Taiwan Today

An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Vol. 2. Edited by Chi Pang­ yuan. Taipei: National Institute for Compilation and Translation, 1975.470 pp.

Winter Plum: Contemporary Chinese Fi­ction. Edited by Nancy Ing. Taipei: Chi­nese Materials Center, 1982. 498 pp.

The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction since 1926. Edited by Joseph Lau. Bloomington: Indiana Uni­versity Press, 1983.279 pp.

We normally judge a transla­tion by gauging to what extent it faithfully renders the original text in another language, with the assumption that the original possesses a fixed closure of meaning, luring yet continually eluding the translator. The evaluation of antholo­gies raises other issues as well. For exam­ple; in the case of these four English translations of modern Taiwan fiction, we should consider the editorial assump­tions behind the choices of the literary selections and also determine the sort of image of Taiwan these selections provide.

In terms of both critical insight and editorial expertise, Joseph Lau's Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960-1970 repre­sents a groundbreaking work. The elev­en years the anthology covers mark a period in which Taiwan literature took a quantum leap. While mainland writers submitted themselves to rigid formal models and ideological constraints, writ­ers in Taiwan managed to open up new structural and political horizons. They enriched a period in modern Chinese literature, which otherwise would have been a desolate vacuum. By confirming the achievements of the writers in Taiwan, Lau's anthology reminds Mainland-centered scholars and critics that modern Chinese literature should not be judged only by the standards of geopolitics.

The anthology introduces eleven writers. Most of them emerged as lead­ing figures in the seventies. Both Wang Chen-ho and Huang Chun-ming turned out to be forerunners of the hsiang-tu (native soil) movement. Pai Hsien-yung won high acclaim for chronicling the decaying manners and morals of main­ land exiles in Taipei. Wang Wen-hsing attracted tremendous controversy with his radical experiment with Chinese linguistic and narrative canons. Both Chen Ying-chen and Yang Ching-chu propagated a literature about and for politics, finally committing themselves altogether to ideological struggle. As if featuring a preview, the anthology even contains an early work by Chen Jo-hsi, before she (re) emerged in the mid­ seventies as a celebrity storyteller of what "really" happened in Mainland China during the Cultural Revolution.

The anthology creates a vision of Taiwan at the crossroads between Main­land cultural-political hegemony and burgeoning native consciousness, be­tween avant-garde causes and nostalgic sensibilities, and between historical awareness of change and yearning for mythic Time. Rarely has modern Chi­nese literature witnessed a period like Taiwan fiction in the sixties, in which Chinese (or Taiwan?) experiences are endowed with such thematic tension and formal variety.

Chinese Stories pieces together a pic­ture of Taiwan undergoing drastic change. Thus, in Chen Ying-chen's "My First Case," the young police officer is initiated into a world where values like love, family, marriage, and motherland take on a dubious dimension. And in Chi Teng Sheng's "I Love Black Eyes," the existential moralist Li Long-ti is trapped in a flood and faces the choice of saving either his wife or a prostitute. Whereas Pai Hsien-yung's "Winter Nights" deplores the passage of time that has eroded away the romantic dreams of two intellectuals, Wang Chen­ ho's "An Oxcart for Dowry" celebrates the perseverance and life force of Tai­wanese peasants.

Published in 1975, Chi Pang­ yuan's Anthology of Contempo­rary Chinese Literature remains one of the few sources that pro­vide a historical overview of Taiwan lit­erature from 1949 to the early seventies. The anthology features seventeen writ­ers, of whom five (Yu Li-hua, Pai Hsien­ yung, Wang Wen-hsing, Huang Chun­ ming, and Lin Huai-min) also appear in Lau's anthology. The two anthologies are remarkably different in their vision of Taiwan. This is not due to the longer period that Chi's anthology covers, but in their views of the historical course that modern Chinese literature has taken. Lau's book sees Taiwan literature in the sixties as a break with the past, while Chi's would rather treat it as anintegral part of a great tradition that is traceable back to the fifties and earlier.

