Taiwan Today

Toward the end of last year, a major Chinese-language book fair in Taipei displayed more than 1 million copies of 100,000 titles from Taiwan and China. Among other promotional activities, representatives from Taiwan's three major book distributors--Eslite, Kingstone and the online shop Books--were invited to select the 10 most-talked-about Taiwanese writers. One of them was Giddens, or Nine Knives in Mandarin, the penname of 29-year-old Ke Jing-teng. Having started posting his stories on the Internet about seven years ago, he has now published more than 30 books and meeting fans in Taiwan and China is one of his regular jobs.

Spawn of the Web

In the 1990s a new literary space began to emerge on university intranet bulletin board systems (BBS), which were set up to make academic resources available to students and later became an everyday communication tool. Gradually, better-structured fictional narratives were developed from the early rambling notes and diaries. In 1998, graduate student Tsai Jih-heng posted a story in 34 parts on his university's BBS. The love story spread quickly through the student community, and a paper version was published in the same year, quickly becoming a bestseller in Taiwan and China. The surge of online writing in its wake created something of a phenomenon in the Chinese-speaking world.

The now legendary The First Intimate Contact tells of a failed romance between a graduate student of hydraulic engineering--like the author himself--and his schoolmate who tragically dies of lupus soon after their first meeting. For several months before the meeting, they developed a relationship via email and chat rooms. Tsai's influence on other online writers is huge, and Giddens is no exception.

Drawing from the ordinary reality that he calls "local, common experience," Giddens' Waiting for Someone Cafe is another campus love story, undisguisedly featuring a protagonist very similar to the author. About halfway through the story, the narrator posts the text thus far on the BBS. The story goes on in such a way, blurring the distinction between the online story and the plotline and the writer and the narrator.

Like Tsai's online stories, Giddens' narrative reads smoothly with often hilarious wit and conversational style. His stories are peppered with such contemporary fads as "twisting" small toys out from egg-shaped capsules or "gripping" stuffed toys from vending machines. "His themes and descriptions have a refreshing sense of everyday reality," says Rock Wang, a high school student who confesses that Giddens' Kung Fu was the first book that he read from beginning to end in just a few days. Set in the author's hometown of Changhua in central Taiwan, Kung Fu is a contemporary martial arts story that develops around a junior high school student and an old Kung Fu master. Wang is one of many young people whom Giddens seeks to expose to the magic of literature.

Toward Entertainment

Giddens' novels are an integral part of pop culture and entertainment. He says that many of his works were written with potential adaptation to television, movies and comic strips in mind. "In my lectures," he says, "I often rely on storyboarding to talk about my novels." Wolf Hsu, product manager at Books, points out that in the light of the prosperous film and television industries which coexist with the vast readership of popular fiction in Japan and the United States, Giddens is simply doing a good job as a popular writer. "By its very nature popular literature is closely linked to other entertainment forms in the mainstream commercial market," Hsu says.

The writer has formed a business connection with Comic Ritz International Productions Co., a leading producer of television soap operas like the hugely popular Meteor Garden (2001). This company is now working on the adaptation of Giddens' works for television. One of Comic Ritz's major jobs is to promote Giddens' novels and sell their copyrights elsewhere in the foreign markets. "Once his great potential is fully developed and recognized," says Angie Chai, the company's president, "maybe even Hollywood will come to tap his wild imagination."

Chai is most impressed by Giddens' horror stories. "His stories explore the bold extremes of humanity and show no reservation in the display of blood, violence and sex." she says. "And he seems quite determined to milk black humor for all it's worth." In Refrigerator, for example, the heroine wakes up to find her left hand and right fingers cut off and put in refrigerators. The amputation is later revealed to have been done by her "other self," who manages to break free from repressed memories of being raped and tortured to become a supernatural being who can destroy anything around within five meters. The ultimate evil force in this story, however, proves to be a hypnotist who put a false memory in the heroine's brain as she slept.

