, 46, 51 Environmentalism, 96 Epeli Hau‘ofa, 8 Epistemological incertitude, 65 Ethno-history, 220 Euro/Sinocentric societies, 141, 147 Executive Yuan, 144 Exoticization, 122 Eyes in the Sky (天空的眼睛), 156

F Family Catastrophe (家變), 60, 64, 76 Fanpo (番婆), 138 Fatherless City (無父之城), 7, 111, 112, 118, 120, 123 February 28 Incident (228 Incident), 9, 15, 28, 223–225, 227 Feminism, 97, 126 Feminist, 96, 125, 126, 136, 143, 148, 221 Feminist Club (女研社), 125, 126 Floating Dream in the Ocean (大海浮夢), 8, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 161 Floating Light (浮光), 166 Florida Metamorphosis (佛羅里達變形 記), 203, 204, 208, 210, 211 Formosa Betrayed, 224, 230 Formosa Incident, 105 Formosa Literary Award, 45 Four Asian Dragons, 1

G Gan Yao-ming, 3–5, 41, 43, 50, 51, 54, 178 Gender studies, 5 Genealogy, 30, 61, 64, 75, 76, 192, 204, 208 Genre fiction, 96 Gen-Z, 75 Geo-cultural scenarios, 246 Ghost island, 204 Ghost Town (鬼地方), 9, 203–206, 210, 211, 214 Ghost-writing, 118, 218 Global cultural economy, 60 Globalization, 5, 9, 61, 95, 96, 98, 148, 174, 242 Global sci-fi world, 7 Global socio-environmental, 136 Golden Tripod Award, 46

Index Green Island, 9, 217, 218, 220–222, 224–228, 230, 231 Ground Zero (零地點), 6, 95, 95, 98, 100–103, 106

H Han Taiwanese, 135, 156 Heterogeneity, 219 Heteronormative, 7, 112, 116, 117, 122, 240, 241 Hokkien, 43, 238 Hoklo, 4, 43, 48, 195 Homophobia, 9, 117, 203, 204 Homosexuality, 3, 7, 126, 204, 206, 207, 210, 212–214, 240 Hsia Yu (夏宇), 81 Huang Chong-kai (黃崇凱), 3, 9, 189, 190, 194, 198, 208 Huang Chunming (黃春明), 42, 180, 181, 208 Hybridity, 3, 5, 27, 29, 36, 38, 219

I 520 Incident, 18 Indigenous, 4, 5, 7, 8, 41–43, 46, 48, 52, 54, 75, 76, 105, 135–148, 153–163, 167, 168, 172, 173, 192–195 Island literature, 161 Island of Blooming Higabana (彼岸花が咲 く島), 236 J Japanese colonialism, 51, 177, 180, 184, 186, 230 Japanese colonialization, 95 Japanese Empire, 97, 178 Japanese imperialism, 177, 178, 184, 185 Japanese Occupation, 42 Juancun, 138, 139, 141, 147, 168

K Kaohsiung Incident, 191 Kevin Chen (陳思宏), 3, 9, 203, 205, 210 Killing Ghost (殺鬼), 41, 44–52, 178 Koxinga (國姓爺), 154, 169

L Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), 18–20, 106, 107 Legislative Yuan, 111, 192

251 LGBTQ+, 17 Li Ang (李昂), 3, 5, 27–34, 36, 37 Li Bai (李白), 83 Li Gedi (李格弟), 83 Liglav Awu (利格拉樂・阿烏), 3, 7, 136 Li Kotomi, 4, 9, 235, 242, 243 Li Yongping (李永平), 3, 4, 8, 177, 179, 181, 185 Locke 1928, 218

M Magical realism, 6, 41, 47, 51, 52, 54, 171 Mainland China (The People’s Republic of China; PRC), 29, 30, 32, 37, 81, 103, 128, 154, 163, 168, 169, 194 Malaysian Chinese, 180 Mao Zedong (毛澤東), 1 Martial law, 1, 2, 5, 10, 15–18, 20, 24, 28, 41, 42, 45, 54, 60, 82, 96, 97, 102, 105, 107, 125, 128, 129, 153, 207, 210, 219, 223, 224 Mata nu Wawa (大海之眼), 8, 153, 154, 156, 159–161 Ma Ying-jeou（馬英九）, 19, 20, 99, 100 Memorial Foundation of 228 (二二八事件 紀念基金會 ), 223 Memories of the Waves (海浪的記憶), 156 Mencius, 88 Millennials, 60, 61, 75, 190 Modernism, 3, 6, 27, 60, 62, 65, 70, 71, 75, 76, 190 Modernist, 6, 27, 59–63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 76, 83 Mulidan—Tribal Letters (穆莉淡 Mulidan: 部落手札), 140 Multiculturalism, 242

N National Human Rights Museum (國家人 權博物館), 225 Nationalism, 8, 10, 42, 97, 167, 178–186, 193, 231, 246 Native-soil, 4–6, 41, 42, 96, 155, 156, 162 Nativism, 42, 43, 221 Nativist, 9, 27, 43, 76, 82, 155, 162, 180, 192, 204, 214, 221, 228 Nieh Hualing (聶華苓), 196 Notes of a Crocodile (鱷魚手記), 122, 236 Notes of Desolate Man (荒人手記), 122

252 O One China Policy, 3, 154 One Country on Each Side (一邊一國), 29 Orchid Island, 8, 101, 156–163, 166 Orphan of Asia, 225

