A new translation provides a valuable view into the development of Taiwanese literature during a time of tremendous economic change and political tumult.
Noted American translator John Balcom’s rendering of Zero and Other Fictions, which includes three short stories and one science fiction novella by Taiwanese writer Huang Fan (黃凡), is an important addition to the body of Taiwanese literature in English. Although two of the short stories have appeared in academic journals, with one of those also appearing in a translated anthology of Chinese literature, Zero and Other Fictions is the first collection of Huang’s writings published in English. Huang, a well-known writer across multiple genres, played a seminal role in the development of Taiwanese literature in the late 1970s and 1980s. Zero and Other Fictions offers perspectives on universal themes including technology, political authority and the vulnerability of the individual in modern society. Perhaps more importantly, this compilation is an indication of the growing respect given to Taiwanese literature by Anglophone academia. The short stories, together with the novella, provide a valuable view into the development of Taiwanese letters during a time of tremendous economic change and political tumult.
Huang was born in Taipei in 1950. He was educated in industrial engineering but worked in the food business and as an editor. After receiving acclaim for his short stories, Huang devoted himself to writing full-time. In his translator’s preface, Balcom divides Huang’s career into four periods—a political and urban literature period from 1979 to 1985; a postmodernist period from 1985 to 1992; a reclusive period from 1993 to 2002, during which Huang studied Buddhism and wrote little fiction; and a re-emergence from 2003 to the present that includes the publication of two novels, Impatient Country from 2004 and College Thief from 2005. Zero and Other Fictions is a compilation of a selection of Huang’s works from the first two periods. The volume contains three of Huang’s early short stories—Lai Suo from 1979, The Intelligent Man from 1989 and How to Measure the Width of a Ditch from 1985, as well as Zero, a 100-page dystopian novella from 1981.
Together, these writings give the English-reading audience a window on the work of a significant Taiwanese writer during an especially productive and innovative stage in his career. Though Zero and Other Fictions includes a range of themes and genres, Balcom writes in his preface of the qualities that span the body of Huang’s work, particularly “his black humor and a critical spirit, often satirical in nature.” Although Huang’s work is devoid of easy answers to life’s predicaments and is frequently fatalistic, his prose is always insightful, offering interesting reading that sheds light on the limitations of modern society and economics.
The short story Lai Suo is probably Huang’s work most recognized by Taiwanese readers. Often anthologized in collections of Chinese-language literature, Lai Suo became the author’s first work to receive wide acclaim when it won the China Times Literary Prize in 1979, a prestigious award from one of Taiwan’s largest Chinese-language newspapers. Moving back and forth across time, Lai Suo spans a period from the Japanese colonial era (1895–1945) to the last decade of martial law, which ended in 1987. Although as a volume, Zero and Other Fictions should be read as a critique of authoritarianism. Lai Suo examines the inherent problems of power and politics, regardless of party. The story revolves around themes of activism, but there is no apparent reward for political engagement in Lai Suo. The protagonist, Lai Suo, is a rag doll for the powerful, including the authoritarian government and the democratic opposition. As Balcom explains in his preface, Lai Suo broke new ground: “It was one of the first stories to transcend the strict political dichotomy by attacking both the ruling Nationalist (KMT) Party and the opposition.”
Amusing Study
The Intelligent Man is an amusing study of how, in a modern society and commercial order, an individual might bring about his own undoing. The story addresses Taiwan’s engagement in globalization as well as the complexities of intra-Chinese relations. Suffering from his own self-doubts in the wake of the Republic of China’s (ROC) loss of international prestige in the 1970s, Yang T’ai-sheng (“Taiwan-born Yang”) immigrates to California with his wife and children. The resourceful Yang works in a family member’s restaurant, then opens a furniture business in the heavily Chinese community of Monterey Park. Always enterprising, Yang quickly finds a niche market by selling traditional furniture to Asian immigrants in the United States.
Having established a furniture factory back in Taiwan, the industrious Yang takes a second wife, the pretty accountant at his Taiwanese branch, in hopes of producing a son. Then, facing a new rival in the immigrant furniture business, a Chinese-American competitor who specializes in Ming dynasty-style chairs, Yang opens up another factory, this time in mainland China. He hires an administrative assistant, an attractive female graduate from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University who has a high degree of “bourgeois liberality.” In October 1986, during the celebrations of the communist victory in 1949, they “unite,” as Yang wants to share his “Taiwan experience.” Meanwhile, Yang’s Taiwanese wife is especially jealous of her rival from mainland China and does not want to share. Needing to preserve a tranquil status quo and wanting a male heir, Yang convenes a “family conference” in Singapore, neutral territory.
