Obviously, confirmations of quantity are far from synonymous with affirmations of quality. But when so many people do the same things at the same time, aside from marketing considerations, there are significant social insights to be had.
On the basis of the two book stores' 1985 monthly lists plus publishers' statistics, we have come up with ten top selling writers for all 1985 (on the basis of their best sellers, we divide the ten into three rough categories—our listing is not in order of quantity or quality):
▪ Essays and Poetry: Yin Ti, Struggles of the Heart; Chang Hsiao-feng, Here I Am; San Mao, Collapse of the City; and Hsi Mu-jung, Traces of Growth and Resentless Youth (poetry).
▪ Novels: Chu Hsiu-chuan, Strong Woman; Hsiao Li-hung, Moon on A Thousand Rivers; Li Ang, Dark Night; and Su Wei-chen, Old Love.
▪ Special: Po Yang: The Po Yang Edition of "Tsu Chih Tung Chien" (Po Yang's interpretation of the ancient historical chronicle) and The Ugly Chinese (essays of social criticism); Lung Ying-tai, Prairie Fire Collection (essays of social criticism) and Lung Ying-tai Reviews Novels (literary criticism).
All four essay-poetry category writers belong to the middle age group. Their best-selling works share philosophical concern and demonstrated sensitivity to life's vicissitudes.
—Struggles of the Heart (Yin Ti) offers a comprehension of life "dedicated to hearts housed within uneasy souls." The book is directed mainly to maturing youths.
Though, universally, youth seeks answers to the mysteries of life, most of the (capsule) advice in Struggles of the Heart is gravely inadequate. The book simply sets forth paradoxes, or disperses into misty meditations lacking philosophical depth. Sales, in any case, have been brisk.
—Ever since her first collection of essays, The Other End of the Carpet, published in 1966, almost every succeeding work by Chang Hsiao-feng, whether prose, fiction, drama, or other forms, has arrived with notable impact in the publication market.
Poet Yu Kuang-chung characterizes Chang Hsiao-feng as wielding "both a manly and elegant" pen, and adds that her virtuosity with words is very generally regarded as placing her among the top rank of contemporary writers.
In her recent collection, Here I Am, Chang affirms certain hallmarks: an accomplished literary style, innovative approaches, and a warm optimism (a special thankfulness for the grace of God, for her nation, her parents, the sharing between husband and wife, friendship, and so forth; the book's preface pronounces—"Here are trees; here are the mountains; here is earth; here are the ages, and here am I. What kind of better world could we anticipate?").
—San Mao's concerns are altogether different. She grew up in Taiwan, then married a Spanish youth while studying in Spain. The couple came to live at the edge of the Sahara Desert. And since the mid-1970s, San Mao's stories of the Sahara have become very popular in Taiwan.
Poet Ya Hsien has called San Mao "the skirted Ulysses." And she does dazzle her readers with romantic exoticisms of a magic land...but, also, with her courage to venture forth, and then resist the modes of traditional society.
San Mao's Collapse of the City (in both Chinese and Western idioms, exceedingly beautiful women are described as credible causes for the fall of a city or state), so popular last year, is a compendium of three parts: on childhood, miscellaneous jottings, and short stories (including one with the same name as the book). With her unique individualism and spirit of resistance, San Mao poses attractive if impossible dreams for people in routine environments.
—Five years ago, Hsi Mu-jung published her first modern poetry collection, Chi Li Hsiang (Common Jasmine-Orange). And within a year, the publisher happily printed seven editions—a record for Chinese modern poetry. Her second poetry collection, Resentless Youth, and several prose collections were also very popular, especially on the nation's campuses.
Hsi reaches for the romantic hearts of youth, who, "in the loneliness of light and shadow, still contemplate hills washed in moonlight."
Poet Chang Tso, in the Last Love Poem, makes her name an icon: Still, I yearn for that kind of restrained tenderness,/like Hsi Mu-jung.
In recent years, a remarked phenomenon in Taiwan literature has been the rising number of women writers. On our best seller rolls, all four of the novelists are women. But they belong to humankind regardless of gender and, in many aspects, their works are as different as their own personal characteristics.
—A term too frequently used in contemporary Taiwan to describe feminine achievers, especially career women, is nu chiang jen (strong women). And Strong Women is also the name of Chu Hsiu-chuan's best-selling novel, winner of the 1984 Chung Shan Literature Award.
After failing in the competitive university entrance examinations, the heroine of Chu's popular novel gets a job as a typist, then gradually rises till she "owns a sky of her own," all because of her assiduous efforts. It is, obviously, a vicarious thrill for routine "nine to five" working women. And the novel, indeed, in its other elements, may be described as equally shallow.
—Moon on A Thousand Rivers, by Hsiao Li-hung, presents quite another kind of dream. The story records a singular phase of a young woman's life as well as mirroring a distant Chinese age and lifestyle.
The most moving feature of the novel is, arguably, its beautifully classic literary style—modeled, perhaps, on that of the most famous of Chinese classic novels, Dream of the Red Chamber. Its detailed descriptions of traditional Chinese folk customs and its delicately restrained handling of emotions result, in the words of writer-critic Chien Wan, "in creation of an extremely naive and beautiful world where the reader may get drunk on libations of old, pure feelings."
