Taiwan Tales is a collection of eight short stories set in Taiwan. There isn’t a weak link anywhere in it. It’s a far more professional and compelling assemblage than anyone might reasonably expect, and as such is most definitely recommended reading.
Edward Cheung’s We’ll See Each Other on Facebook is an assured, finely written story about a young Californian who comes to Taipei and quickly becomes an English teacher. He lives in a third story apartment overlooking Shida Night Market, and meets a local girl for what turns out to be a rather short relationship. The tale could have been sad, but Cheung instead remains alert and focused on the Taipei setting, which is presented in detail. My only complaint is that the plot doesn’t quite equal the intensity of the superbly-observed locations.
In the Mood by Hugo Chung presents a gay love-affair experienced by the narrator while serving compulsory service in the Taiwanese military. This time the plot is stronger than its background, while the tone of the narrative is intense and quasi-poetic. The subsidiary characters are strongly evoked — a sergeant who protects the couple, and the rat-pack of other conscripts who circle the two without really understanding what’s going on. Not a lot happens sex-wise, but this is a potent contribution that lends a whole new dimension to the collection as a whole.
The same could be said of Dragon’s Call, which offers us a US-trained “seer” adept at contacting beings most of us aren’t aware of. It’s a family business back home in New England, but by teaching English in Taipei the narrator is hoping for a break from her true profession. She’s not too surprised, though, when she encounters a series of dragons living along the MRT, and it isn’t long before she’s offered the role of “public seer” overlooking the denizens of the line west of Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Minquan W Road Station. This story is a strong example of what the book considers “speculative fiction.”
Very different is Amanda Miao’s Superstition, a semi-skeptical tale set in Taipei during Ghost Month. A school girl has little belief in ghosts as she switches on her iPod, but her mother urges her to take all the traditional precautions. The girl experiences all sorts of misfortunes and eventually accompanies her mother to the temple in an attempt to rid herself of perceived malevolent influences. The author is an academic in the US specializing in linguistics, and this tale is characterized by a vivid re-creation of Taiwanese life, plus an ironic narrative tone that probably succeeds as far as it wants to in seeing Taipei customs from a Western perspective.
Bitter Pill by Katrina Brown is a dystopian tale set in the future. Living conditions in Keelung have become intolerable when an alarm signals some malfunction at a nearby nuclear power plant. Television news advises people to go home and open the emergency boxes issued to all households 10 years earlier. These boxes bear instructions for one person in every house to take the white pill contained in the box, then proceed to one of the coaches waiting to take them south. The city mayor, forging a seat number on a ticket, joins the exodus, only to discover the coaches all become fatally trapped by rock-falls at either end of the Yilan Tunnel. The final twist comes with a new TV announcement. This fine story is narrated with a grim, emotionless realism reminiscent of Orwell.
The Collector is another dystopian tale set in a future Taiwan. A time of extreme global warning called Peak Heat has destroyed the civilized life of the early 21st century. Taiwan’s government is a tyranny located in the basements of Taipei 101, and now that temperatures are cooling its aim is to recover the technologies of the past. Old people are also compulsorily interned in the hope that skills contained in their memories might possibly be retrieved. The collector of the title runs a shop selling such items as photographs and cell-phones, the know-how for which has been lost. That personal loyalty and professional duty will come into conflict might be predictable, but this is nonetheless perhaps the most haunting tale in this excellent volume.
Tony Messina’s Gap Years is a story of quasi-marital misery (alternating with times of relative elation) set in Taipei. A student from the US feels his relationship with his girlfriend is doomed to grow into a fully-fledged honey trap, with a shared bank account and his taking a second job to support a spouse and their first child. His response is to explode into sexual fantasy (there’s a warning of explicit language at the start) and to be less than unresponsive to the advances of a mature lady student. The author is currently taking a Creative Writing course back in the US.
Lastly, I hadn’t thought that a story about a baseball player regaining his confidence would appeal, but Patrick Wayland’s Roger Jergenson’s Flyout turned out to be for me the best story in the collection. A failing US player sees an advertisement from a Taiwan team and decides to give it a try. Structured as a dramatic monologue, something told in a bar to an unnamed hearer, the tale has a clever twist, and in addition evokes the Taiwanese countryside and its people with rare magic. The narrative tone — that of a baffled, not over-educated American in a strange land — is flawless. Many of these stories see Taiwan from a foreigner’s perspective, but none succeeds in bringing off the feat as well as this one.
Taiwan Tales advertises itself as offering a multi-cultural perspective, but all this really means is that the stories are written by foreigners, or Taiwanese long resident in the US. It’s nonetheless in every way an outstanding compilation. It’s available as an e-book from Amazon.com for US$2.99.
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