Significantly, Chi's anthology starts with Lin Hai-yin, a native Taiwanese who grew up in Peking. With Lin's touching accounts of her childhood, like "Gold Carp's Pleated Skirt," one comes to appreciate the emotional ties, family relations, and cultural heritage shared by both the old and young generations, both the mainland and the island Chi­nese societies. Also highlighted in the anthology are soldier writers like Ssu-ma Chung-yuan, Chu Hsi-ning, and Tuan Tsai-hua, who began their literary ca­reers while serving in the military. Their stories about their hometowns in the Mainland and a legendary past have fas­cinated numerous readers. Though in­visible on the surface, the image of Tai­wan nevertheless looms large in their narratives, as the condition on which their remembrances of things past be­ come possible.

Even writers of the sixties and early seventies appear here in rather different images, although many of the authors are represented as well in Lau's antholo­gy. These writers set out to deal with a wide range of subjects, but their works end up pointing to the same world, one inhabited by people either alienated from their existential circumstances or trapped in social-psychological crises.

The title of Shih Shu-ching's short story, "The Upside-down Ladder to Heaven," may well summarize the vision shared by these writers. When the ladder to heaven is hung upside down, the entry to Paradise is lost. In this sense, Shi Song's retelling of the mythi­cal No Cha's fall from Heaven ("No Cha in the Investiture of the Gods") prefig­ures an allegorical matrix and thus sub­stantiates the stories by Li Yung-ping and Lin Huai-min about the loss of an ideal hometown ("A La-tzu Woman" and "Homecoming"). Traditional human relationships are turned upside down as well. Whereas Ou-yang Tzu's ideal mother in "Perfect Mother" ap­pears as a neurotic distortion of tradition­ al motherhood, Huang Chun-ming's father is reduced to a walking machine by the hardships of life in "His Son's Big Doll." If Chinese Stories envisions a Taiwan on the verge of change, then Contemporary Chinese Literature is more pensive, and sits in the shadow of history.

Nancy Ing's Winter Plum collects twenty-three translations of Taiwan short stories originally published in The Chinese Pen (a quarterly journal published by the Taipei Chinese Center, International P.E.N.) It is less bothered by thematic formulae or critical criteria, and brings forth a much more relaxed atmosphere in its transcription of Taiwan experiences from the fifties to the early eighties. The anthology includes popular writers like Wang Chen-ho and Pai Hsien-yung, and also salutes veteran writers such as Pan Lei and Wang Ting-chun. More important, because Ing chooses not to abide by established canons, she succeeds in loosening up the tradition a little and calling our attention to voices that are less well-known, but just as interesting. The works she introduces by Yang Fu, Tzu Yu, Hsieh Shuang-tien, and Chang Jhy-chang, confirms their inclusion as an integral part of Taiwan fiction.

Another major difference between Winter Plum and the other two antholo­gies lies in the organization of the trans­lations. Instead of presenting the stories in a chronological sequence, as the other two anthologies do, Ing arranges them alphabetically according to the authors' names. What results is a tentative suspension of temporality, an escape from history. Juxtaposing veteran writers like Pan Lei, Meng Yao, and Ssu-ma Chung­ yuan with young rising stars like Hsiao Yeh and Yuan Chiung-chiung, the anthology creates a space where tradition is manifest only in the simultaneous exis­tence of the past and present, the young and old. lng's anthology offers an alter­ native to the diachronical conception of time, thereby adding a new dimension to the image of Taiwan.

The Taiwan in Winter Plum is a place crowded with a variety of people and lifestyles. There are aging generals fight­ing the harshest war in the battlefield of life ("The General" by Chu Hsi-ning), boys falling hopelessly in love with women their mothers' age ("Flaw" by Wang Wen-hsing), refugee Chinese stu­dents from Vietnam lost in the brave new world of Taipei ("The Sky's Escape" by Yuan Chiung-chiung), coun­try kids working hard and in vain to make a living ("The Fish" by Huang Chun-ming), and overseas prophets loading up with honor while in their own country ("Flute" by Chang Hsi-kuo). Whereas Tzu Yu's young men try hard to enter society ("Bewildered"), which is still dominated by self-important "old gingers" (Pan Lei's "Old Ginger"), Hsin I Fei's and Ssu-ma Chung-yuan's narrators enjoy recollecting adventures and legends of long ago. Through lng's kaleidoscopic lenses, Taiwan appears both lively and inert, both refreshingly· young and bewilderingly aged.

