While Taiwan is world-famous for its high-tech exports, its literary accomplishments have been comparatively few. An exception is Cheng Ching-wen, one of the island's best contemporary writers and the first Taiwan-born writer to receive an international award.
The panel of judges for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize described Cheng Ching-wen as "a masterful Taiwanese storyteller whose writing is both particular in its sense of place and universal in its themes," when in 1999 they awarded him the prize for Three-Legged Horse , a collection of twelve short stories. Since the prize was inaugurated in 1996 as an alternative to those offered to European and American authors, its judges have shown a preference for writings that feature a local setting and tone. Cheng was singled out from 115 other candidates for providing readers with a vivid portrait of Taiwan's past and present, and bringing the country alive in the minds of English-speaking readers.
Such praise has won Cheng an international audience, but he is less well known in local literary circles, because rela tively few reviewers have assessed his work. The author, a bank employee for most of his life, began writing while still at university. One of his stories was published in the literary pages of a major newspaper in 1958. Since then, he has gone on to write more than two hundred short stories, two novellas, several tales for children, and a number of essays.
Local issues and events figure prominently in all of Cheng's works. He has watched from the sidelines as a number of literary trends went in and out of vogue, remaining faithful to his distinctively Taiwanese characters and settings.
His unassuming style corresponds with his simple view of life. In the preface to one of his books, he talks about a scene he witnessed at a bus stop. "[I realized that] people can be divided into two groups: those who cut into the line and rush for a seat, and those who wait their turn. I've never witnessed such a sharp contrast." The incident also provided Cheng with a useful tool. "Whenever I feel angry about something, I picture those who stood firmly on their principles. It gives me a wider perspective and makes me feel better." Cheng is greatly influenced by casual observations, and many of his experiences--particularly those during childhood--have found their way into his stories.
Born to a farming family in northern Taiwan's Taoyuan County in 1932, Cheng Ching-wen grew up during the waning years of Japanese colonial rule. When he was a year old, he was adopted by an uncle who ran a wooden furniture store in the northern town of Hsinchuang and had no sons of his own. During his schooldays, Cheng used to return to his rural birthplace to work on the farm during winter and summer vacations. "I have two sets of childhood memories and two hometowns," he says. "In them, I've found a font of ideas for my stories."
The author has revisited Hsinchuang many times in his writings, often referring to it simply as "the old town." South of the town's main street was a "great river," in reality the Tamsui River that runs to the Taiwan Strait at the northern tip of the island from the Taipei basin. This figured prominently in the author's life prior to his leaving the town for junior high school. "The great river doesn't only contain water, but also history and time itself," he notes. "When your eyes are level with the surface, it becomes more expansive. From this perspective, each ripple represents eternity."
In The River Suite, one of Cheng's more famous short stories written in 1964, a river serves as both metaphor and backdrop for an episode of unrequited love and infatuation. The old town's most experienced boatman obsessively watches the main entrance of a house from where a girl regularly emerges to wash her clothes by the riverbank. He watches her in silence for five long years, without ever speaking to her. Then one day he sees that another woman has taken her place, and he has to accept that he will never see the object of his affections again. Novelist Li Chiao, who is also a friend of Cheng Ching-wen, regards the long, silent wait as a symbol for the rite of passage of an artist in the making. "The boatman is the writer himself," Li suggests. "The mysterious closed door and the girl represent something that Cheng wants to write about, but this subject matter is vague and elusive."
What is remarkable about Cheng's accomplishments in the literary field is that he did not learn how to write Chinese until he was thirteen years old. During the chaotic years shortly after the Japanese were defeated in World War II and withdrew from the island, he picked up some Chinese in junior high school, but the dominant languages at the time were Taiwanese and Japanese. His more serious studying of Chinese took place in senior high school, when he bought an expen sive dictionary and began winning praise from his teachers for his compositions. This served to encourage his interest in writing.
After graduating from high school in 1951, Cheng Ching-wen found a job at a bank and continued his studies. Three years later, he passed the college entrance exam and became a student of business administration at National Taiwan University. As a student, he read literary works in Japanese and English. Russian novelists such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were among his favorites, but in the Taiwan of the 1950s such novels were hard to come by. When he found an English version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, he brought it home and began reading each word with the help of several dictionaries. It took him a year to finish the classic. He was also forced to pick up a little French, as the novel contained several untranslated passages in that language.
Once he had earned his bachelor's degree, Cheng returned to his desk at the bank. "In my forty-odd years there, I never requested a reassignment or promotion," the writer says. "For close to thirty years, I did the same undemanding work. This allowed me the luxury of leaving everything behind me at the end of the day, so I could devote all my spare time to reading and writing." Cheng worked at the bank until he retired in 1998, winning several major literary awards for an avocation that was in truth his real vocation.
Those who have known him for many years complete this picture of the unassuming banker by day, writer by night. Chi Pang-yuan, formerly a professor of foreign literature at National Taiwan University, edited Cheng's volume of short stories, Three-Legged Horse. "Cheng was a quiet and steady person to begin with," she writes in the foreword. "Through his rela tively smooth and even routine life, he developed into a detached observer." By imbuing human emotions and struggles with a specific sense of time, place, and circumstance, Cheng has been able to cover in considerable detail the story of Taiwan's rapidly changing society in a style of the "purest nativism."
