An anecdote about writing in postwar Taiwan from【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

Was going to do some writing on my paper this morning, but instead read a chapter from When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】). The first chapter is about Chung Chao-cheng (Zhong Zhaozheng, 鍾肇政), a Taiwanese author who helped other Taiwanese writers get their work published during the martial law period, where Mainlanders more easily got published. There’s an interesting anecdote (which comes from a memoir by Chung) of the time when Chung saw an ad in the newspaper calling for submissions for a writing contest. This was sometime in the 1950s, when Chung was probably in his mid- or late-20s, living in his family home in Longtan, Taoyuan County. Although he was interested in submitting something, he paused when he saw the requirement was to write on grid paper (有格稿紙). When he dug around his house for paper, he found some Japanese-style manuscript paper (原稿用紙, genkō yōshi), so he made what he called a “bold” (大膽) decision to use the Japanese-style paper. 

Chu Yu-hsun, the author of When They Were Not Writing Novels, explains that this was a “bold” decision because it symbolizes Chung’s use of his Japanese-era literary foundation to break into the literary world of postwar Taiwan (34-35). Chu points out that writers of Chung’s generation, who were educated in Japanese, had to learn to write in a “foreign language” (Mandarin) before they could even try to write creatively (to say nothing of trying to publish) in Chinese. The different kinds of paper are a material difference but are also symbolic of the writers’ struggle to bring their own resources to the task of writing in a new linguistic, political, and literary environment. 

The other interesting point is that the genkō yōshi Chung used was probably not that different in format from the paper used in postwar Taiwan, but it might have been different enough (maybe the name of the manufacturer was printed on the paper, for instance) that Chung was hesitant to use it. This might symbolize Taiwanese writers' concern about how Mainlander editors might view their writing, where anything that gave away the author's Taiwanese identity could be an excuse for rejection. Chu also mentions that Chung's use of "bold" might be a sign that Chung is reflecting on something that happened 35 years earlier. Chu thinks that the younger Chung probably had more of a sense of despair at the time.