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Forging ahead with Taiwanese literature

By Ian Bartholomew
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Jun 07, 2003, Page 16

There are plenty of books written about Taiwan written by Taiwanese authors. But books in Taiwanese? These are few and far between, but according to Lu Guangcheng (盧廣誠), at the Department of Taiwan Literature at Alethia University (真理大學) in Taipei, there is a pressing need for something to be done about this.

The release, tentatively scheduled for the end of the year, of the second volume of the University Taiwanese Reader (大學台語文選), is a small step toward the foundation of Taiwanese literature.

It only requires a quick look around any bookshop to see that there is no shortage of Taiwanese language teaching materials. That might not seem surprising, given that this is Taiwan. But you are unlikely to find any literature in the Min-nan dialect (otherwise called Taiwanese), as it is a tiny niche market that is only now gaining some exposure due to the emphasis on mother-tongue education.

All this might be rather confusing for people who have been told that one of the glories of Chinese civilization is a script that joins together Chinese all over the world, regardless of what dialect they speak. But for Lu and other like-minded people, while Chinese can be used for writing Taiwanese, the languages, not the dialects, are as different as English and French.

But why write Taiwanese at all? Most people are content to see it as spicy vernacular, the language of taxi drivers, street vendors and gangsters. The language of literature, it seems, is Chinese.

But this assumption is what sticks in the craw of Lu and his fellow editors of the University Taiwanese Reader.

"Without a written tradition, a language can easily die out and once dead, can never be revived," Lu said. In this context, he referred to the Hebrew revival (which got started in the 1890s), in which a language that had been neglected for centuries and the understanding of which was confined to a religious elite, was brought back into wide use through the dedication of a number of individuals such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

It is a powerful analogy, and while the Taiwanese and Hebrew examples differ in some crucial respects, they share elements of an ideology in which national destiny, racial identity and political sovereignty play important roles.

The primary difference has to do with literature and explains why the publication of the University Taiwanese Reader and books like it are of such importance to those seeking a Taiwanese revival. The problem for Lu is that Taiwanese -- while it has a long history as a spoken vernacular -- only has a marginal history in the written form, and that is largely confined to various kinds of narrative poetry and popular songs.

"Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese share a common written lexicon of about 60 percent," Lu said. "But it is in the other 40 percent that the unique character of Taiwanese is expressed."

Finding characters to express this 40 percent is an important part of his work, but at the moment, due to lack of consensus, publication in Taiwanese is forced to rely on an unregulated mixture of Chinese ideograms and romanization. Lu brushes off criticism that they are creating an unreadable literature.

"People get cross when they cannot read it," Lu said. "But there is nothing strange about that because this is simply another language. It is like an English speaker expecting to understand French because it is written with the same alphabet."

Much of the journal Tai-bun Thong-sin (台文通訊), one of the largest Taiwanese language journals, is unreadable for a native Mandarin speaker, and even for a Taiwanese speaker. Some instruction in the various systems of Taiwanese transcription would be needed to understand it. In a single edition of the journal, some writers rely heavily on Chinese characters, while others have opted for a wholly romanized transcription system.

This illustrates how relatively unformed the state of Taiwanese literature presently is. A further indication is the fact that virtually all Taiwanese readers come with audio CDs to give students easier access to the text. For better or for worse, Taiwanese literature is still some way from escaping the shackles of a spoken vernacular.

Part of the reason for this has been political, as both the Japanese and the KMT governments suppressed the use of Taiwanese. This has given the movement for Taiwanese a strongly political flavor that goes beyond simply finding a way of transcribing Taiwanese speech.

While not wanting to make too much of the political issues, Lu said that in the case of the University Taiwanese Reader editors, there is definitely an issue of differentiation from Chinese. "We reserve the right to correct the texts. To make them more correctly Taiwanese," he said. "Sometimes authors become over influenced by Mandarin, so that you are simply reading Mandarin using Taiwanese sounds. This is clearly something to be avoided."

The community that seeks to create Taiwanese literature might be widely divided on exactly how to do so, but it is gradually building recognition for the Taiwanese language.

The publication of the University Taiwanese Reader by Yuanliou (遠流) is a milestone in itself, an indication that Taiwanese literature (albeit in textbook form) has broken into the mainstream. This is quite an achievement considering the Department of Taiwan Literature at Alethia University, to which Lu belongs, was only created in 1997.

Lu avoids any predictions about what Taiwanese literature will ultimately look like, but sees the current trends in the publication and teaching of Taiwanese literature as an unprecedented opportunity. "The best way of expressing Taiwanese will emerge through use," he said.

Taiwanese literature is also available on the Internet. In addition to Tai-bun Thong-sin, mentioned above (taiwantbts.org), there is Bong (www.bongpo.com.tw) and Lien Chiao Hui (蓮蕉花) at home.kimo.com.tw/lichukeng/lianchiauhoe.htm.
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