Taiwan Today

By the early 1930s, the Japanese colonial government had successfully suppressed most of the radical social and political groups in Taiwan, including the Taiwan Communist Party, which was crushed in 1931. Local intellectuals, unable to pursue their social and political aspirations through activism, turned to literature to plead their case and vent their frustrations. The realist trend, already popular during the early period of Taiwan's modern poetry (1923-1931), continued to evolve, and hsiang-tu (鄉土) or "native-soil" literature made its first appearance (a similar literary movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s). Native-soil writing focused on the countryside because it was seen as the last stronghold of traditional Chinese culture and local customs.

Taiwan writers also began to organize. The Taiwan Literary Association, for example, had more than four hundred members in countless branch offices islandwide. As the pressure for cultural assimilation intensified, literary resistance became increasingly open and confrontational. For example, Huang Shih-hui (黃石輝) published two articles in 1930 and 1931, "Why Not Promote Hsiang-tu Writing?" and "More on Hsiang-tu Writing," in which he advocated writing about Taiwan using vocabulary drawn from the local dialects. Kuo Chiu-sheng (郭秋生), another writer and critic, also advocated native-soil literature written in the Southern Fukien dialect. Their articles had a profound impact on the island's literary circles.

The 1930s also saw the emergence of surrealism. It was the first instance of local writers taking part in an international avant-garde movement. The surrealist poets ignored traditional rural culture and instead affirmed the uniqueness of the individual, valuing the private world of the imagination over any expression of a collective identity or values. They fled from political engagement and escaped into a heightened world of the senses.

But the realist strain of poetry remained the mainstream trend, and grew much stronger during the decade as the articulation of a local consciousness came more sharply into focus. Although the language of poetic expression was largely Japanese, theme and content were Taiwanese. Poetry enjoyed a flourishing period until 1939, when the colonial authorities reinstated rigid controls on the island because of the war between China and Japan.

The realist, native-soil trend in Taiwan poetry during the 1930s is perhaps best represented by the works of the so-called Salt Field Poets, a group which took shape in the early 1930s in the town of Chiali in the southern county of Tainan. The core of the group was composed of four poets: Kuo Shui-tan (郭水潭), born in 1907; Wang Teng-shan (王登山), 1913-1982; Hsu Ching-chi (徐清吉), 1907-1982; and Wu Hsin-jung (吳新榮), 1907-1967.

Kuo Shui-tan worked as an interpreter in a government office. He earned a reputation as a haiku poet quite early, and his poetry was published in a number of Japanese magazines. In 1931, Kuo, Wang Teng-shan, and Hsu Ching-chi all joined the South Sea Salon, a literary organization in Tainan. Kuo is generally considered the best poet of the group. Wang was also a noted haiku poet, but under Kuo's influence he began writing modern poetry. He later wrote plays and his works always focused on the life and characters of the salt fields, which earned him the title of "salt village poet." Hsu was more important as an organizing force than as a poet. The decisive moment for the group, however, occurred in 1932 when Wu Hsin-jung returned to Tainan after earning a medical degree in Japan.

During his stay in Japan, Wu read the latest literary theories and gained knowledge of international literary trends. He was appalled by the lack of contact his compatriots had with the outside world. To remedy this situation, he joined with Kuo and Hsu to form the Chiali Youth Association, established to promote literature and exchange ideas. Because the three poets had failed to seek and receive permission from the government to set up the organization, it was disbanded by the authorities as potentially subversive. At the time, Taiwan activists were agitating for local autonomy and, although government officials took a somewhat tolerant attitude, they kept a close eye on all local organizations. The three later became members of the legal Taiwan Literary Association, and Kuo and Hsu founded the Chiali branch office.

The Salt Field Poets had all received a Japanese education and were fluent in the spoken and written forms of the language. They wrote exclusively in Japanese, but never forgot that they were from Taiwan. Their realist poems often depict life under Japanese rule, exposing the corruption of the colonial administration and the oppressiveness of colonialism itself. Having native command of Japanese gave the group the linguistic ability to engage the Japanese on their own cultural ground: ethnic and national conflict was carried out in the realm of language. In a consciously subversive way, the poets often met to discuss ways of embarrassing the colonial powers by writing anti-Japanese poetry in Japanese.