The title story of Three-Legged Horse typifies this nativism. Set shortly after the Japanese occupation, the story revolves around a man who spent the last half of his life carving lame horses to atone for working with the colonial police force, a job that the Taiwanese stigmatized as "three-legged." But as the story unfolds, the reader learns that the man had a motive for turning against his fellow villagers: during his childhood they had roundly ridiculed him for having a white birthmark on his nose. "This story is a perfect fusion of history, character, and powerful symbolism," says Chien Yi-meng, a doctoral candidate in Chinese literature at National Tsinghua University. "Within the scope of a short story, it can't be bettered."
Cheng's characters are often ordinary small-town people who find themselves in some kind of conflict--between man and woman, parent and child, city and village, traditional and modern lifestyle, agrarian and urban culture. He creates heroes, or antiheroes, amid images of an old town without an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, even though he has witnessed his hometown transform itself into a crowded Taipei City suburb. "Society can't avoid development," Cheng says. "I feel some thing lost from time to time, but that feeling doesn't disturb me very much." He does not exaggerate the "victimhood" of his characters, who typically gain insight by the story's end. "For Cheng Ching-wen, there's no such thing as the good old days," says Chien Yi-meng. "He doesn't hesitate to reveal the problems of the past or defects in older characters."
The Last of the Gentlemen is a classic example of Cheng's unsentimental view of the past. In the story, an elderly man who takes pride in leading a graceful and dignified life attends the funeral of an old friend dressed in a faded, outdated white suit:
The suit was a little big. It had been custom-made for him. Maybe ironing had stretched it out a bit. No, he had shrunk. He had heard that, as a person gets older, he tends to shrink, just as clothing does. But now, it was the person, not the clothes, that had shrunk. Furthermore, the older you got, the faster you shrank, as if sooner or later, you could disappear entirely.
(translated by Chen I-djen)
As the old man contemplates the death of his friend, he wishes that he had died earlier so that the funeral could have been held at the public hall, a venue that befitted his stature. As it was, the old town's public hall had been turned into a theater. At last, when the protagonist is himself near death, he experiences an epiphany and a sense of serenity replaces the scorn.
He lay back on his bed again and closed his eyes. After the trip to the bathroom, he felt much better. Again, he saw himself in his white suit, stretched out on his bed. Sunshine poured through the window. How very peaceful.
(translated by Chen I-djen)
Cheng emphasizes details in his stories. "Presenting particular aspects of a fact is always one of my major concerns," he says. "Sometimes there's just no other way to tell a good story. When details are convincing, even fictional characters and plots can appear real." For example, the flora description in Spring Rain.
Some delicious trees had already begun to bud. The leaves and heads of last year's broom grass were slowly withering and dying; the new leaves were taking over, adding strokes of bright green to the red-violet awns. Yes, those were new awns, weren't they? But broom grass was a late summer and fall plant; why was it joining in this spring rally of new growth?
(translated by Karen Steffen Chung)
"How do you know that broom grass grows new awns [bristles] in spring?" Cheng asks. "You just have to go see for yourself."
Sometimes the meticulous description results from the author's childhood experiences on the farm. In the story Betel Nut Town, for example, his description of burying rice stalks was drawn from life. Because there is little time to clear the harvested rice stalks between the first and second crops, farmers stomp on the stalks to make them sink into the mud.
Here and there throughout the freshly turned mud, there were clumps of rice stalks sticking up. Some were sticking straight up, others were at various angles, and still others were upside down in the water. Since the rice had been cut rather recently, the rice stalks were still quite sharp. Sometimes the mud was so sticky she had trouble lifting her feet. Other times, it was so slippery, it felt as if leeches were wriggling around. Each time she took a step, the mud squeezed up between her toes and spread them apart.
(translated by James R. Landers)
Perhaps the most striking feature of Cheng's works is the poignant--sometimes exotic--simplicity of the language. "I think he's the only writer in Taiwan who's managed to break free from the traditional Chinese writing style," says Kuo Su-miao, a high-school teacher of Chinese literature who gets her students to read Cheng's stories. "The first time I read one of his stories I thought it must be translated from Japanese, because of the plain words and short paragraphs."
Cheng, an admirer of the simple writing style favored by Chekhov and Hemingway, avoids classical four-character Chinese idioms and employs relatively few adjectives and adverbs. He often writes dialogue without introducing the speak er's tone or expression. The Garden and the Game is comprised of nothing but everyday conversations between a man and woman. "It's kind of a compulsive thing," he says. "For me, language is not a mere conveyor of ideas. Language itself speaks. Without elaborate expressions or clichés, you can still describe something very well."
The author has no plans to give up writing stories, and is even trying his hand at a play. He warns readers against expecting any sudden alterations in his style or in his choice of characters and settings. Writing, he says, does not change anything, but it has given him an opportunity to know himself. "That's the magic of language."
No matter what supernatural powers Cheng's writings possess, there is no way for non-Chinese readers to appreciate them other than through competent translations, and his works have already appeared in North America, England, Japan, and Yugoslavia. The author finds that satisfying. He says he is glad his stories have afforded overseas readers a chance to know something about Taiwan--something, that is, apart from machinery and microchips.