The same hypnotist continues to wield his horrible power in the detective story Bizarre Dream. Together with Refrigerator, Kung Fu and four other stories, this crime novel forms a part of the City Fear series, set in a world where Giddens says "anything can happen." The author ranges across genres from love affairs to horror stories and martial arts to science fiction. His latest published book The Crime of Sleeping and Waking, from the Killer series, is a political satire in which politicians and talk show hosts are murdered one after the other.

Tsai Jih-heng's seventh novel Peacock Forest, on the other hand, revolves smartly and confidently around a psychological test question, but is, above all, a love story. This genre is used again and again by Tsai and other lesser-known online novelists such as Hiyawu and Fumijan. "For many people, online novels are almost synonymous with campus love stories," Wolf Hsu says. "Giddens shatters that lingering stereotype."

High Lowbrow

The online-novel craze that started in the late 1990s heralds a more democratic age of literature. The authority of editors in selecting works for publication in books or newspapers' literary pages has been eroded by close interaction between authors and their readers in the Internet community. This virtual space may indeed shape the styles of and even marketing strategies for online stories before they are picked up by publishers. "The production of online texts is always interrupted," Giddens says. "Their nature lies in their being seen and shared by readers during the process of writing." The readers' intervention in the texts takes the form of simply urging the author to write more, showing preference toward a certain character, offering concrete suggestions and exposing errors or contradictory action in the stories. "The high number of immediate responses from readers assures online novels' affinity with their readers' concerns and states of mind, despite the great diversity in motif and content," Hsu says. This central role of readership takes online novels, as part of popular fiction, further from the elitist territory of traditional literature than the translated foreign works and locally set romance novels of the early 1990s ever did.

For Giddens, the arbitrary distances between high and lowbrow popular literatures do not really exist. He thinks that a really fascinating story is the only standard. "A masterpiece is usually found among bestsellers," he says, "although bestsellers are not necessarily masterpieces." Indeed, the remarkable scope of Giddens' work leads online novels toward a literature of great subtlety that does not alienate common readers. Hsu points out that, in the past, this middle ground did not exist on Taiwan's literary map because most writers with initial success would then march haughtily off toward the highbrow, while new writers, including those working online, tended to linger as light entertainment. "Giddens has filled in that gap in popular literature, which was formerly dominated by translated work," Hsu says. "He's created a new, solid base for its development among local authors."

Whatever success is attributed to him, Giddens shows no signs of slowing down--he published 14 books in 14 consecutive months from 2004 to 2005--and it is certainly not going to his head. He denies that a writing career has any mystery attached: "Living an ordinary life like everybody else is the only road to being a truly great writer".

The Tenants Downstairs, published in 2004 by Gaea Books Co., is a Giddens novel in which the protagonist landlord installs hidden cameras in his five-floor house, including the six rooms he rents to eight people. The landlord is "not a silent viewer, but rather a brilliant director," and apparently motiveless wickedness ensues.

Just before this excerpt begins, the landlord has watched a young female writer cutting off a victim's body parts with a pair of scissors she just borrowed from him to "trim her pot plant," and the sight has caused him to throw up.

Knock! Knock!
The door does not open for a full minute. Ying-ru has put on that white dress, standing in the low doorway as though nothing has happened.
That was a quick move!
"Look! I just found them." I raise the tailor's scissors, smiling warmly.
"Great! The others didn't work so well for me. Thank you." Ying-ru smiles and takes my tailor's scissors.
"Don't mention it. We're bound by some destiny to live here together, so we should take care of each other. Ha!" I laugh, staying where I am.
You bitch. I'll get on your nerves until you wet yourself!
"Uh." Ying-ru nods, still smiling.
"Uh." I smile. I have to smile, showing no signs of leaving. My eyes inspect her room through the narrow opening.
"Anything else?" Ying-ru says calmly and leans slightly to block my view in a natural way.
"Oh! I just want to take back the small scissors I lent you. Ha! I may need them soon." I smile, my nose twitching deliberately, and then frown. "Strange smell. Do you have a cat or dog in your room? It smells like... something rotten."
"Uh, my dog just died--I'll deal with it later," Ying-ru smiles, not feigning sorrow for her pet.
"You'd better do it right away. Ai! I'm OK, but I'm afraid other tenants will complain." I assume an air of tolerance.
"All right. Wait a minute. I'll go get them." Ying-ru smiles too, closing the door.
I watch the door close with delight, the sour taste of my vomit still in my mouth.
Worry! Hurry up and wash my scissors!