Kuo Shui-tan, the only surviving member of the group, is a poet of great emotional and thematic range. He has written everything from native-soil poems to lyrical love poetry. His work can be sweetly nostalgic when he writes about his youth and deeply sad when he writes about personal loss or political oppression. His poem "Crying Beside His Coffin," written for his son Chien-nan who died at an early age, was widely read when it appeared in 1939:

Unable to sleep, I have cried for you
My lovely son

Cried that you might wear a silver helmet
 and carry a golden spear
And ride a fine, snow-white horse
Back from the distant land of children
Your face so full of life, so full of play

No, no, that's not you
You were never a vain child
If it were you, really you
You'd carry a branch of dates in both hands
Swaggering along the way you did
Returning with a smile

My lovely son
I left the door open all night waiting for you

Waiting for you to come back
Wearing a red wool sweater and a white cap
A little French doll in your arms
Slowly descending in a baby carriage
With awe-inspiring majesty

If it were you, really you
You'd be bare bottomed, pants falling down
Clapping your hands, jumping
The way you did every day
My lovely son
Too young, you had no friends
That's why the funeral procession
Walks so silently
I hold your brother's hand
Your uncles and aunts carry incense and
 spirit money

Only these people
Your relatives who loved you so
Grieve, unable to stop
Cry
Sigh with pity
As they carry your little coffin
My lovely son
I promise you

I promise that I will plant an acacia
By your solitary grave
Beside the cemetery pond
And when I grieve, I'll visit you

O, the offerings of flowers
At your eternal resting place
 have been toyed with by the wind

They've withered, poor flowers
Where have they gone? Young soul
Two butterflies happen to fly by
Tumble, dance, and fly away

Kuo's elegy for his son is one of his signature works. The same year, Kuo also published "The Song of the Century," a powerful outcry against the war in the Pacific. The final stanza is representative of the general tone of the poem:

People pray and wait
Believing this dark wood holds the dawn
People will jump for joy at the beautiful sound
 of the trumpet announcing war's end
When the day comes
For love and fraternity to awaken on earth
People, in all sincerity,
Will bless the course of history
Will the sun ever get its fill
 of human good and evil?

Like many intellectuals of his day, Wu Hsin-jung had liberal political views and a strong sense of justice. In 1928, while studying medicine in Japan, he joined the radical Taiwan Youth Association in Tokyo and learned about Marxism and Lenin's ideas on imperialism. At the same time, Wu also read Soviet literary theory on realism and proletarian literature in Japanese translation. After earning his medical degree, he volunteered to spend a couple of years in Japan treating the poor. He remained active in pro-Taiwan activities and was eventually arrested and spent a month in a Japanese jail before returning to Taiwan. Wu's poetry reflects his indignation at Japanese colonialism and is characterized by native-soil themes and a humanistic compassion for the downtrodden. Although his writing lacked the refinement and turn of phrase found in Kuo's work, it is noted for its simple beauty and expressiveness.

One of Wu's favorite themes was the suffering of rural laborers under Japanese economic subjugation. The Japanese administrators focused their efforts on developing the island's agricultural sector in order to provide Japan with needed foodstuffs and raw materials. Farmers were forced to grow rice and sugar cane, which were processed in Japanese-owned refineries and mills for export to Japan. As Taiwan's rural economy was vigorously integrated and subordinated to the needs of Japan, farmers were increasingly controlled by the cycle of Japanese production and eventually becoming almost serfs to Japanese business. In his poem "An Elegy for My Home," Wu develops this theme by contrasting in alternating stanzas the island's happy past with life during the occupation:

Compatriots!
Don't forget your youth
In the front hall lit by the bright moon
Watching your aunts and sisters-in-law
 pounding rice
Listening to those ancient folk songs

Today!
There's a mechanical rice mill
 in every village
Day and night a lament is heard
How many people are starving
How many people eat raw shredded potato