Despite its strong sexist overtones, The Intelligent Man is neither hedonistic nor misogynistic, but is rather a clever critique of both the business and personal adventures of the first generation of Taiwanese businesspeople, mostly men, who flocked to explore manufacturing in mainland China and Southeast Asia in the 1980s. Huang’s delineation of the divisions within the Chinese world, especially the metaphoric “peace talks,” is perhaps the high point of the book’s short stories. Yang is like a Chinese emperor holding his fragile empire together, with his three “wives”—overseas Chinese, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese—symbolizing the diversity of Chinese experience in the late 20th century.
At the Singapore summit, Yang decides upon relocating his entire family to Hong Kong, where he plans to work earnestly at producing an heir. Never content with his current situation, however, he continues to look around in anticipation of expanding his business. Having calmed his “family,” he foresees still more enlargement of his dominion: As the story ends, Yang notes that Singapore is “full of potential” and starts thinking about opening a branch office there.
How to Measure the Width of a Ditch is a humorous, postmodern treatment of the author’s life and writing. Huang refers directly to his audience as he pokes fun at himself, mocking his own work and his attempts to understand the truth of anything. The absurdist story is autobiographical, yet the reader sees that memories are no guide to finding the meaning of one’s life. How to Measure the Width of a Ditch was, as Balcom notes, “a key postmodernist text that is often seen as the inception point of the trend on the island.”
The dystopian Zero, which takes up the majority of Zero and Other Fictions, was Huang’s first work of science fiction and received the 1981 United Daily News Literary Prize in the novella category. Zero traces the life of Xi De, one of the privileged members of a post-apocalyptic, golden-age society that provides all that previous ages (collectively known as the “dark age”) lacked. In the new society, computers have replaced human capacity to reason and disagreements are unheard of. “Less desirable populations” have been eliminated from the Earth and scientists have liberated humanity from the need for sexual reproduction. Everyone has been educated for one purpose—to fill a particular job in the new society. All education is technical, with no student having the chance to learn anything beyond his or her immediate specialty. Nor is there a need to venture outside: “Your office was in the floor above or below you; likewise, the amusement parlors, bars, and restaurants were all in the same building,” Huang writes. “In some places … you never had to set foot outside the door your entire life if you didn’t want to.”
Other recent books in the Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series published by Columbia University Press (Photo Courtesy of Columbia University Press)
Superior workers are rewarded with beautiful androids as lovers. With productivity the only goal, society has been flattened, individuality extinguished. As a popular song in the book goes,
There is no past, there is no future,
There is nothing but the present for us.
There is no sadness, there is no happiness,
There is nothing but indifference for us.
There is no argument, there is no splitting,
There is nothing but work for us.
Huang’s plot is familiar to readers of Western dystopias: One of the elites perceives that something is terribly wrong with the system and challenges the authorities from within. Xi De, a graduate of the Central Superior Academy and a man well on his way to a successful career as a member of the top leadership, miraculously discovers a book telling the sordid secrets behind the genesis of the new society. He then learns of a revolutionary group, the Defend the Earth Army, although the failure of its cause is almost certain given the control authorities exert over society.
Secret Mission
Xi De nevertheless commits to the cause and is sent on a secret mission to save workers at a steel factory from being executed because they are no longer needed after completing their quota. Xi De is arrested and sent to the Ministry of Security, where he is beset by doubts. Was he really part of a movement to save the Earth? Was the “revolutionary” movement a plot by the authorities to neutralize dissent? The authorities execute Xi De without his ever discovering whether he has been a martyr or a fool.
There is little question that Huang expanded the scope of Taiwanese literature with this innovative work of science fiction, which addresses universal issues of totalitarianism and social control. Zero compares with Western dystopias in this regard, and even contains a clever reference to George Orwell’s 1984.
