A book by Taiwanese author Chang Chuan-fen (張娟芬) about the life of Taiwan’s oldest man on death row and the vestiges of the country’s authoritarian past has been selected to be translated as part of a US-based translation program.
Seattle-based translator Lya Shaffer is the one taking on Chang’s 2022 book Liumang Wang Xin-fu (流氓王信福) as part of the American Literary Translators Association’s (ALTA) 2025 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program.
“As a literary translator with roots in Taipei, Lya is committed to amplifying marginalized voices, particularly from Taiwan,” Shaffer’s page on the ALTA’s Web site said.
Photo: Screen grab from books.com.tw’s Web site
The book is about the life of Wang, 72, who was sentenced to death in 2008 for being with the murderer and an accomplice at a karaoke bar where two police officers were shot dead in 1990, despite a lack of evidence incriminating Wang in the shooting.
He appealed the ruling, but in 2011, the Supreme Court issued a final verdict upholding his death sentence.
In her book, Chang documents Wang’s life, including being labeled by police in his youth as a “liumang,” (流氓) meaning “hooligan,” under martial law imposed by the administration of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正).
He was sent to Siaoliouciou Island (小琉球) in the early 1970s to be disciplined for “wearing long hair and colorful shirts” and “often wandering outside late at night.”
The stigma from that label could have influenced his death sentence and his decision to flee to China, at a time when Taiwan’s judiciary made a conscious effort to keep the process from adjudication to execution short to maintain social order, Chang wrote.
The Control Yuan, the nation’s top government watchdog, and human rights groups have called for a retrial of Wang’s case, believing that he was framed and that the case was a miscarriage of justice.
“This story is a powerful call to arms against indifference and resignation in the face of authoritarian systems of injustice. It deserves to be shared with readers worldwide,” Shaffer’s ALTA page said of Chang’s book.
Shaffer would be mentored under the program by Taiwanese-American translator Lin King (金翎).
King in November last year won the US National Book Award for her translation of fellow winner Yang Shuangzi’s (楊?子) 2020 novel Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄).
King has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She is the translator of The Boy from Clearwater (來自清水的孩子) by Yu Pei-yun (游珮芸) and illustrator Zhou Jian-xin (周見信).
The Taiwan Academy under the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, which co-organizes the ALTA mentorship program, said Shaffer and King’s work would be unveiled at the annual ALTA Conference in early November in Tucson, Arizona.
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