Taiwan Today

I realize that no matter what occurs, I am always like a bystander without position or concern toward this home, which almost seems like it has nothing to do with me. I just happen to be a spectator.
—Mazu’s Bodyguards, Chen Yu-hui, 2004

In the 319-page novel Mazu’s Bodyguards, the female narrator tells the story of three generations of her family beginning in 1930, a time when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). The story, originally written in Mandarin, then translated into German and with an English translation on the way, starts with 18-year-old Ayako Sanwa arriving at the port of Keelung in northern Taiwan from her home in Japan’s Ryukyu Islands.

Ayako’s fiancé has been sent from their village to colonial Taiwan to serve as a police officer, but when he is killed during a major aboriginal uprising against Japanese rule, she falls ill and is cared for at a hospital by a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin. Lin is attracted to the girl “from Japan yet not so Japanese” and Ayako later returns to Taiwan and marries the man. The two become the narrator’s maternal grandparents.

In the novel, Lin attends flight school in Japan and is later sent to southern Asia to serve in the Japanese air force during World War II. The real maternal grandfather of author Chen Yu-hui actually did become a Japanese soldier like many other Taiwanese men during wartime, although he did not fly planes. The novelist, who also writes under the name of Jade Y. Chen, says that such fictional plot designs account for around 40 percent of Mazu’s Bodyguards, which is an otherwise true account of her family’s history.

Getting Personal

Since 1990, Chen has published more than 15 books of fiction and nonfiction, although a number of the fictional works are based on real events. In 1989, for example, Chen placed a personal notice seeking marriage in several newspapers, an act inspired by Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal’s (1931–2009) concept of invisible theater, which is marked by non-traditional settings and onlookers unaware the event is a performance. She received more than 100 responses to the advertisements. Based in part on these exchanges with lonely hearts, she published The Personals in 1992, a bestselling novel that was adapted into an award-winning film of the same name in 1997, as well as a popular stage play. Chen’s novel Mine Hunting (2000) is a detective story that draws on a real murder case that occurred in 1993 in connection with arms sales to Taiwan. Like Mazu’s Bodyguards, her latest work of fiction, Stalker, which was published this year, is partly autobiographical as it revolves around a female writer. Unlike Chen’s real life, however, the story features an obsessed male fan. Currently, the author is working on a historical story of Taiwan’s oolong tea, which accounted for a tremendous share of the island’s total production value around the mid-19th century.

Mazu’s Bodyguards, with its 12th printing released in March this year, has been one of the most critically acclaimed novels written by a Taiwanese author in recent years. In a book review, Chen Fang-ming, professor and director of the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at Taipei’s National Chengchi University, wrote that, compared with Chen Yu-hui’s earlier works, this novel announces “the emergence of a mature writer” who has developed a “confident, subtle way of handling language.”

In the 2009 preface to a new edition of The Personals, Chen Yu-hui describes her writing as moving “from streams of consciousness toward plain narratives, from nonfiction toward novels and from murmurs to myself toward concrete chapters.” A central appeal of Mazu’s Bodyguards lies in the way the author entwines the story of a local family with Taiwan’s history. Chen Fang-ming likens the novel to “a letter to Taiwan,” referring to an article by the same name written by Chen Yu-hui at around the time she started work on the novel. “In the past I had to explain a lot about my place of origin,” Chen Yu-hui says. “Now they can just read this novel and know something about it.”

In the 2009 preface to The Personals, Chen Yu-hui recalls the many travels and events that have occurred in her own life.

I went to Germany, got married and settled down in Munich, southern Germany to begin my home life and end my wandering days. Before then, it seemed that I, like those who seek to learn from kung fu masters in Chinese martial arts novels, was always walking, roaming and moving. During these 20 years, I have been a diligent writer. I became an author, sitting. (A play on words, as “sitting” sounds very like “author” in Mandarin.)

I bid farewell to theater and restarted writing news reports. I wrote several novels, went to dozens of countries, visited national leaders and elites, went to battlefronts, reported on many specific issues, met countless people and saw countless things.

The only thing I did not do was have a baby.

Chen Yu-hui says she initially developed the idea of writing about her family in the mid-1970s chiefly because of encouragement from a teacher, distinguished novelist Chu Hsi-ning (1927–1998). Chu taught at the Department of Chinese Literature in the former Chinese Culture College, now Chinese Culture University, in Taipei. Like Chen Yu-hui’s father, Chu had come to Taiwan along with the Kuomintang (KMT) government following its loss in the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s.

