Literature in Taiwan, once dominated by influences from outside the island, is being reinvigorated through the voices of local authors, whose works are highlighting the uniqueness of Taiwan's own literary traditions and providing scholars with a new field of study.
Until modern times, Taiwanese literature lived in the shadow of the traditions of China. In the past few years, however, Taiwan has been finding its own voice. Universities are now offering courses in the study of Taiwanese literature, and a museum is being established to highlight the contributions of important local writers. For some, however, recent progress has only emphasized the lack of attention paid to the country's literary achievements. "It's really absurd that Taiwanese literature should have to fight for legitimacy right here in its own homeland," says Tseng Kuei-hi, president of Taiwan PEN, an organization established in 1987 by writers who strongly identify themselves with the island. "All we want to do is to bring our literary traditions back to their natural state and away from the overbearing presence of China's traditions."
Modern technology is aiding this process. Books, newspapers, and magazines are now available in print and on the Internet. For instance, Inventec Group's Tomorrow Studio allows its clients to browse or download novels or poems onto their cell phones and personal digital assistants. Among the titles on its database are works by Taiwanese authors from generations old and new, and those with native and mainland origins.
The multimedia circulation of literature only adds to the great vigor and diversity that have characterized Taiwan's literary scene. Among other things, several novels have been turned into films, and novelists have written film scripts or hosted radio programs, observes Chen Fang-ming, professor of Taiwanese literature and history at National Chengchi University in Taipei. "Taiwan exists in a continuously changing reality," says the former spokesperson of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. "Likewise, the country's literature continues to expand, representing the active imaginations of the island's writers. It's hard to give it a precise definition."
As a historian and literary critic, Chen did not always embrace such unswerving confidence in Taiwan's past and present. Initially in his studies, he had carved an idealistic image of China while focusing on the Sung Dynasty. "I simply took an abrupt leap from 12th-century China to 20th-century Taiwan," he recalls. It was only when he was over the age of 30 that he began to systematically read about Taiwan's literature and history. "My awakening came too late, and I want to spend the rest of my life making up for the time lost." Chen sacrificed a promising political career for his convictions. He is currently working to set up a graduate school of Taiwanese literature at Chengchi University that is scheduled to begin recruiting students next year.
The belated realization of the importance of this area of study can be expanded to the broader scale of Taiwan's literary consciousness and education in general. The country's literature was not formally considered a proper academic field until 1997 when Aletheia University in Taipei County established a Department of Taiwanese Literature. And the university is not alone. "We're seeking to form a system independent of the discipline of Chinese literature," says Shih Yi-lin, a professor of classical Taiwanese poetry at National Cheng Kung University in southern Taiwan's Tainan City. "Despite occasional objections from old-fashioned teachers, Taiwan's literary history is increasingly highlighted as a worthy and significant specialty on its own." Cheng Kung has built the first and hitherto the only complete system of formal training in Taiwan's literature that includes undergraduate and graduate programs.
The rebirth of interest in native literature and history dates back to the 1970s. In 1974, the reprint of Newsboy, which Yang Kuei (1905-1985) had published locally in a newspaper in Japanese four decades earlier and won him a Japanese literary prize, generated interest among Taiwan's writers and intellectuals in the period of Japanese colonialism (1895-1945). It was during this time that a burgeoning awareness of local literary traditions was accompanied by a call for the return to native roots and socially responsive literature. Then, roughly corresponding with the abolition of martial law in 1987, the discussion of Taiwan's unique literary experiences began to notably increase in quantity and quality among Chinese literature scholars.
The emerging topic, however, has only complicated the teaching of Chinese literature, says Chen Fang-ming, who now teaches at Chengchi's Department of Chinese Literature. "Like those in other universities, this department is a jumble of everything related to China's culture, such as philosophy, archaeology, and Confucianism," he explains. "But literary study has a disciplinary rigor that sets it apart from other branches of knowledge." Furthermore, scholars of Chinese literature tend to focus on textual criticism and hermeneutics of earlier classics. "They pay little attention to the suggestion that modern cultural theories such as postcolonialism, Marxism, and feminism can lend themselves to literary studies," notes Shih Yi-lin.