Brothers!
Can you forget the tons of potatoes and
bags of rice
That once filled your storage rooms out back
Eating last year's rice
Selling this year's
Happily worshipping heaven and earth in winter

Today!
The land registration is in someone else's name
You can't plow because you haven't paid your taxes
Dead or alive it doesn't matter
Frightened and cursed, it's the times

In "Farmer's Song," Wu stresses that Taiwan has its own cultural identity. He exhorts people to remember the past and the bitter struggles and bravery of their ancestors who came to the island with little or nothing but their hopes. Despite the hardships, they built a life for themselves and for their descendants. Wu laments that though the people of Taiwan come from such hardy stock, they seem to lack the same courage and stamina of their ancestors:

Our ancestors had something great
They believed it was a kind of fire
A fire that came from within
With which they could fight to the end
And labor without tiring
And they never forgot to pass it down

We are the inheritors of that fire
It will never go out
Whatever the age or system may be
Though it may keep dull company

We are fools!
We cry out to you:
Let us try again
With a shovel and our empty hands

Do you know that
Flint-struck, the fire is no
 dying spark
But like a flash of lightning
We've been called dumb
In some cases we've just been fooled
And though we starve, our wills are firm
We won't go on like this
Through all ages and systems
We ignoramuses have a mission

O, think of our ancestors
When they first landed
They had nothing
But a flimsy boat and a shovel

Not long after Wu and Kuo Shui-tan established the Chiali branch of the Taiwan Literary Association in June 1935, Lin Ching-liu (林精鏐), 1914-1989, a twenty-one-year-old poet from Chiali, joined the association. Lin was the son of the noted Chinese scholar Lin Pan. From an early age, he received a standard traditional education from his stern father in addition to a Japanese education. By mastering both Chinese and Japanese, Lin was able to pursue a literary vocation both during and after the occupation.

Lin was a realist writer, like all the Salt Field Poets. His occupation-period poems, which were mostly written in Japanese, often deal with the darker side of colonial life and native-soil themes. But he was also adept at writing personal lyrics, many of which depict the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the native and the foreign. One of the best examples is his poem titled simply "Father":

Almost every night, father wants me to study
But I'm never in the mood
I'd rather be left alone with my confused thoughts
Father can't understand this
He wants to pass on his knowledge
But his son has no mind to study
I look at his white hair and I know
My thin father is aging
Mother died ten years ago, but rather than remarry
He has devoted his energies to his son's education
I'm almost thirty and have no strengths or talents
I'm just an ordinary guy
Father gets more and more upset―
My progress is too slow
Father has such high expectations for me
I should try to honor and obey him
This evening I'll again try to recite
 Tao Chien's "Return"
In my unpracticed pronunciation

Lin's poem captures, in a very personal way, the cultural and emotional conflicts of an entire generation. The first two lines introduce the basic conflict depicted in the poem: the gulf of understanding then existing between generations. The father represents the older generation and Chinese traditions, while the son symbolizes the younger generation which has grown up with the traditions and languages of two cultures. The language of the poem, and presumably that of the narrator as well, is Japanese, in contrast to the Chinese of the father. The father has sacrificed everything in hopes of passing on his knowledge to his son; but the son is not interested in useless old traditions ―they will not get him anywhere in modern society. The narrator exists in an emotionally confused state, torn between the traditions of his people and the demands of the present.

At the end of the poem, in a filial gesture, the son decides to try reciting a traditional Chinese poem by the Tsin dynasty poet Tao Chien (陶潛, 365-427). His unpracticed pronunciation, however, indicates that the language and traditions of his father are already somewhat foreign to him. Significantly, Tao Chien's "Return" is a lengthy rhapsody detailing the poet's flight from a confining official job to the freedom of his farm; the reference here is not without purpose. No doubt, the speaker of the poem yearns for a similar freedom from his own cultural and emotional conflicts. Given Lin's own family background, he would no doubt have been acutely sensitive to the conflicts allude to in this poem.

It was also during the 1930s that Taiwan poets first joined the ranks of the international avant-garde. This was largely the result of the efforts of one man: Yang Chih-chang (楊熾昌), born in 1908. As a young man, Yang was a voracious reader of world literature in Japanese translation. He was particularly attracted to the works of Jean Cocteau, and he hoped one day to be able to read them in the original French. Today, at age 85, his eyes still light up when Cocteau is mentioned.

