Features

Taiwan novelist evokes Formosa’s exotic past

Wang Chia-hsiang holds a model of whale he made. (Staff photo/June Tsai)

• Publication Date：08/26/2012
• Source： Taiwan Today
• By  June Tsai

In 1624, a curious 17-year-old Sirayan made a forbidden foray outside his tribe’s territory, paddling his canoe into the inland sea of Tayoan—after which Taiwan is believed to be named—where he watched in wonder as nine big ships bearing Dutch flags sailed in from the Taiwan Strait.

This scene opens Wang Chia-hsiang’s historical novel “Daofeng Inland Sea.” Just a few years after these vessels appeared, the Dutch East India Company built Fort Zeelandia on the bay, making what is today Tainan a trading hub throughout the period of Dutch dominance in Southeast Asia.

Told from the perspective of the Sirayan hero, the novel depicts how Dutch merchants, Han Chinese settlers, pirates and refugees interacted with Formosan aborigines, claiming their land and forever changing their ways of life. The island’s landscape and ecology were also changed in many catastrophes to come—as foreseen in the ominous dream of a Sirayan shaman.

Published in 1997, Wang’s book attracted a group of dedicated readers, including filmmaker Wei De-sheng. Long before he made the box-office hits “Cape No. 7” and “Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale” in 2008 and 2011, Wei talked with Wang about adapting the novel for a silver-screen trilogy on the history of Taiwan, the screenplay of which has recently been completed.

“Imagine the wild and dynamic Taiwan of the 17th century,” Wang said at his home in Taitung County July 29.

“Picture burly aboriginal hunters chasing Formosa sika deer and other animals through murky forests and across open plains; see in your mind’s eye the separate influxes of Dutch traders, soldiers and missionaries, Chinese pioneers and even black slaves.”

Following the arrival of these outsiders, rice and sugar cane fields gradually replaced the wild land, completely dominating the landscape until industrialization took over a few decades ago. As the book shows, large-scale agriculture came at the price of clear-cut forests and disappearing deer populations.

In the novel, Wang draws on the history and society of the Siraya, the most powerful of the plains aborigines inhabiting southwest Taiwan, dotting his narrative with examples of the group’s language retrieved from the Sinkang Manuscripts, a set of documents written in Siraya using a Romanization system introduced by the Dutch.

He has also received critical acclaim for his five other novels based on the mythologies of indigenous groups or on Taiwanese folklore.

For Wang, writing historical novels is a way for him to come to grips with himself “as a descendent of those farmers, pirates and indigenous peoples once active on Taiwan’s inland sea.”

Before turning his pen to history, Wang helped pioneer nature writing in Taiwan. He said it was his nostalgic love for nature that led him to write in the first place.

The low-budget hostel operated by Wang and his wife offers backpackers serene surroundings and a view of Dulan Mountain. (Courtesy of Wang Chia-hsiang)

Born in Kaohsiung County’s Gangshan Township in 1966, Wang remembers as a boy splashing in a river teeming with fish and freshwater shrimp. But as his childhood ended, he found that rapidly developing industries had polluted the river beyond recognition.

In 1985, he entered Taichung’s National Chung Hsing University to study forestry, a discipline he trusted would keep him close to nature. With like-minded classmates he tramped through streams and across mountains, took up birdwatching and became involved in the country’s emerging environmentalist movement.

He became so engaged in activism, in fact, that he did not finish his studies, but his publications on the environment and his wilderness adventures began to win him recognition.

Eventually, however, nature writing was not enough. “I kept on writing, but it seemed my work was nurtured by the destruction of nature, and I hated to see that all that was left from the devastation was a few pieces of paper,” he wrote in 1993 when he submitted his first novel for publication.

“At the seaside, in wetlands and in forests, I’ve often felt the presence of history before me,” he said. “I see the remote past in the places I’ve been,” he added, citing as an example the many place names in western Taiwan derived from aboriginal designations.

Chien I-ming, an assistant professor of literature at National Cheng Kung University, remarked that Wang’s use of historical accounts sets him apart from other nature writers in Taiwan. Geography and history meet in his novels, where humans coexist with ghosts, gods and animals, Chien added.

In the 1990s, Wang served as chief editor of the literary supplement to southern Taiwan’s major newspaper Taiwan Times, as well as leading two green organizations in Kaohsiung. In 2005, he and his wife moved to the village of Dulan in Taitung’s Donghe Township, home to aboriginals and nonaboriginals in approximately equal numbers and an archeological site dating back 3,000 years.

“In this part of the island I found the sort of environment I have always desired, where nature still shows her grace,” Wang said.

Dulan, flanked by the Pacific Ocean to the east and Dulan Mountain to the west, was traditionally inhabited by the indigenous Amis. At the time of Wang’s move it was just beginning to attract artists and musicians from Taiwan and abroad.

Film director Wei De-sheng (left) is working on a cinematic version of Wang’s novel “Daofeng Inland Sea.”(Courtesy of Wang Chia-hsiang)

“People with no money have come here, as have people with dreams and crazy ideas,” he said. “Local Amis grandmas are quite used to such people, whom they fondly called ‘the dirty artists.’”

Wang took to chatting with local people about the past and their personal histories, as well as looking for historical documents that could help him forge a good story. He is a keen observer of the different types of people who have come together in Dulan—the easy-going Amis with their tidy houses dotted with flowers, money-making Han Chinese and their slightly chaotic environs, hermit-like loners, sedentary hippies and urban professionals seeking a few moments of respite from their hectic lives.

Many latecomers are attracted by the possibility of living a life free of pollution and materialism, he noted.

“The east coast is the graceful back of a whale, and through its back a whale breathes,” Wang said, referring to ancient maps of Taiwan that show the island from a west-to-east view, rather than a north-south orientation, so that it resembles a whale.

To keep this last part of the island unspoiled is to keep Taiwan intact, he said. Controversies over several tourism projects along the coast in recent years remind him of the underlying politics and profits that he knows so well from past involvement in environmental issues.

While many stories seem to be waiting for Wang’s pen, in the past decade he has written less systematically than before.

“The country’s cultural sector is so weak that no writer can afford to live solely by writing. I have to do many things on the side.”

At present, Wang and his wife operate a hostel for backpackers, devoting a large part of their income to the care of more than 40 stray dogs.

“Writing is not life’s imperative,” Wang said.

He is content with his simple life, but he is also curious about how film director Wei will overcome the technical difficulties of representing the jungle-like Taiwan of 400 years ago to put his Siraya novel on the silver screen. (THN)

Write to June Tsai at ttjt2012@gmail.com