The Canadian-born JW Henley, who has spent nearly a decade as a freelance writer (he’s a contributor to the Taipei Times) and musician in Taiwan has proven himself to be a formidable crime novelist. The best part of reading his debut novel, Sons of the Republic, is taking pride in knowing all the little details the author uses to describe Taiwan from road names in car chase scenes to the vibe at different neighborhoods such as Taipei’s posh Xinyi District (信義) or decadent Zhongxiao Dunhua (忠孝敦化) area.
Yet, one does not need to be an old Taiwan hand or even to step foot in the country to appreciate Henley’s message about the current state of cross-strait relations. Although a work of fiction, readers, even apolitical ones, can learn a great deal about Taiwan’s side of the equation — something which is often underrepresented or misrepresented in English-language media coverage and academic discourse.
Rather than relying on good vs evil dichotomies, Henley meticulously hashes out how China and Taiwan are inextricably interconnected. This is accomplished mainly through the protagonist, a Taiwanese American named Jason Su. On the surface, Jason is the archetypal rich kid — he lives in a penthouse in the Xinyi District, jets to Thailand on weekends to party, and speaks Mandarin with a strong American accent.
But Jason’s comfortable life suddenly changes when he gets mixed up with a dead body that washes up on the shore of Kinmen (金門) and the murderers are suspected to be Chinese nationals. From then on, Jason is unwittingly drawn into a conflict which grows to involve spies and double-agents from both the Chinese and Taiwanese sides.
The messiness of the situation is summed up in a seemingly simple statement by an agent from the Chinese Ministry of State Security who says to Jason as they toast to a bottle of single malt scotch: “You must never forget who your friends are. Chinese, Taiwanese, I believe we are friends, yes? Or at the very least, we are becoming friends.”
We later find out that it’s a very facetious kind of “friendship,” and categories are not as clear-cut as “Chinese” or “Taiwanese.” Far from that, characters in Sons of the Republic are multifaceted and confused about their own allegiances.
Along the way, Jason and his counterpart Wang Li-yang, a stocky, six-foot-three private investigator and born-and-bred Taiwanese patriot, encounter a slew of characters — some comical and others more intimidating — who lead them closer and closer to the Kinmen murderers. Henley does a good job at providing readers with a colorful portrait of the wide spectrum of life which roam the streets of Taipei. From the witty street thug to the high-rolling politician who throws away wads of cash at hostess bars, each character represents a particular type of dysfunction in Taiwan’s less-than-transparent democracy. Henley is not the least bit shy to point out these discrepancies in wealth, and it’s these sorts of nit-picky details that truly bring the story to life.
The author’s heavy metal leanings is also fleshed out across the pages of Sons of the Republic. In some ways, the novel reads like a typical young boy’s fantasy with a good share of guts, gore and naked women. Warning notes are carved onto the stomachs of corpses, blood and brain tissue spatter across walls in shootouts, and limbs are snapped like twigs. Henley manages to make the slightest details seem gruesome. In one murder scene, the wrinkles below the victim’s eyes “were stretched so far in his final scream of anguish that his skin seemed to the point of tearing.”
There’s nothing wrong with a good dose of gut-wrenching violence to set the scene, but all the characters who commit and bear the brunt of it are male. Female characters, by contrast, are relegated to the status of hostesses who smother their bare breasts in customers’ faces in the discreet back rooms of glitzy lounges — although this is more the problem of the reality of high-rolling nightlife in Taipei rather than any fault of the author’s.
The plot is far from trite. Henley does not exactly lay it out in a “whodunit” style since we know who the murderers are early on. It’s more the case that it’s hard to know which characters to trust since the line between confidant and traitor blurs with each subsequent encounter. Someone who may seem like a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) sympathizer might actually turn out to be a pro-China unificationist and vice versa. As a Chinese general tells Jason and Li-yang, “Pretending to be one thing when you are another is vital to political survival, as is patience and manipulation, shadow play.” Overall, Henley makes sure that it’s unclear who’s a pawn in whose game until the very end.
More than anything else, at the heart of the novel is a nagging, paranoid feeling that political perils are lurking beneath the surface — and they are waiting to be set off any time by the slightest, most insignificant trigger. The result is that readers can’t help but wonder how many times both countries have come short of all-out confrontation.
The biggest lesson of all, which we come to learn along with the characters in the novel, is that often in politics, covering up is better than exposing the truth — especially if it means maintaining the status quo between Taiwan and China.
Sons of the Republic
By JW Henley
247 pages
Library Tales Publishing
Paperback: US
Until this summer, when the idea of hiking the length of the island first occurred to me, I didn’t even know that Cijin (旗津) had been a peninsula until 1967. That’s when diggers and dredgers severed Cijin from Taiwan’s “mainland,” because the authorities wished to create a southern entrance to Kaohsiung’s fast expanding port. The island is just under 9km long, but a bit of research quickly convinced me that a south-to-north trek wasn’t a good idea. The southern third of Cijin is dominated by container-lifting cranes, warehouses and other facilities off-limits to the public. Dunhe Street (敦和街) forms the boundary between
As if the climbs and views and snacks and companions of cycling in Taiwan aren’t sufficient, the GPS-generation of route-planners are now using apps such as Strava and Endomondo to create works of art as they ride. One such is nicknamed the Dove Road of Sijhih (汐鴿路), a 25km ride that follows the riverside bike path from the Nangang-Neihu Bridge (南湖橋) to New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止), climbs around 400m up the Sijhih-Shiding Road (汐碇路), before dropping back down past Academia Sinica to generate a very dove-like pattern. Originally called Kippanas by indigenous Ketagalan people and transliterated into Hoklo (more commonly
Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a way urban households can obtain healthy produce, while helping to build a more sustainable farming sector in Taiwan. King Hsin-i’s (金欣儀) transformation from advertising copywriter to social entrepreneur began in 2008, when she visited a rice farmer who practiced pesticide-free agriculture. “He explained that we have to leave space for other species. At the same time, I realized that while big companies have budgets to spread their messages, farmers have few chances to tell the public about their beautiful concepts,” she recalls. Inspired, she quit her job and traveled throughout rural Taiwan for a year. King went
If ever there was a reason to be inside on Mid-Autumn Festival, even for just an hour or so, while still celebrating the natural world, Cheng Tsung-lung (鄭宗龍) has provided one with his first full-length work for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) as artistic director, Sounding Light (定光). Judging by the excerpt performed for the press last week, Cheng shows he can be just as minimalistic as his mentor, troupe founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), while still forging his own unique path. Just as he did with last year’s Lunar Halo (毛月亮), his final work as director of Cloud Gate 2 (雲門2), Cheng
RSS