Basically this is an attempt at a modernist masterpiece, something on the lines of Ezra Pound's Cantos or － the closest parallel － a Taiwanese prose version of The Waste Land. Unacknowledged extracts from classic and other texts are incorporated, in this translation helpfully in italics and with Eliot-like notes, but in the original Chinese apparently without any such assistance. Lost idylls are juxtaposed Eliot-style with modern horrors, one of which is the MRT station of Jiantan (something I've always rather admired). Prosaic guidebook information is slung in alongside poetic laments, and a series of refrains deceive the by now confused reader into believing he's finally grasped some handy means of orientation.
This, in other words, is a text that's pleading aloud to be catapulted fully-dressed into the academic literary canon. Even so, there's much for the ordinary reader to enjoy, especially if you know Taipei well. Exact addresses are detailed － 7 and 9 Ln 91, Renai Road Sec 2 , for instance, are offered the chance of literary immortality on the grounds that their owners haven't chosen to cement in the ox-eye openings in their courtyard walls or their skylights. The habit of Taipei sausage-sellers of offering customers the chance to gamble double-or-quits on their snack is lovingly pasted in. Gusts of fetid wind and St Christopher's Church needn't necessarily evoke Eliot, and you learn there were massive protests when Da-An Park was created over a previously residential area.
Even so, much of The Old Capital is so reminiscent of Western high-art classics of the early 20th century that it's hard to take seriously as a contemporary work. But to give credit where it's due, nothing else like it has ever appeared locally, certainly not in English translation. And as Taiwan has opted to mimic the West so extensively, and Taipei is now in so many ways "Asia-meets-the-US," you can hardly expect its writers to remain wholly immune to such copy-cat tactics.
It may, of course, be that Chu is unaware of her debt to the past. But given the highly allusive nature of the other four items in this volume, this remains unlikely.
Despite these reservations, the entire book is an important, and indeed a major contribution to Taiwanese literature in English, and at the same time an unusually fascinating read for any Taipei resident.
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