While academics discuss new ways of examining Chinese literature, researchers of Taiwan's literature have started to walk their own path. "We have our own priorities," says Chen Fang-ming. "For one thing, the research of aboriginal literature has amounted to almost nothing." For centuries, before Han Chinese settled on the island in significant numbers, about 20 distinct groups of Austronesian extraction lived on Taiwan and its outlying islands. In the absence of a writing system, a large body of their myths, legends, and folklore has been passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition. Today, the government recognizes 11 indigenous groups, in total about 400,000 people, or less than 2 percent of the entire population. Some descendents of plains-dwelling tribes, who are generally thought to have completely assimilated with the Han Chinese, are also seeking to restore their ethnic identity. To help attain this goal, Chen calls for the training of aboriginal scholars who can overcome language differences to reclaim this literary legacy.
Beyond this area of study are the literary traditions imported from China generations ago. Since the early 17th century, a number of Chinese intellectuals have come to Taiwan to live or visit. Among the first distinguished figures was Shen Kuang-wen, who was forced to land on the island by a typhoon in 1662. Once here, he passed on classical Chinese literary traditions through a poets' group called the Tung Yin Society. The traditional Chinese lyric dominated Taiwan's literary field throughout Ching Dynasty rule and well into Japanese rule in the early 1920s. For Shih Yi-lin, a pioneering expert on the formative stages of Taiwanese written literature, this integral literary legacy awaits more extensive study. "We've accumulated a lot of materials," she says. "But the more abstruse aspects of classical works, in both form and content, have alienated many students." To establish a sound foundation for future study, Shih is now working on a government-sponsored project that involves collecting and editing classical Taiwanese poetry created during a span of about two and a half centuries.
Efforts are also underway to examine lesser known periods of Taiwanese literary history. The Japanese occupation period, for example, represents a major gap for researchers due to their limited Japanese-language skills, notes Chen Fang-ming. In 1924, Chang Wo-chun (1902-1955), then a student of Chinese literature at Beijing Normal University, attacked Taiwan's traditional lyricists for their petty poetizing and unrealistic subject matter and consequently triggered a new literature movement. Afterwards, the literary mainstream started turning away from classical paradigms and moving toward vernacular expressions and social responsibilities modeled on the tenets of China's 1919 May Fourth literary revolution. However, along with the consolidation of the Japanese colonial administration that culminated in the Kominka Movement, or the intense Japanization program launched in 1937 in Taiwan, Chinese cultural models gave way to Japanese or Western ones through Japanese mediation, and the Japanese language became the major medium of literary production.
Mandarin Chinese became the official language when the Kuomintang government arrived in Taiwan in 1949. Because of the language barrier and unfavorable political milieu, native Taiwanese writers were largely silenced and emigre intellectuals dominated the postwar literary scene. Many of these new arrivals were excellent writers who have achieved great artistic heights and influence during their prolonged stay on the island. Until now, however, the Chinese cultural and literary traditions they brought with them are still the prevailing force at least in the educational system, which upsets the Taiwan PEN's Tseng Kuei-hi.
Tseng has examined different senior high school textbooks and found that they commonly lack a connection with Taiwanese themes and writing styles. Texts in classical Chinese represent more than 90 percent of these readings, if the supplementary materials are taken into account. As for subject matter, Tseng points out that less than 5 percent are about Taiwan and its people. "Most of the works our children read in classrooms have nothing to do with our daily experiences or with our way of talking and writing," he says. "That's absolutely against the universal rule of literary education." To address this issue, the Ministry of Education is planning to modify the guidelines for senior-high textbooks, so no more than half of the passages are written in classical Chinese.
Tseng calls for the sensible assimilation of Chinese traditions into a national-scale literary picture that can fully represent the existence of all the ethnic and cultural groups in Taiwan. Plans are underway to build the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, housed in a building originally constructed by the Japanese in 1916, and slated to open in October this year in Tainan City. In the past, only smaller private museums called attention to important Taiwanese authors. Examples include those dedicated to Lai Ho (1894-1943), generally recognized as the founder of Taiwanese new literature, and Chung Li-ho (1915-1960), a leading Hakka novelist who wrote about rural surroundings and hardships. Their museums, which also serve as the local center of various literary pursuits, are located in their hometowns in Changhua City and Kaohsiung County, respectively.
