After winning several of Taiwan's top literary awards for his short stories, Yuan Che-sheng (
The three stories share the same narrator -- a rural Taiwanese boy -- and the same village setting by the familiar Taiwanese Hokkien name of Siochuikau (燒水溝, Hot Water Drain) with all its stock characters, including the loud-mouthed barber, a "red turtle cake" (紅龜粿) maker, their cantankerous wives, and a mange-infested dog.
The first story, The Scholar's Watch, is a complex probe into the human perception of time and how it affects one's potential. The boy narrator remembers his days with a mysterious intellectual man from his village who kept writing letters and sending them to non-existent addresses. The narrator remembers himself as a kind of intuitive genius, who could "hear" the postman or the icecream man coming long before they turn up at the corner of the road. The scholar relies on his expensive wrist watch to predict when the postman will be coming, but he is always outperformed by the boy.
There is also a local fortune teller who predicts deaths and disasters. One day, he predicts a catastrophic earthquake that will rip Taiwan in half. His dire prophecies come true, but all on the wrong days. Finally, the scholar loses his life in a train accident and the boy loses his "hearing" after the dead scholar's watch comes into his possession.
One central motif running through the stories is the link between "supernatural" abilities and the nostalgia for childhood innocence.
In the second story, Father in Heaven (天頂的父), the boy narrator can see and communicate with ghosts, which in Yuan's description are more like naughty little spirits instead of scary beings. The story is about the boy's rejection of the Christian church and formal education in favor of a beggar's life as a follower of a local "beggar king" who commands a legion of vagrants. Parallel to the first story, the boy loses his faculty for seeing ghosts after police arrest and jail the beggar king.
One of Yuan's weaknesses appears in this story, however, in an overboard attempt at subverting his religious theme. During Sunday service, Jesus Christ appears on the wall of the Church looking similar to the beggar king. The boy, in attendance at the church service and holding a full bladder, then wonders plainly if the church's toilet is behind the wall on which Jesus is hung. This simplistic critique detracts from the strength of the rest of the narrative.
The third and longest story, Time-counter Ghosts (計時鬼), is a thematic summation of the first two stories. After a traumatic "first day in school" experience, the boy meets a new classmate by the strange name of Wu Hsi-lang (吳西郎), which sounds like the Taiwanese Hokkien for "There's a dead person" (有死人). From Wu, he learns about the mythical world of Time-counter ghosts.
According to this myth, every human becomes a time-obsessed ghost after death. They inhabit all time pieces -- from wrist watches to grandfather clocks. They can also manipulate time at their whim. A hilarious part of the story comes when the ghosts twist school time into 10-minute classes alternated by 50-minute breaks.
Intimate portrayals of childhood and Taiwanese rural life remain the most real part of the stories. Yuan seems to have a special knack for catching Taiwanese humor. But Yuan often appears a little too predictable in his ventures into religious experience and the afterlife in these stories.
Yuan won his first China Times literary award in 1994 for his short story Seeing off (送行), an extraordinarily successful piece that catches an obscure sense of existential desolation through a low-key description of a train-and-bus journey. In contrast, the long stories in his new book sometimes appear to get caught in conceptualization and lack the solid inevitability of his earlier masterpieces. Especially, the church scene in Father in Heaven seems all-too-predictable in its stereotyping. It is fine to create myths of one's own, but they risk becoming frivolous if not embedded in -- or at least linked to -- deep inner experience.
In this respect, the first story The Scholar's Watch (for which he won his second China Times award last year) is the best of the three stories because it is almost totally grounded in a rural Taiwanese childhood, an experience Yuan can mine in depth.
Despite the defects, Yuan deserves encouragement as one of the few young Taiwanese writers exploring new themes and working to find their literary paths in between superficial nostalgia for the pastoral, and the pursuit of sexy metropolitan materialism. In any case, Yuan's literary talent keeps the stories from being boring. They are full of raw Taiwanese humor and literary surprises. Perhaps Yuan can benefit from digging more into world literature, which may give him the inspiration he sorely needs for new adventures.
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