Despite the universality of themes within Zero, Balcom locates Huang’s dystopia within the “closed, uncertain times” of Taiwan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The translator recalls the violence against the democracy movement at the time, which included police raids of opposition magazines as well as the murders or doubtful suicides of democracy activists. This was also a time of harsh prison sentences for political writers and censorship of periodicals that did not toe the official government line. Balcom does not specifically mention the limits of expression Taiwanese fiction writers faced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it seems clear that Huang penned his work of science fiction as an indirect critique of the ROC’s one-party rule during a time of limited expression.
Zero invites comparisons with mainland Chinese writer Chan Koonchung’s (陳冠中) The Fat Years from 2011, which first appeared in Taiwan and Hong Kong and has recently been translated into English. Both Huang and Chan emphasize the importance of the suppression of history for the maintenance of a dictatorship.
In fact, much of Huang’s subject matter is dark and depersonalized. One sees a modern society with increasing choices but few remedies for the problems of life, as characters find that neither the expansion of commerce nor politics suffices. Instead, given expanded choices, individuals become their own worst enemies. They also find that being devoted to causes does not help. Idealistic men do not get the Mercedes-Benz or pretty girls, nor do they achieve political vindication.
While the settings of the short stories are unmistakably Taiwanese or involve Taiwanese characters, the reader is not presented a positive picture of the aesthetics of Taiwan’s cities or of the righteousness of the country’s people. Cityscapes are unsightly, the countryside a burden to traverse. There is no village experience similar to that found in Pearl S. Buck’s 1931 novel The Good Earth, nor is there an authentic Taiwanese identity that would protect against malicious foreign influences, be they the perils of globalization or foreign political ideas. Lai Suo’s country-bumpkin in-laws lack charm or the ability to discern truth within a sophisticated society, while Taiwanese businesspeople are participants in a global commercial order that gives individuals insatiable appetites, yet leaves them isolated and without significant purpose.
Though as a volume, Zero and Other Fictions is overtly political and contains harsh criticism of authoritarianism, Huang’s early works scarcely read as a manifesto for participatory democracy. Exempting the much-abused Lai Suo, the author’s characters do not display a capacity for making rational decisions or for considering anything but their own narrow self-interest. In the new, perfect society of Zero, it is easy enough to keep most people happy with small things such as the banality and mindlessness of video games, while the unquenchable thirst of adding business markets and “wives” in The Intelligent Man hardly presents a flattering picture of the individual in modern civilization.
Focus on Taiwanese Writers
Readers of Zero and Other Fictions are fortunate to have John Balcom as translator. A professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, Balcom is a highly regarded Chinese translator who has focused on Taiwanese writers. His preface to the book puts Huang’s writings in context, while the translator’s sensitivity to cultural variation can also be seen, for instance, in The Intelligent Man, which uses different systems of Romanization for the Chinese names given in the story, thus reflecting the diversity of systems used in different ethnic Chinese communities around the world. Balcom’s recent work includes co-editing and co-translating 2005’s Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems, which received the 2006 Northern California Book Award; translating Chang Hsi-kuo’s (張系國) science fiction The City Trilogy from 2003; and translating Li Qiao’s (李喬) Taiwanese epic novel Wintry Night from 2002.
Zero and Other Fictions is the 18th book in the Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series, which is published by Columbia University Press in New York. Begun in 1998 by one of the top university presses in the United States and sponsored by the ROC’s Council for Cultural Affairs, the Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series is an indication of the growing importance of Taiwanese literature within the American academy and of the growing respect given Taiwanese writers abroad. Since Zero and Other Fictions only spans Huang’s career from 1979 to 1989, however, one hopes that Columbia University Press or another top-rated publisher will provide translations of Huang’s later stories or of his recent novels.
This first English volume of Huang’s work is a tremendous service to Anglophone readers, as it demonstrates the vitality of Taiwanese letters during the changes of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Balcom’s translation of Zero and Other Fictions stands alone as a historical document by providing evidence, in English, of Taiwan’s evolution from martial law into democracy, and by demonstrating the extent of Taiwan’s economic and urban development.
Readers may also want to pause to pay attention to Huang’s critique of the follies of modern commercial society. By taking a hard look at such economic “progress,” Zero and Other Fictions shows that sometimes fiction is the best way to delineate the limitations of the dismal science.
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Joseph Eaton is an assistant professor of history at National Chengchi University in Taipei
Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Eaton.