P Pacific Ocean, 8, 153, 154, 156, 157, 161, 162, 172, 173 Pacific War, 183 Paiwan, 7, 135, 136, 138–140, 142–144, 146–148, 154, 155 Post-authoritarian, 219 Post-Cold-War, 61, 75 Postcolonial, 7, 96, 105–107, 157, 161, 177, 178, 185, 186, 198, 222, 239, 245 Postcolonialism, 54 Postmodern, 3, 22, 60, 88, 96, 97 Postmodernity, 6, 60 Putonghua, 238 Puyuma, 154

Q Qing dynasty, 29, 156 Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津), 122, 126

R Realism, 6, 41, 44, 47–49, 51, 52, 54, 76, 97, 125, 127–130, 171, 190, 194 Red-mouthed Vuvu (Hongzuiba de Vuvu 紅 嘴巴的VuVu), 140 Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles (吉陵春 秋), 179 Routes in the Dream (睡眠的航線), 166–168 Rub Ineffable (摩擦●無以名狀), 88, 91

S Science fiction, 5, 6, 97, 171, 195 Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel ( 尋找天使遺失的翅膀), 113–115, 118, 120, 122, 123 Second World War, 1, 8, 51, 136, 167, 171, 192 Sediq, 154 Shawna Yang Ryan, 4, 9, 217, 218 Shih Shu-tuan (施淑端), 27 Shin ming-teh (施明德), 31, 32, 34 Sinocentric, 105, 141, 143, 147 Sino-Japanese War, 42, 171

Index Sinophone, 4, 178, 179, 183, 184, 222 So Much Water so Close to Home (家離水 邊那麼近), 166 Stories at Funeral (喪禮上的故事), 45 Stories of Lucheng (鹿城故事), 28 Student movement generation (學運世代), 18 Syaman Rapongan (夏曼·藍波安), 8, 153–156, 158, 160, 161 T Taipei People (台北人), 169 Taiwanese Independence Movement, 31, 224, 225, 231 Taiwanese Mandarin, 238–240, 245 Taiwan independence, 31, 34, 36, 128, 224, 225 The Axis of Spine Spine (Jizhui zhi zhou 脊 椎之軸), 84 The Eagle Haidong Qing (海東青), 179–181, 184 The End of the River (大河盡頭), 179, 181–183, 185 The Formosa Exchange (新寶島), 189, 192–195, 198 The Girl and the Woodcutter (邦查女孩), 44, 45, 47, 49–51 The Good People Upstairs (樓上的好人), 203, 204, 211, 214 The Illusionist on the Skywalk (天橋上的 魔術師), 166, 167 The Island (島), 17 The Land of the Little Rain (苦雨之地), 166, 171 The Lost Garden (迷園), 28 The Love that is Temporary: Memoir in Nates/Paris (愛的不久時：南特／ 巴黎回憶錄), 126 The Man with the Compound Eyes (複眼 人), 165, 166, 170, 171, 173 The Rain Tree (雨豆樹), 21, 22 The Scenery in the Fog (霧中風景), 17, 23 The Small Town that I Loved and Lost (我 鍾愛與遺失的小鎮), 120 The Snow Falls in Clouds (雨雪霏霏), 181, 182 The Stolen Bicycle (單車失竊記), 166, 171 The Summer Winter General Came (冬將 軍來的夏天), 44 The Tao of Butterflies (蝶道), 166, 169 The Taste of Taipei (台北的滋味), 19 The Three Anti-allergy Methods (去過敏的 三種方法), 204

Index The Translator, 5, 15–17, 21, 22, 24 Tiananmen Square Massacre, 19 Tibet, 52 Tongzhi, 7, 111–113, 116, 119, 126, 128–131 Trans-Indigenous, 144, 162 Transnationalism, 10, 237, 245, 246 Traumatic realism, 125, 127–130 Tsai Ing-wen（蔡英文）, 4, 20, 22, 23, 100, 111, 153, 155, 195

V Ventriloquy (腹語術), 85, 88, 91, 92 Vietnam War, 46, 218 Visible Ghosts (看的見的鬼), 28, 37

W Waishengren (外省人), 128, 136, 138, 167 Walis Nokan (瓦歷斯・諾幹), 136 Wang Wen-hsing (王文興), 59, 60, 63, 64, 72, 75 Wang Zhenhe (王禎和), 48, 181, 191, 196–198 When I Became We: Thirty-six Possibility of Love Relationship (當我成為我們 ：愛與關係的三十六種可能), 7 White Portraits (Baise huaxiang白色畫像), 24

253 White Terror, 5, 9, 15, 16, 18, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 42, 45, 97, 107, 118, 119, 125, 138, 191, 205, 218, 220, 223, 226, 227 Wild Boars Cross the River (野豬渡河), 178 Wild Lily Movement (野百合學運), 5, 19, 105 Wu Chuo-liu Literature Prize, 156 Wu Ming-yi (吳明益), 8, 165–174 Wu San-Lien Award, 156

X Xiangtu (鄉土), 5–7, 27, 28, 41–43, 46, 47, 51, 53, 54, 96–98, 107

Y Yang Mu (楊牧), 62, 106, 107 Ye Shito (葉石濤), 4

Z Zeelandia (熱蘭遮), 21, 23 Zero Degree of Separation (零度分離), 97 Zhang Yixuan (張亦絢), 3, 125, 204 Zhiguai, 44 Zhong Lihe (鍾理和), 197 Zhong Zhaozheng (鍾肇政), 197 Zhu Tianwen (朱天文), 122