Thoughts on Taiwan Travelogue

I finished reading Lin King's translation of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's Taiwan Travelogue this morning. I enjoyed the novel a lot, including its postmodern framing, where the English translation I read is supposed to be a translation of Yáng's Mandarin translation of Aoyama Chizuko's original novel, a novel that went through several Japanese, English, and Mandarin editions. (If memory serves me correctly!) 

I also enjoyed getting a picture of Taiwan--and particularly Taichung--during the period of Japanese colonialism. The descriptions of the Taichū Train Station and its environs, the markets, the streets and countryside were fascinating to me. King's translation also cleverly creates the point of view of the Japanese travel writer/novelist by using Japanese names for most of the cities and sites in Taiwan (which she often calls "the Southern Country" or "the Island" in contrast to "the Mainland," which refers to Japan). For example, Taichung's Lü Chuan River (or Lyu-Chuan Canal) is called the "Midori River." 

Lü Chuan River (Midori River) during the Japanese Period, from Wikimedia Commons

Much of the book is focused on discussions of food, particularly Taiwanese cuisine (Aoyama-san describes herself as having an always-hungry "monster" in her belly as the result of unfortunate events during her childhood). While there were a lot of dishes, snacks, beverages, etc., that I was familiar with, there were also quite a few that I don't recall ever trying or even hearing of, particularly because their names are written in romanized Taiwanese (though the Mandarin names are often added in footnotes). Reading this book made me hunger for Taiwanese food, both familiar and strange. 

Perhaps my unfamiliarity with the food mentioned in the book and with some of the places they visited should be a warning to me. Without giving away the plot of the novel, the ending made me question my own relationship to Taiwan and Taiwanese people, and what my role should be (if any) in representing Taiwan (and Taiwan's rhetoric) to others. Maybe it's not my place to speak but rather to continue to learn. 

Speaking of which, what should be my fifth book for 2025?

P.S. This interview with Lin King gives more information about the novel. And here is a more complete review of the book (spoilers!).

P.P.S. Next book on my reading list: Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. 

P.P.P.S Here's another nice review of the book. I find myself hoping a movie version of this comes out one of these days...

Notes on Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

朱宥勳 (Chu Yu-hsun). 【他們沒在寫小說的時候：戒嚴台灣小說家群像】When They Were Not Writing Novels: Portraits of Novelists from Taiwan Under Martial Law. 2nd. ed. 大塊文化, 2023.

Note: This isn't going to be a complete discussion of the book--to do that would probably involve writing a post as long as the book itself!

In this very readable collection of essays, Chu Yu-hsun focuses on the socio-political contexts in which nine postwar Taiwan novelists lived and worked. I especially like the anecdotes that Chu includes about the writers' experiences (such as this one about Chung Chao-cheng's "bold" decision about paper that I posted earlier). Because the book doesn't focus as much on their actual novels or their writing processes, I get the funny feeling (as I did with A-chin Hsiau's book) that many of these novelists spent more time on other activities than they did on writing novels. Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), for instance, goes from editing a literary column in Free China Journal (自由中國半月刊) to moving to Iowa on the invitation of Paul Engle to join the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which Engle directed, and eventually developing an international writing program at Iowa. (Where did she find time to write her own novels?!) 

Chung Chao-cheng is depicted as spending a lot of time developing a network of Taiwanese writers and helping them get published. He pops up in other people's chapters, too, for example trying unsuccessfully to get Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) to allow his work to be published in an anthology of Taiwanese nativist writers (Chen wasn't interested because he was a pro-unification Taiwanese leftist--in fact, judging from what Chu has to say, Chen wouldn't even accept being called "Taiwanese"). 