One Desk for News, One for Novels

After graduating from university in 1979, Chen Yu-hui went to study theater in Paris and did considerable scriptwriting, acting and directing for stage plays in Europe, New York and Taipei. Also a veteran journalist, she still writes for major Taiwanese and German newspapers. “There are two desks in my house, one for writing news reports and the other for novels,” says Chen Yu-hui, who now resides in Germany. “As journalism needs facts and literature requires imagination, they are two distinct categories set apart from each other.” Still, she believes that her experience as a reporter is helpful to her writing career by, among other things, expanding her perspectives as a result of extensive traveling and also by helping her to develop a simple, explicit writing style.

Mazu’s Bodyguards, literally Sea Goddess Family in Mandarin, is not a story about the goddess Mazu or any divine revelation. As a metaphor, Mazu stands for Taiwan’s history, in which immigration and colonial forces arrived from across the seas, according to scholar Chen Fang-ming. One of the most beloved deities in Taiwan for numerous believers including the novel’s character Ayako, Mazu has been venerated as a guardian of seafarers since the religious practice was brought across the Taiwan Strait with Han Chinese immigrants some 400 years ago. With more than 800 temples dedicated to the goddess throughout Taiwan, Mazu worship has developed a greater intensity locally than its place of origin in southeastern China’s coastal Fujian province. One feature of the carnival-like Mazu festival parades in Taiwan are the tall puppets of two deities, one with super-human hearing and the other extraordinary eyesight, who act as Mazu bodyguards on the goddess’ constant journeys to save and bless people. The attendant deities are introduced at the beginning of the novel in the form of two small wooden statues.

Divine Bodyguards

The two 10-centimeter-wide by 15-centimeter-high god statues have wandered along with me for 20 years. For some unknown reason, despite my traveling and moving continuously from one city to another, and having lost forever many important things such as birth or education certificates and even the protective jade stones and gold rings from my family, the two god statues stay with me like a shadow.

It’s as though they go with me intentionally.

Accompanied by the two statues, the narrator seems to take on some of the merciful qualities of their divine boss. Her homecoming journey eventually brings her family members closer to each other, after having been torn apart by historical and personal conflicts. The two statues were carved by the narrator’s great-uncle—Lin’s younger brother—while he was fleeing arrest in central Taiwan. The great-uncle had joined a resistance movement in March 1947 as part of a major uprising islandwide against the KMT administration that had displaced Japanese rule two years previously. He left his carvings to his sister-in-law, Ayako, before he escaped first to Japan and eventually to Brazil to serve as the leader of the South American branch of the World United Formosans for Independence.

Secret Love Affair

A secret love affair between the Taiwanese activist and his sister-in-law is central to the turmoil of the narrator’s extended family. In fact, it is finally revealed that the exile fathered Ayako’s younger daughter, the narrator’s aunt.

In the second generation of the family there is tension between the narrator’s mother and her younger sister, with the mother often complaining about Ayako’s preference for her sister. Referred to as “two sisters who never speak to each other” in a chapter title, the two women do not make true peace with each other until toward the end of the story. The mother also blames her uncle for the loss of her father, Lin, who was taken away by government authorities, never to be heard of again.

In the new century, the narrator’s aunt brings the great-uncle’s remains back from Brazil. Ayako’s secret lover is eventually buried with her and her lost husband, as represented by some of his belongings placed in his tomb.

The love triangle of Ayako, her husband and her brother-in-law echoes the tangle of geopolitics in the region and the theme of national identity. Ayako comes from an island territory that became an official part of Japan only in the late 1870s, less than 20 years before Taiwan came under Japanese colonial rule. Ayako’s Taiwanese husband developed an admiration for the Japanese whereas his younger brother embraced local opposition to the colonizers.

He has his own thoughts. Unlike his brother who admires imperial Japanese culture, he talks very humbly to Japanese police but acts like a different person immediately after they leave. A wooden sign saying “National Language-Speaking Home” is hung at the entrance to the Lin family’s house. He speaks Japanese only to Japanese people and speaks Minnan to her. “I accepted Japanese as the national language because I was a coward then. What a pathetic person I am!” He is frank to her. “In any case, I am Taiwanese in body, mind and soul.”