The door opens. My stomach convulses a bit and I move a step backward behind the door.
"Thank you. I'll give the tailor's scissors back to you after I use them." Ying-ru still smiles. The back of her hand holding the scissors is white and silky, and I cannot help touch it.
Ying-ru doesn't show unhappiness. She just wants to close the door.
"Oh!" I pretend that something just come to my mind. "That pot plant! Yes! May I see it? I like it a lot and maybe I'll get one of my own."
I cheerfully look at Ying-ru, expecting her to be greatly embarrassed and talk nonsense.

This is my revenge on her for making me throw up on the bed.

Ying-ru looks at me and looks at me. The corners of her mouth are slightly taut.

I smile, but sweat pours from my palm.

"Please come in."

Ying-ru smiles. I suddenly forget to breathe.

Are you crazy?
What are you thinking?
How can you possibly sort everything out in just one minute?
If not, are you planning a crime?
Are you also planning to turn on me...?
I glimpse the big tailor's scissors in Ying-ru's hand, and hidden fears grow in me.
The smile is frozen on my face like a pale mask.

"Shit..."
Bo-yan's voice behind me, the wind from his opening door seems to smother him in anger.
I look back at him. Wearing shorts and blue and white flipflops, Bo-yan slams the door, frowning, and drags his feet toward the stairs.
"Bo-yan! Be careful with the door!" I complain, actually feeling relief.
I put my hand on Bo-yan's shoulder with forced enthusiasm, looking back at Ying-ru. "Ying-ru, I'll come by another time." Bo-yan turns his head too.
Ying-ru nods, smiles and goes into her room.

"You're upset? Is it schoolwork or a girlfriend? Ha!" I laugh dryly. Bo-yan is a piece of wood that I happen to grab before I drown.
"Nothing." Bo-yan's present attitude is very different from when he begged me to let him move in.
He drops my hand and walks quickly downstairs to go out to eat.
I slowly walk behind him, trying to recover from the nerve-racking confrontation with Ying-ru.
This time, I'm in no mood for the shame of defeat. I've narrowly escaped death and I'm grateful.
Moreover, I'm admiring.

Committing a crime is really a marvelous spiritual activity.
Committing a crime draws the line between people on higher and lower levels.
Committing a crime makes people powerful.
This is what criminals are.
The crime itself is an expertise, a romance, a seduction.
A kind of maneuver of humanity in reverse that cannot be done perfectly without overcoming one's own fears and continuously suppressing morality.
Reversion is always fascinating and I have gradually learned that from watching.

Yet, Ying-ru braves the wind and the waves, which is radically different from watching, from stealthily sailing in darkness.
Her crime fills her weak, lonely existence with sickening, appalling ghostliness, which utterly drains the criminality I feed by watching, nothing but a low-level criminal.
I cannot stand calm in front of her. I have tried twice and have suffered the same utter defeat.

Crime gives Ying-ru power, but dwarfs me.

Perhaps I should teach myself by watching Ying-ru's perverse performance of absurd criminal art again and again on the screen until my imitation and learning lead me gradually closer to the higher, spiritual state of criminality.
Then, I won't be afraid of Ying-ru. I could rival her as a high-level criminal.

But I don't want to be a copycat. I'm not interested in anything like feeding people sleeping pills and cutting off fingers at all.

Write to Pat Gao at pat@mail.gio.gov.tw