This is a massive compendium whose main service will be to supply English-speaking students writing essays on Taiwanese authors with background as to their beliefs, history and general attitudes. It consists of introductions, polemical essays, statements of intent (“Literature Must Serve Society”), diary entries, manifestos, inaugural statements by literary journals, interviews and so on. Every library of every university with students studying Taiwanese writing in translation will want to order a copy, and they would be advised to keep it in their reference sections rather than allowing it out on loan, because students will for sure be waiting in long lines to use it.
For the same reasons that The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan will be extraordinarily useful for its intended audience, it is very difficult to review. It isn’t an encyclopedia, insofar as it doesn’t contain lists of authors and their biographies: Such things these days can very easily be found online. But the difficulties involved in reviewing it are the same as those reviewing an encyclopedia would pose. A reviewer can’t be expected to read either from cover to cover and then report on an enjoyable experience, or the reverse. He must instead pick and choose.
All the three editors are women, and I pored over the extensive introduction by Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang to see if I could detect any feminist bias. Far from it, I decided. The subject receives scant coverage, as if its battles are now things of the past. Instead, there is a reasoned overview of the various clear phases in Taiwan’s history — the era of Japanese colonial rule, the era of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) one-party rule (not excluding the 228 Incident and the White Terror of the 1950s), and the era that followed the onset of democratization in 1987.
Chang’s introduction, while it can be fairly hard-going, does contain some fine passages. She comments on literary debates featured prominently in earlier eras — about reform of the Chinese written system to make it more expressive of Hoklo norms, for example. But often the written record is one-sided, she adds, because opposition to state policy in pre-1987 times was dangerous to put into print, and flourished mostly in oral form. She also observes that Taiwan’s literature has received less attention internationally than its dance, cinema and theater.
I’d wondered if this book was going to express any other form of special pleading, but on balance I don’t think it does. Chang does take the opportunity to pursue the idea of a conflict between bourgeois-capitalist and socialist ideology in Asia, something she says has been neglected by her fellow academics. I would have thought, though, that the distribution of such loyalties was largely according to nation-states, socialism being prominent in places like Vietnam and China, but barely present elsewhere outside the universities. This could be wrong, however. If it is, then Taiwan and Japan are certainly among the places where the whole range of political allegiance is most likely to be found.
I have no specialist knowledge of this book’s subject matter, so my interest inevitably focused on the Taiwanese novelists whose books I’ve reviewed in English translation. At first I thought the Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Zhang Guixing, author of the excellent My South Seas Sleeping Beauty [reviewed in Taipei Times May 13, 2007] was missing. It’s true that there’s no contribution from his pen, but his novel is in fact listed in the bibliography. Presumably he hasn’t written any polemical or background texts suitable for inclusion. I also couldn’t at first find Chu Tien-wen, author of Notes of a Desolate Man [reviewed March 9, 2003], but then I discovered her with her name Anglicized as Zhu Tianwen. Her contribution is an extract from her 2000 book Re-Reading Zhang Ailing.
There are numerous fascinating entries. There’s an article on the meaning of Ku’er (from the English “queer”) by Ji Daiwei, a contribution by Li Ang, author of the grotesque and justly famous The Butcher’s Wife (English translation 1986), and a discussion of Hakka as a literary language by Li Qiao, author of Wintry Night (1980), a trilogy about the Hakka experience over several decades, culminating in service in the Japanese forces in the Philippines prior to 1945.
Modern Taiwan may be a sea of contending elements, cultural, racial, political and social, and it sometimes seems unique in Asia in this. But this book shows that, probably because of its roller-coaster history, it’s more or less always been like this. The Awful Literary Scene of Taiwan is the title of one piece from 1924 by Zhang Wojun, author of the first collection of modernist poetry written in Chinese and published here. Lower the Flag to Half-Mast for May Fourth! proclaims another, Yu Guangzhong, in 1964, referring to the 1919 movement in China that, among other things, called for a modernization of literature. The Chinese-speaking world again needs new literary blood, Yu argues, saying that what followed May 4 was too often politically inspired in a way that misunderstood the Chinese tradition, overemphasizing social significance and neglecting aesthetic value. He contrasts the reformers in the West (he mentions Wordsworth, Hemingway and T.S. Eliot) who were also major literary artists in their own right, which the literary figures who came after May 4, he insists, were not.
All in all, this book is yet another example of Taiwan’s excellence — its diversity, its intellectual openness, and its ability to incorporate foreign influences even while it allows its own multiple traditions to express themselves as parts of the national whole. What it proves is that, while Taiwan wasn’t always exactly like this, it was in many ways more diverse, contentious, and eager to embrace international trends, even under the Japanese and the KMT, than we like to think.
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