Ayako fully respects his views and is glad that he does not consider her Japanese. Because of his insistence on his own identity, sometimes she does not necessarily consider herself Japanese either. She is from Ryukyu and a Ryukyu person is neither Japanese nor Chinese.

By the same token, colonized Taiwan could be regarded neither as Japanese nor Chinese and was not even allowed to be Taiwanese. “Now, Taiwan is neither a country nor a province of China,” Chen Yu-hui says. “It’s a clear fact. We can’t help it.” In the narrator’s words, “Taiwan is a very strange place as Taiwan looks like a country, but is not a country.” According to the author, such a status and the variety of Japanese, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese origins of the major characters in her novel constitute a “marginal discourse” about Taiwan. “While it’s not a deliberate position, writing from the margins is more inspiring than adopting a central view,” Chen Yu-hui says. “For example, Chinese history would be written very differently from a minority, rather than from a Han Chinese, point of view.”

Writing from a marginal or a borderland kind of place like Taiwan can help one to develop a broader picture in some ways, Chen Yu-hui says, but Taiwan cannot afford to become any more marginalized as it might entail the loss of its voice and position. “Taiwan can be peripheral,” she says, “but it must speak out for itself.” In this sense, Mazu’s Bodyguards sends a clear voice or message from Taiwan that it is a historical and cultural subject in its own right. As professor Chen Fang-ming sees it, if the historical “mist” that has given rise to complex feelings and distorted relationships within some Taiwanese families could be dispelled, all the conflicts of being “Japanese, Chinese or Taiwanese would eventually just return to the motherland, Taiwan.”

Female Perspective

Chen Fang-ming also draws attention to the novel’s female perspective. “Surprisingly, this history of modern Taiwan doesn’t start from the designs of a Han man, but rather from a Japanese woman, Ayako,” he notes. The professor points out that the story begins in the 1930s when Japanese rule in Taiwan was seen to be at its most secure and most brutal. The plot is connected by major historical events such as local uprisings against the Japanese and later the KMT administrations, but does not concentrate on famous individuals in Taiwan’s history. “Chen Yu-hui makes a big joke here by focusing on an obscure female,” the professor notes.

Throughout the story, detailed accounts of the lives of the various characters are given, including the family story of the narrator’s German husband, the characters’ diverse life experiences and how they are intertwined with one another’s sorrows and sufferings. The settings include various places in Brazil, mainland China, Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Russia and Taiwan. For Chen Fang-ming, using multiple storylines is extremely difficult, as each plotline must have its own development as well as link together somehow and work as a whole. In the end, it is the female experience that connects all the unexpected and inevitable occurrences. “Chen Yu-hui implies that history is created by women, who are the invisible force,” the professor explains. Chen Yu-hui says that despite the universal nature of literature that transcends gender distinctions, a female writer can more easily express a uniquely female view.

While a female perspective is apparent in the novel, Chen Yu-hui insists that she adopts an objective, impartial attitude without political bias when describing historical events. She says that her father was imprisoned for “God knows what reason” when Taiwan was still under martial law, which was not lifted until 1987, but she does not blame anyone. “A very thin line divides the victims and the oppressors, and that line can be blurred,” she adds. The novelist hopes to see greater mutual understanding and reconciliation among Taiwan’s different ethnic groups, which she thinks need to work together to foster national solidarity.

Chen Yu-hui says that, through writing about her parents and looking again at their life stories, her former resentments toward them have dissolved. “They didn’t love me in the way I thought parents should love their kids,” she says. “But did anyone ever love them? They didn’t know what love is or how to love.” Casting a more detached look at the family romance, like that of a bystander, she has learned to be more tolerant and has developed a deeper attachment to her relatives. A new faith is taking shape, just as the narrator of Mazu’s Bodyguards becomes a believer in the goddess toward the end of the novel.

I worship Mazu in my own way. I can feel her existence—more than 1,000 years ago when she was just a young girl, how she studied hard to gather her spiritual energy, how in dreams she saved her father and brother being devoured by the sea, how she helped people who were being tormented physically or mentally. I know it is her integrity and determination that let her soul stay, making her an old soul of incomparable spiritual force. I attempt to get closer to such an old soul.

Chen Fang-ming believes that Mazu’s Bodyguards originated partly from the author’s anxiety toward Taiwan’s ambiguous identity, which he describes as somehow ghostlike in its shifting nature. Now, with the unfolding of an enthralling epic, that anxiety seems to have been transformed to faith as readers approach an old soul called Taiwan.

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com