Lau's Unbroken Chain, however, is another attempt to antholo­gize Taiwan fiction in the light of a certain historical plan. His first anthology of Taiwan fiction traced a sequence of history, from 1960 to 1970. In the new anthology published in 1983, he does something more ambitious: a complete genealogy of Taiwan fiction. Of the seventeen authors in the antholo­gy, thirteen are native Taiwanese, and the other four belong to the generation of Mainlanders who were either born or grew up in Taiwan.

The year 1949 is no longer used as an arbitrary date for the rise of Chinese literature in Taiwan; rather it is 1945, the year of Taiwan's retrocession from Japan, that marks the turning point of Taiwan literature. More noteworthy, Lau digs out four authors who wrote during the Japanese occupation, Lai Ho, Wu Cho-liu, Chun Tien-jen, and Yang Kuei. Through their works, the reader learns how the first generation of modern Taiwan writers endeavored to maintain a native consciousness, and that it was they who planted the seeds of the native-soil movements that took place in the seventies.

The textual implication of Lau's new anthology is a polemical one. No longer does he treat Taiwan fiction as a branch of the mainland tradition. If Taiwan literature is important, it is be­ cause it has developed a unique discourse over the past fifty years, one that cannot be homogenized by mixing it in with Mainland literature. It carries its own roots and perspectives, and it caters to a reading public whose concerns are not identifiable with those in the mainland. Lau, of course, had no intention of pro­pagating political separatism. He simply recognized that the best way to promote Taiwan literature was to emphasize its difference from Mainland literature and to endow it with a lineage of its own.

The four pioneer writers of the pre-1945 period may not be skilled in the techniques of fiction or even the Chinese language, but their deep concern about Taiwan's fate merits attention. Under their pens, Taiwan is a colonial society suffering from a great identity crisis. And as in "The Doctor's Mother" by Wu Cho-liu, even loyalists to Japan cannot alter the vacuity of their lives. The emphasis shifts in the post-1945 sec­tion to the humanist spirit and native-soil consciousness ─ the thrust of the literary discourse of Taiwan.

Besides familiar names like Lin Hai­ yin, Chen Ying-chen, and Huang Chun­ ming, Lau features Cheng Ching-wen and Li Chiao, two writers overlooked by the previous three anthologies. These two may not be as experimental or radi­cal as their more popular peers, but their writings display the tender but straight­ forward style characteristic of the majori­ty of Taiwan literature. Cheng's "Betel Palm Village" casts a nostalgic look at southern Taiwan as it becomes increas­ingly industrialized, and Li's "The Spheric Man" provides a bitter caricature of modern Taiwanese trapped in an absurd sociopolitical condition.

The anthology fittingly ends with Chang Ta-chun's "Birds of a Feather," a story about a young army reservist's en­counter with an old Mainland soldier, who indulges his dreams of going home by raising a flock of chickens. By naming the chickens after family members left on the Mainland, the old soldier has pieced together a domestic scene that is a degenerate representation of his for­mer family life. When the troops are or­dered to move and to leave behind extra belongings, in effect condemning the "family members" to death, he buries the chickens alive in despair.

The old soldier personifies the last group of mainland exiles who still hang on to the past, while the young army reservist, presumably a second genera­tion Mainlander born in Taiwan, under­ stands but fails to feel the old soldier's pain. Reading Chang's story in the light of pre-1945 fiction, we see that the theme of identity crisis has come full circle: people in Taiwan are faced with a new stage of defining who they are. As the story ends with Taiwan's inevitable breaking away from Home, Past, the Mainland, and Origin, it adds an unex­pected paradox to the book's title, The Unbroken Chain.─ David D. W. Wang (王德威) is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.