Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader

Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader. Cambria Press, 2020.

I started a post about A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, but before I could get into writing it, working out my complicated feelings about Hsiau's book, I picked up Lin's collection yesterday and ended up reading the whole thing in about two sittings. 

That isn't as difficult as it might sound, for despite feeling the title might give, this book is fairly short--it contains an introduction and only six stories, comprising less than 200 pages. The six stories are all from the Japanese colonial period, five from what Ye Shitao calls the "mature period" (1926-1937) and one from what he calls the "war period" (1937-1945). (Actually, it's not clear if Long Yingzong's "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees" if from the mature period or the war period--it was published in 1937. I've counted it as being from the "mature period.") Two of the six stories--Loā Hô's "A Lever Scale" and Zhu Dianren's (zh) "Autumn Letter"--were originally written in Chinese. The other four--Yang Kui's "The Newspaper Boy," Long Yingzong's (zh) "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees," Wu Yong-fu's (zh) "Head and Body," and Wang Chang-hsiung's (zh) "Sweeping Torrent"--were written in Japanese. 

The stories were all pretty interesting, if not entirely polished (I assume this was the case in the original languages, not just in the translations), and the book made me hope for more translations of fiction from Japanese-era Taiwan.* One thing that I appreciated about the stories is where they provided sensory details about what life was like. Sometimes you get this in biographies or other non-fiction, but fiction writers seem more likely to include that detail to make you feel like you're there with the characters. (Probably the "show, don't tell" principle at work.) For instance, when Chen Yousan, the main character of "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees," arrives at the home of a colleague, he is described as "remov[ing] his sweat-soaked underclothes" and "wringing them out," something I can definitely imagine doing after walking under the hot September sun in southern Taiwan. 

Together, the stories give a variety of perspectives on what it was like to be Taiwanese under Japanese colonialism--for some, the barely suppressed rage; for others, the self-doubt, the desire to become fully Japanese balanced with the sense of second-class citizenship. 

*I've since ordered a copy of The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction since 1926, published in 1983.

[Note: This post is necessarily short and sketchy--my 8-year-old keeps asking me if he can spray paint something in the garage that he's working on, and I don't have that much bandwidth anymore at the end of a very tiring summer... Looking forward to my "sabbatical" that starts Sept. 6!]