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Deconstructing Taiwan's gay scene, from a woman's perspective

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Mar 09, 2003, Page 18

Notes of A Desolate Man By Chu Tien-wen 169 pages Columbia University Press

This novel isn't new, but it has recently become accessible online in digital form in two different formats, as well as being issued in paperback.

As it has never been reviewed in the Taipei Times it seems appropriate to take a closer look at it now.

When Howard Goldblatt was in Taipei last month he pointed to this book as the most challenging he'd ever translated (he tackled it along with his wife, Taiwan-born Sylvia Li-Chun Lin). This, and the fact that it's a Taiwanese novel about gays, written by a woman, that has been voted one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, makes it something we should sit up and take note of.

Chu Tien-wen (朱天文) is famous for her vividly-etched short stories set in Taipei, for instance the title story of Fin de Siecle Splendor which features fashionable young women taking drugs in hot-springs and exchanging chat about apricot scrub creams and rose blushers against a brighter-than-life subtropical background.

Notes of a Desolate Man is rather different. It's narrated by an initially timid gay teacher, Xiao Shao. His youthful gay friend, Ah Yao, lies dying of AIDS in an American hospital. Ah Yao has pursued a wild life and is also a committed activist for gay and lesbian rights. Strongly contrasting with him is the narrator's devoted lover, Yongjie, a man with a perfect body and a faithful disposition to boot. The couple would like to embark on a gay marriage, a state they enter mentally while attending mass in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

When Yongjie goes away on an assignment to Yunnan province, Xiao Shao experiences loneliness and begins to feel his age. His meditation on the nature of the young in the mid-1990s, the "Fido Dido generation" as he calls it, is one of the best things in the book.

What contributed to this novel's early fame when first published in Chinese in 1994 was the very wide range of cultural reference it contained. There are discussions of Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Goethe, Johann Sebastian Bach (as well as Bach flower remedies), the movies of Naruse Mikio, Fellini and Ozu Yasujiro, and much more. There are also lengthy passages describing Miles Davis's trumpet playing, a failed attempt to set up a thriving fish tank, and society's hypothetical evolution to patriarchy from matriarchy. The concept of a feminine, humane, and by implication quasi-homosexual Age of Aquarius, superseding the materialist and war-oriented masculine culture that has dominated the last 2,000 years, also makes a surprising reappearance.

What also initially caught the public's eye was the list of innumerable color shades in the text, and the accompanying sense of the author positively trawling for rare words, whether they were herbs, colors or scents, especially when they carried a strong sensory association. This was at the time a signature tactic of this particular writer, something she was known for and that was therefore expected. In a book as theoretical as this it also provided some very welcome oases of relief.

In addition there are passages set in Egypt (Karnak), Italy (Venice), Japan (Kamakura), as well as references to maybe 50 classic writers, 30 famous films, and an uncountable number of abstract ideas.

The picture of male gay life this book paints is simultaneously a sympathetic one and one of addiction. The gay man who reverses day and night, goes to gay saunas five times a week, and has so many casual partners there's no way he can remember them all, is set side by side with the social radical who's intent on breaking the line of biological descent.

"We are the terminators of the kinship system," the narrator proudly proclaims after reading Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques and Foucault's History of Sexuality.

This is a gay cultural tour that lacks only one thing -- any credible evocation of gay experience. There are very many ideas here, but gradations of feeling and perception are far more difficult to find. Plot-wise, too, this isn't a thrilling book. At times it reads more like a dissertation than a novel. For readers living in Taiwan, it may well be its Taipei setting that constitutes its most immediate attraction.

Some people will think this isn't so much a novel as a dissertation on mid-1990s youth culture, taking in alienation, designer fads, computer games, androgyny and the like, and containing more than its fair share of cultural theory. As a result, many readers are going to find the book more than a little wearying.

The best books all give pleasure, albeit pleasure of different kinds, with not all of them giving pleasure to the same sorts of people. But the weakness of this book as a novel is that it's more a catalogue of ideas and associations than a pleasurable story with developed characters and dramatic developments.

This novel was a major event when first published in Chinese. It took Taipei gay life seriously, and set it in a rich and elaborate sociological and cultural context. It was the product of a major Taiwanese writer who was to go on to reap great success.

Nevertheless, the issue of display will not go away. Was this writer merely bent on displaying her multiple talents, or was she genuinely intent on pleasing the reader? That the answer will be the former for many people is the reason this book is, in the final analysis, less than the masterpiece it might otherwise have been.

Notes of a Desolate Man remains a major landmark, but the feeling that it has been pieced together rather than written is in places unavoidable. Great books have to have something pressing to say. Chu Tien-wen does not, at least in this book, give the impression she is under that compulsion.
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