As human beings, we've modified and adapted virtually everything that nature has presented us with. We've draped our nakedness in clothes, cut and shaved our hair, and transformed our food over fires, long ago walked on the moon, and can now send messages in micro-seconds between China and Brazil. Virtually nothing "natural" remains. What is all this talk, then, about "unnatural" sexual behavior?
This book contains 10 short stories with gay themes written by Taiwanese authors during the 1990s. The best of them are outstanding, and all of them, as translator Fran Martin asserts, testify to a society that has changed out of all recognition over the last 15 years.
The strongest story is Stones on the Shore by Hsu Yoshen (許佑生), the gay writer who staged a high-profile wedding to his Uruguayan partner in Taipei in 1996. It's strong on account of its varied concerns, presenting a love affair between a Taiwanese and a Chinese person, and then developing this by making the mainlander a father surrogate to the Taiwanese.
What underlies this story is its treatment of the vexed question of the relationship between gay Chinese and their families, a theme that marks several of the best items in this book. It's a particular problem in East Asia because the family link is so much stronger than it is in the West, and the pressure on sons to marry is so unrelenting.
Hsu Yoshen shows a group of Chinese gay men living in New York, and therefore far from their families' reach. Yet these men appear to need family relationships almost as powerfully as their families need them, and as a result they are presented as unwittingly forming quasi-familial links among themselves.
That the "father" in the story's central relationship is from the mainland, and the "son" from Taiwan proposes a novel angle on political cross-strait relations, already present in the familiar "fatherland"/"motherland" phraseology. As the mainlander says to the Taiwanese as they emerge from their "postejaculatory trance," "Comrade, how's it feel to go to bed with a compatriot from the fatherland?"
In addition, the tale manages to portray several different kinds of foreigner/Chinese gay relationships -- all of them exploitative, albeit in different ways. It also makes use of the frequently commented-on phenomenon that an alarming number of Taiwanese can't swim. All in all, Stones on the Shore has a confidence and a scope that none of the other stories quite manages to match.
The connection between family and sex in Taiwanese gay life doesn't stop here, however. Strangely parallel to Hsu Yoshen's narrative is Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel by Chen Xue (陳雪) , a writer famous for her explicit lesbian fictions. Here the narrator, a Taichung high-school girl, has a no-holds-barred affair with an older woman while enduring a troubled relationship with her own widowed mother. Both these older women live by having commercial sex with men. There are other parallels too, until at the end the women's two identities merge. The young girl's eroticism, in other words, has been aroused by the attentions of her own parent. Sex and family can't get much closer than that.
Another story, Poem from the Glass Womb by Hong Ling (洪凌), is similarly mother-obsessed. Its gothic fantasy style enthusiastically combines heavy metal music, menstruation, Wagner's operas, the Chinese ghost month and lesbian orgasms. But mama's never far away. When your whole emotional world is that of a warm swamp from which other people, like alien life-forms, briefly emerge, how could she possibly not be?
Another story features a gay 17-year-old boy who's waiting for the result of his AIDS test. Crossing the Yongfu bridge between Taipei City and Yungho on his motorcycle, he's checked by a policeman who shoots him in the spine when he tries to ride away. It's the mid-1990s and the police are supposed to be on the lookout for the suspects in a high-profile kidnapping case. As the shot rings out, one of the suspects cheerfully rides past unmolested. Meanwhile the blood of the gay teenager spurts onto the policeman's lip just where he cut it that morning while shaving. That the boy is in fact HIV-positive isn't stated but is central to the story's neat, if contrived, trio of paradoxes.
The author is Chi Tawei (紀大偉), author of, among other things, translations into Chinese of Italo Calvino. Fran Martin considers his bitter portrayal of the persecution of sexual nonconformity in Taiwan as characteristic, and provocatively appends a footnote of her own stating that "the government-run venereal disease clinic in [Taipei's] Chang-an West Road is notorious for the rudeness and homophobia of its staff."
The book's final story is an extract from the 1998 novel Galaxies in Ecstasies by Wu Jiwen (吳繼文), one of Taiwan's best-known authors of gay-oriented fiction, and in addition translator into Chinese of Japan's Banana Yoshimoto.
The item is remarkable in that it deals with a transgender character in the context of Taiwan in the "white terror" period of the 1960s, though with the character living and working in Japan and the sex-change operation taking place in Casablanca. This is, interestingly, the city where the British author James Morris, now Jan, had the same operation in real life in the same decade, as she recounts in her book Conundrum.
Once again there is vivid Taiwanese local color, in this case featuring a Catholic junior high school for boys in Taichung. The story is rather strangely intercut with extracts from the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin's account of his 1934 journey to find the celebrated "wandering lake" of Xinjiang.
All in all, the theme of these brave and often lurid fictions appears to be that if you can't escape from your parents, the next best thing is to have sex with them, at least in your barely-repressed imagination. Nothing could be more explosive in a Confucian context than that. Taiwan, in other words, quietly continues in this remarkable volume to display itself as what it probably is, the most extraordinary place in the whole of Asia.
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