—Among all of the ROC's female novelists, Li Ang is probably the most controversial. Li's novels lay particular emphasis on sex, and her explicit descriptions are continuing subjects of public controversy. Her latest novel, Dark Night, was specifically berated in the Legislative Yuan (Parliament).
The novel, concerning an illicit love affair between a married woman and a married man, has been characterized here as "walking on an unpaved road on a rainy day" (the author provides no moral traffic lanes).
—Su Wei-chen the youngest feminine writer on the lists, was also the most speedily popularized.
Readers are fascinated by the "drifting words and thoughts" of her stories—lives and worlds wreathed in smoke and mists, washed in cold and gloomy light.
"Between one image and another, one scene and another—and even between the assertions and responses of her dialogues—omissions are intentionally employed in great quantity as a means of forceful condensation, to increase density and to create unease and uncertainty," noted critic Wang Ting-chun.
Uncertainty is more than exaggerated in Su's fictions: it is electrically intensified—an undercurrent that helps create a kind of doomsday-gloomy mood, beautiful but pervasively sad.
Tsu Chi Tung Chien, complied by Ssuma Kuang (1019-1086) of the Sung Dynasty, chronicles the period from the Warring States to the Five Dynasties—altogether 1,362 years of Chinese history. And over those endless years, many scholars have spent endless nights annotating the work. Contemporary writer Po Yang has re-annotated it, and it has been published (monthly) in 36 volumes.
Tsu Chi Tung Chien can also be regarded as a treatise on "Chinese empire management." The political maneuvering, negotiation techniques, and imperial "executive personnel management" are underlined in Po Yang's version as necessary both to the understanding of inherent Chinese cultural characteristics...and to facile application of modern marketing and management methods. The popularity of the Po Yang Edition of "Tsu Chi Tung Chien" was accompanied here last year by generally active sales of books on modern management.
Po Yang's other best-seller, The Ugly Chinese, as in his earlier social-criticism collections, employs a highly stimulating cynical approach and style; his pungent observations of certain Chinese collective characteristics are near-wounding.
The book's success, given its title, said Po Yang, demonstrates that this generation has the residual courage to face its bad habits.
—Louder and, perhaps, even more cutting is Lung Ying-tai's Prairie Fire Collection. Her flagrant unveiling of various dark scenes of our times generated notable social shock.
A volume in the same sharp and open spirit, Lung Ying-tai Reviews Novels, reverberated "like thunder" in staid local literary circles. Lung's reviews are targeted at readers unconcerned with academic literary approaches. As a result, her simply expressed, energetic critiques came as a shock to the devotees of what has become a notably wordy discipline.
Excepting for Yin Ti and Po Yang, the rest of the ten on 1985's best-seller list are female. Surely it was the "year of women writers."
And in addition to the eight women mentioned, Hsiao Sa, Ai Ya, Yuan Chiung-chiung, Liao Hui-ying, Chung Hsiao-yang, Chien Chen, and others frequently appear on shorter-term best seller lists. It is truly unprecedented in the literary history of China.
The higher educational level of contemporary Chinese women in the Republic of China on Taiwan is certainly among the salient reasons for this emergence. Also, since top job opportunities for arts graduates are relatively far less than for science, engineering, or business careerists—and men basically face heavier social pressures to opt for such careers—the colleges of arts count comparatively more women students. And with notably more time to write (and to read), women writers (and readers) have gradually become major forces in today's publishing scene.
Still, today's women writers, while proficient, tend obviously to suffer from "narrow fields of vision." With only minor exceptions, their subject materials circle closely round love and marriage. Indeed, for most women writers (and readers), these remain the most important topics of daily life.
The resulting best sellers are generally characterized by excessive individualism—escapism, habitual nostalgia, self-gratification—mirroring the general characteristics, no doubt, of an avid readership.
"Such people want now, above of all else, to solve their own problems, and lack concern for the state of their own societies and of mankind," opines Chan Hung-chih, editor-in-chief of the Yuan Liu Publication Co.
"Among (such books) I have recently read, no matter whether the focus is on individuals, depictions of psychology, or special arrangements of plots, they all tend to be rather minute and exquisite. Notably lacking is that deeper inspiration and thought necessary to serious literary work," observed novelist Chen Ying-chen.
In fact, a once clearly demarcated dividing line between popular and serious literature has gradually faded. In the 1950s, the two areas were definitely separated, each with its own writers. Then an "overlapped" area appeared and gradually enlarged. Today's top ten almost all belong to the overlap.
Under a free economic system, according to Chan Hung-chih, it is only natural that those works with "special market development value within the field of serious literature" will be energetically developed. Popular works explain social meaning for those who require such interpretation, thus creating the intermediate area, he said. And that is also the kind of writing attracting most consumers—a great many of them students and women.
The top-ten statistics manifest for the public at large "what the majority favors." Therefore, the emergence of best-seller lists here is not at all a temporary phenomenon. Clearly, their influence on publishing will increase.
At least in the beginning, such best-seller lists should offer both society and the casual reader more advantages than disadvantages. Later, when people become dissatisfied with "being led by their noses" by such lists, a more-informed independence should lead to better choices and improved tastes...and thought.
"At such a time, quality books listed by experts and scholars will become most important," predicts Chou Hao-cheng, vice president of the Shih Pao Publication Co.