A young blogger is part of a movement that is changing popular literature in .
In October 2004, 23-year-old Hu Jia-wei began blogging about life at her office and home intending to share her everyday reflections with friends and family members. On July 26 last year, the visitor counter on her blog surpassed the 100-million milestone amid a 5-minute virtual fireworks display. Wanwan's Comic Blog--Wanwan is Hu's pen name--combines text and simple line drawings. The cute, amusing online diary entries resonated with students and young office workers. Comments from Wanwan's blog readers poured in. "I laughed so hard I gave myself a stomachache," wrote one fan. "You're my first choice when I'm low or get into some kind of trouble," wrote another. Yet another of the multitude of comments on Wanwan's blog expresses heartfelt sentiment: "You gave me a new life."
Her online success was repeated in print toward the end of 2005, when Revolution-Star Publishing and Creation Co. published a book version of Wanwan's illustrated diary. I Hate My Work But Enjoy My Life surged to the top of bestseller lists at major bookstores such as Kingstone and Eslite and at online retailer Books.com.tw. Two sequels were published over the next two years. They too became bestsellers. Kingstone selected Wanwan as author of the year in 2005. Her depiction of everyday issues that crop up in modern life offers a refreshing alternative to love stories, previously the dominant subject matter of comics and online narratives for teenagers and young adults.
Another popular online author, Ke Jing-teng, who uses the pen name Giddens, has taken his online writing and novels well beyond the romance genre with horror, crime, science fiction and martial arts titles. Now, Wanwan and Giddens--whose Chinese pen name means "nine knives"--are among a growing segment of popular literature authors that can rival foreign authors whose works have been translated into Chinese in Taiwan's market. Before these newcomers, only non-fiction Taiwanese authors could hope to top bestseller lists. In 2006, though, Giddens ranked second and Wanwan eighth among Kingstone's 20 bestselling authors. Half of the other authors on the list were foreigners. On the Books.com.tw top-10 author and bestseller lists for 2006, Giddens was ranked highest among authors and Wanwan and Giddens were the only Taiwanese authors with top-10 books. Even as she helps break the stranglehold books in translation have on 's market, Wanwan is venturing into foreign markets. Her books have been licensed for publication in simplified characters in and in translation in and .
Giddens believes that he and Wanwan are the tip of the iceberg. "We two have received more attention, that's all," he says. "As we see more good work from Taiwanese authors, maybe Taiwanese readers will start showing more respect for local titles."
Deceptively Simple
Wanwan has worked in several offices. She spent some time at an interior design company and also worked at a computer game design firm. She is now an independent author and she works closely with her manager, who is also her publisher. Wanwan majored in painting at Fu Hsin Trade and in before landing her first job at 18, right after graduation. The sketching and watercolor painting skills she learned in school proved useful once she began drawing cartoons. Her work is characterized by simple elliptical contours depicting slices of everyday life. "They're not as easy to make as some people think," Wanwan says of her cartoons. "Sometimes they're harder to present than longer stories or more elaborate drawings." Before tackling cartooning, she had been an avid fan of various styles of comics since her childhood.
The bestseller I Hate My Work But Enjoy My Life (2005) (Courtesy of Revolution-Star Publishing and Creation Co.)
Wanwan's work, though deceptively simple, effectively responds to the needs of young readers. In a survey conducted on Wanwan's blog toward the end of 2006, nearly two-thirds of the 4,066 respondents identified themselves as being between 11 and 20 years old. Another third said they were between 21 and 30. "The craze for Wanwan tells us that the way to speak to members of the younger generation has already changed immensely and that the Internet is driving this change," says Lu Yi-chia, Kingstone's marketing manager.
A new literary domain began to take shape in the 1990s on university intranet bulletin board systems (BBS), which were designed to give students easy access to academic resources and later became a forum for casual exchanges. In addition to eclectic notes and rambling diaries, better-structured fictional narratives started to attract an increasing number of online readers. Eventually, the surge of and craving for online writing became an unstoppable wave. Tsai Jih-heng was the first author to achieve success first as a BBS poster and then in print. His enormously popular campus love story The First Intimate Contact (1998) was a literary phenomenon that swept through the Chinese-speaking world at the turn of the 21st century. Tsai, who published his eighth novel Nuannuan in October last year, has had a strong influence on other writers.
Emoticon Role Model
In the meantime, online writing was breaking free from traditional constraints. Lu points out that Wanwan's emergence is an illustration of the development of Internet social language from pure text toward a combination of graphics and text. Simple emoticons represent laughter as XD, glee as (^o^) and frustration or anger as (>_<). Anyone who has used "chat" applications like Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger is familiar with the often animated versions, which are called graphical emoticons.