Other writers cross paths in the book, like Lin Haiyin (林海音), who helped Chung Chao-cheng and other Taiwanese writers get opportunities to translate Western works from Japanese. According to Chu (and this is, from what I understand, a dominant narrative), writers who grew up during the Japanese era had a lot of trouble writing and getting published after 1945 because Taiwan's literary scene became dominated by exiled Mainlanders who were more experienced writing in Mandarin and who tended to exclude Taiwanese writers from getting published. Lin Haiyin, who edited the influential literary supplement of the United Daily News (聯合報), worked with Taiwanese writers to get them published, even editing their work for them at times. She had to resign from this position in 1963 due to the "Captain Incident" (船長事件), in which a poem she published got the author and her in trouble when the poem was interpreted as being critical of Chiang Kai-shek. 

The book also touches on some important martial law- and Cold War-era issues, such as the CIA's involvement in Iowa's International Writing Program, the US Information Agency's involvement in the shaping of Taiwan's literature (what Chu's teacher, Chen Jianzhong [陳建忠], has called "unattributed power" [隱蔽權力]), and the relationship between the battle of literary modernism versus nativism and the martial law regime's emphasis on "anti-Communist literature" (反共文學). 

I'm not well-read enough in Taiwanese literary history to evaluate Chu's claims about all of these points, though. I feel I should read some of the books he mentions in his afterword to get a better understanding. I also think I should read Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's Modernism and Nativist Resistance (1993) and perhaps reread A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan (2021) to have a better basis for assessing Chu's book. 

One problem I do have with When They Were Not Writing Novels, though, is that Chu doesn't cite sources for a lot of what he writes about. I realize this is not an academic book (probably that's what made it so readable!), but some bibliography at the end where he acknowledges his sources would help a lot in determining what his conclusions are based on. I was also a bit confused by his comment in the afterword to the effect that while most the book's judgements about the authors come from existing research on Taiwanese literature, a small portion are speculative based on Chu's own literary experience ("本書關於作家的種種判斷，大多得益自台灣文學研究的既成果；少部分則是我以自身的文學經驗推想的"). This made me wonder which portions were based on which. I think a more extensive bibliography would go a long way toward reassuring me about Chu's conclusions. In the end, though, I do want to reemphasize that I enjoyed the book, and it makes me want to dive more deeply into Taiwanese literature, if only as an amateur.

Summer reading and reflecting (Day Thirty)

For various reasons, I felt kind of down today--I'm getting frustrated with my writing project, and I was also sad to find out that a colleague was resigning. So I mostly did some reading today (except for when I was having a meeting with another colleague about how we are going to revise a course--that went well). I read four stories in A Son of Taiwan, one of the books I mentioned yesterday. Some of them deal with men who have come back after getting out of prison for political "crimes," and others appear to be more metaphorical takes on the White Terror period. One thing that I got from reading these stories (like Li Ang's "Auntie Tiger") was the feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time. As Li Ang writes in one place,

"It was an era of mad people and beggars. We did not witness the massacre, we did not see piled bodies or bloodstains, and even Third Uncle seldom passed on his tales. Our fear came from having been taught that one could not believe even what one witnessed, for there had to be a conspiracy by enemy spies." (130)

Li uses this idea to describe various rumors that spread about the Taiwanese Communist Xie Xuehong, who tried to lead a rebellion against the KMT in the wake of the 228 Massacres. The rumors (and Li's story) tie her strength and leadership--and mysteriousness--to her sexuality, which is also depicted as strong yet mysterious. As this is a work of fiction, however, I feel I have to read a biography to find out what is true about Xie. I have a biography written by Chen Fangming, but I haven't had time to read it yet. In the meantime, I can read the article by Ya-chen Chen about her that was listed in the Wikipedia references. It's about Li Ang's portrayal of Xie. 

One thing I wish the editors would have done with the book (besides proofreading it a bit better) was expand the introduction. I noticed that that they didn't include any publication dates for the stories, for instance. I'd like more information about the stories, particularly Ye Shitao's, which appears to be extracts from a longer work and is a little hard to follow. 

Two more stories to finish. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on my paper, too.

[Update, 6/12/21: I finished the book last night. A correction: The publication year for one of the stories, Lee Yu's "Nocturnal Strings," was given (1986).]