Lesbians in Taiwan: A bed of roses

Sang points an accusing finger at Taiwan's sensationalist and "schizophrenic" Chinese-language print and TV media, on the one hand ever eager to give publicity to gay and lesbian issues, yet on the other hand unable to resist falling back on satiric stereotypes.

Qiu Miaojin's book, too, gave a lot of space to (in Sang's words) satirizing the Taiwan media's "invention of homosexuals as a mystical, biologically distinct species." Nor is Sang uncritical of the flourishing study of gender and sexuality in Taiwan's universities.

Local academics who comment on the new fictional material so profusely, she says, have become TV and media personalities in their own right, despite their tendency to tirelessly cite Western queer theory. NTU and the National Central University are given as the powerhouses of this analytical and promotional discourse. Sang points out that in China, by contrast, not only was homosexuality unmentionable in public prior to the 1980s, but also that, even now, no major female writer there has yet publicly claimed a lesbian identity.

After considering the situation in imperial China, the book looks at Republican China (1911 to 1949) and sees at least a debate on the viability of female same-sex love there. It then moves on to analyze the work of some prominent feminist authors in the contemporary PRC. The two most important of these are Lin Bai (林白), author of One Person's War (一個人的戰爭, 1994), and Chen Ran (陳染), author of Private Life (私人生活, 1996). Both of these books are perceived in China as embodying a new female sensibility, part of the approved movement toward the expression of individual views (up to a point). Sang argues, however, that the true nature of the feelings explored in both books is actually a lesbian one. Both authors, however, in interviews with Sang, refused any such identification.

Nevertheless, when Sang visited Beijing again, in 1998, she met a group of self-identified lesbians. When she asked if they planned to start a campaign, one of them significantly remarked, "We want life, not politics." In an obscure footnote, the author refers to Taiwan as "my native place" and China as "my ancestral land."

It's strange, therefore, that the book lacks interview material with Taiwanese writers. Nevertheless, the research into published material on Taiwan appears extremely thorough. What this book shows is what many people have long known, that Taiwan is the most progressive place for a gay and lesbian identity in all East Asia, with the possible exception of Japan.