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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