In December 2004, Wanwan posted graphical emoticons of her own design on her blog. Instead of using standard icons available on popular chat applications, she encouraged her readers to indicate their physical or mental state with Wanwan emoticons. This free and self-replicating mode of art dissemination--people who like an emoticon they see during a chat session can easily appropriate it and use it with other contacts--helped to accelerate the artist's celebrity. "Cartoons and words are often combined in the lives of young people, but it usually takes a long time for technology and publishing--domains controlled by adults--to meet their needs," Lu says. "Just as digital cameras enable casual sharing of pictures, the Internet needs casual comic images like Wanwan's to facilitate digital communication."
Images created by Wanwan have been licensed for mass production. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
The heroine of Wanwan's illustrated diaries is basically an emoticon. With only a single curl of hair at the back of a big round head that suggests the character is female, the childlike protagonist does not exhibit overtly male or female traits. Though some social theorists argue that this simplistic, androgynous image is emblematic of the homogenizing effects of modern society, Wanwan says that it has actually been a recurring character in her doodles since early childhood. Usually referred to as Wan, the protagonist is an ordinary office worker who used to be an ordinary student. Like most ordinary people, Wan has modest hopes, dreams and minor foibles.
Giddens points to the contrast between his novels, which stress enthusiasm and an aggressively ardent love of life, and Wanwan's work, which he says successfully depicts what Taiwanese youth call kuso subculture--a kind of unruly, over-the-top humor. Wanwan's comics display a benign sarcasm that plays on the themes of escapism and inertia that ordinary people identify with. "Her work is not meant to encourage people to be more active and adopt more positive attitudes," Giddens says. "Rather, it is meant to give people who are not so active or positive a chance to develop their sense of collective identity."
A New Publishing Model
It seems this process of identity formation has been quite a positive development in 's comics sector. Lu says that since the casually comic depictions of everyday moments by Wanwan and other blog authors have been able to quickly attract huge numbers of readers, they offer a new model for cartoon product development. For decades now, the traditional Japanese model of elaborate drawing and complicated scenes and plotlines has been dominant. Local artists have not been able to compete effectively with Japanese and Korean imports on this turf, but an increasing number of comic books that originated on blogs (blog books) are starting to take substantial market share. Wanwan is joined by other Taiwanese authors such as Otoko, who published the scatological 85 Step Public Toilet in January last year--a comedic work that is over the top even by kuso standards. Despite their unconventional path to the top of 's comics heap, Wanwan, Otoko and others could follow their Japanese and Korean predecessors and see their creations adapted for TV, film and computer games.
Lu says that marketing efforts on a blog site just before and after publishing a blog book can give it an edge when competing with books published and marketed using traditional methods. Indeed, the immediate, intense exchanges between authors and their readers over the Internet can determine the marketing strategies for online stories even before publishers select them for publication. Editors at publishing houses and at newspaper literary supplements saw their roles as the industry's gatekeepers begin to erode in the late 1990s with the online novel craze. The trend is continuing with comic books. Lu believes this shift is enriching and expanding both the scope and market potential of popular literature.
Online texts are constantly being exposed to and shared by readers during the process of creation. "Responses from readers are my major motivation as a blog author," Wanwan says. "They constitute a kind of benevolent pressure." The readers' intervention in the composition of online texts takes various forms. They might collectively show a preference for a certain theme, for example, and offer suggestions for plot development. Or they may simply urge the author to post more pieces.
Lu says reward mechanisms inherent in blogs, such as the visitor counter and comments left by readers, combine to create an interactive arena that is very distinct from highbrow literary culture. In this culture, aspiring authors study the lives, works and habits of established writers and understand that they too must withstand prolonged periods of loneliness and introspection while endlessly refining and reworking pieces in the hope that they will win critical acclaim and awards. Blog book authors, by contrast, have lots of company as they mold their writings. While they may not win awards, when their books go to print they are virtually guaranteed strong sales, something that may elude even critically acclaimed highbrow authors.
In the final analysis, continual reader participation during the production and circulation of works that originate online by Taiwanese authors like Wanwan, Giddens, Tsai and Otoko has created a new space on 's literary map that attracts sizable audiences both at home and abroad and also reveals a subtlety that many critics say had previously been lacking from popular literature. With blog books, which Lu describes as "the most affordable and sustainable cultural product," Taiwanese creativity in virtual space is challenging that of pop music, currently the most dynamic sector of 's entertainment industry. In terms of revenue, the new virtual discipline lags far behind pop music, but with time that too could change.
Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com