Among other tasks, the first national museum aims to collect and edit literary documents and hold relevant exhibitions and activities for the general public. To help promote the study of Taiwan's literature, a digital collection project is underway. "Taiwanese authors and their works have been studied in China and Japan, but the results are not quite satisfactory due to the indirect access to primary sources and the limited scope of devotion," says Yang Shiuan-chyn, director of the museum's planning office. He suggests that Taiwanese scholars take it upon themselves to become a commanding force in the international study of Taiwanese literature. To help attain this goal, the literature museum will integrate resources from Academia Sinica, universities, and local specialists of Taiwan's culture and history.
In works such as Tung Wei-ge's Study of a God's Life , readers are seeing the potential of Taiwanese literature. Last year, this novelette won for the 26-year-old author first prize in an annual fiction contest sponsored by the United Daily News, a Chinese-language daily. Since the mid 1970s, many talented writers have risen to literary prominence by receiving this prize and its counterpart awarded by another media giant, the China Times. "I've neither friends nor companions, neither ancestors nor offspring, but I'm not alone," muses the grandfather of Tung's hero, an aloof godlike elder who knows practically everything about his native land but is largely unheeded and feared by his fellow townspeople. "I'm the sun, and once a sun burns itself out, it can be sure that the light is nowhere to be found." By the same token, the young sun of Taiwan's unique experiences embodied in its literature, once left unheeded, is about to shine on a land that has known no light but that from a distant shore. And that young sun is far from burning itself out.
Lee Kuei-shien
Publish Date: 06/01/2003
Story Type: ARTS; LITERATURE
Byline: LEE KUEI-SHIEN
Born in 1937 in Taipei, Lee Kuei-shien graduated from a junior college where he majored in chemical engineering. After graduation, he worked as an engineer and developed his literary career at the same time. His poetry has been appearing in print since 1953, and in 1987, he became a founding member of Taiwan PEN and later served as its fifth president. In addition to poetry, he has written reviews, literary criticism, and books for children, and translated the works of other authors.
Among the numerous honors he has received at home and abroad, the more recent ones include the Lai Ho Literature Award, a prize named after the founder of Taiwan's new literature, and the Executive Yuan's Premier Culture Award in 2001. He was selected best poet of the year in 1997 by a poetry magazine in India and Poet of the Millennium by the International Poets Academy in 2000. The following year, the India-based academy nominated Lee as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
"Resident Birds," one of his more famous works, was written before the abolition of martial law, when some writers involved in political opposition movements were imprisoned. The other two poems printed below also appeared in Heaven 2002, an annual poetry collection published by the Michael Madhusudan Academy, established in Calcutta in memory of Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873), a pioneering poet who wrote in Bengalese. The following three poems were translated by Liu Kuo-tung and are reprinted here with permission of Taiwan PEN.
Dialectic of Love
This way, please
here is a city developing
it is still the ruins of love.
This way, please
here is a city prospering
it is still the shantytown of love.
This way, please
no matter if it be ruins or shantytown
heart is really
the shortest distance
between two souls.
This way, please
the sunshine in the rainy day
ought to be a habitual subject of dialectic.
Anyway
love should be the final dialectic.
(April 19, 1983)
Resident Birds
My friends are still in prison.
They didn't learn to be migratory birds
in pursuit of seasonal freedom
in search of suitable tidal land.
Instead
they want to feed back to their weak homeland.
My friends are still in prison.
To flinch their wings and become resident birds of aphasia
giving up the language
giving up the memory of sea level
giving up the habit of flying with the wind.
Instead
they want to ruminate on the weakness of their homeland.
My friends are still in prison.
(February 4, 1984)
Blood Transfusion
Fresh blood taken out of my body
is transfused into other's blood vessels
and becomes a fusion of blood.
My blood starts to flow in the body of others
the body of an unknown person
at an unknown place.
Just like fresh flowers
blooming on the mysterious hill
to open up in my mind a beauty beyond description.
At an unknown place
there is blood transfusion too
taken collectively from the bodies of the massacred.
It is useless to transfuse blood to the earth where has no chance to survive
to the place where has no sun to shine.
It is nothing but to dye on a damaged map in red color.
From Asia, all the way up to the Middle East, Africa and Latin America,
the stain of a drop of splashed blood
is just like a flake of flower petal gone with the wind.
(August 11, 1983)
Reprinted here with permission of Taiwan PEN.