In 1931, Yang left Tainan for Tokyo with the hope of studying French literature. Although he was unsuccessful in entering a university to study French, he stayed in Japan and pursued advanced studies in Japanese. Being a rather flamboyant character, Yang was soon involved in cafe society and mixed with the major avant-garde figures in Tokyo. At the time, Japanese poetry circles were heavily influenced by Italian Futurism and French Surrealism.

In 1933, Yang was forced to return to Taiwan because his father had become seriously ill. Back home, he spent most of his time reading and writing. His own surrealist poems soon began appearing in two local newspapers, the Tainan News and the New Tainan News. In 1934, he took over the editorship of the literary supplement of the New Taiwan News. He was soon promoting all schools of new poetry and surrealism. According to Kuo Shui-tan, the literary supplement was one of the island's most important outlets for new poetry.

The year he returned to Taiwan, Yang invited a number of fellow poets, both Chinese and Japanese, to join him informing Le Moullin, the Windmill Poetry Society. The society had only six members, four Taiwan poets and two Japanese. The Taiwan members included Yang Chih-chang; Lin Yung-hsiu (林永修), 1911-1944; Li Chang-tuan (李張端), 1911-1951; and Chang Liang-tien (張良典), born in 1915. The Japanese members were Toda Fusako (戶田房子), who worked for the Tainan Monopoly Bureau, and Kisi Reiko (岸麗子), who was employed at the Tainan Telephone and Telegraph Bureau.

The group published the Windmill Poetry Magazine in Japanese, and used it to promote surrealism. The magazine had a limited circulation ― only seventy-five copies of each issue were printed ― and no submissions from outside the group were accepted. They called for a poetry that "transcends both time and space with ideas that leap off the earth." The island's realist writers criticized them for their lack of concern for Taiwan's fate and accused them of being art-for-art's-sake esthetes. Even local Japanese critics complained that their writings lacked musicality and were confusing and difficult to understand.

For their part, the Windmill poets were all highly critical of the realist school of poetry and native-soil writing in general. Yang Chih-chang summed up the group's position in an essay published in the New Tainan News: "Since 1933, realism in literature has been pretty much the same in terms of content. It has played a significant role in establishing a colonial literature, but it has grown corrupt and commonplace. It is mournful and garrulous, and empty of content. We hope to move forward." Yang and his fellow poets believed that art was being sacrificed to politics and emotion to ideas. The Taiwan surrealists never adopted the leftist politics of their French counterparts.

When asked why he chose surrealism, and why he decided to set up the Windmill Poetry Society, Yang says: "At that time, the Japanese government controlled things very tightly. They were sensitive to political thought and were severely censorious when it came to writing. At the time, I thought that if literature was to continue developing, we had to skirt politics. Therefore, we pursued what is concealed in the human heart and beautiful literary expression without the slightest political coloring. Only in this way could literature survive the political oppression. That's why we set up the society, published the magazine, and promoted surrealism."

Although credited with introducing surrealism to Taiwan, Yang's writings are not widely read because they were written in Japanese. But his work is highly regarded in Japan, where it is still reprinted. Interestingly, a group of mainland writers, who arrived in Taiwan with the Nationalist government in 1949, reintroduced surrealism in the 1960s, unaware that it ever existed on the island. Like most surrealist writing, Yang's poems are filled with striking imagery and a dream-like quality. A good example of this is his poem "Burning Cheeks," which concerns a young lover who has been rejected and feels the sting of loneliness:

In this flax-colored sunset
The gloves of the falling leaves dance
On my chest On my cheeks
The wind warms itself in my pocket

The autumn mist
Sheaths the streetlight in soft petals
Hate and regret
Float in the faint light
My cheeks burn with loneliness

That forgotten name in the
 thin veins of hothouse flowers
An ear rings in a shell
A sand dune approaches
Pities its own desolation

Yang's "A Border-Crossing Butterfly" is also a dream-like love poem, but more celebratory in tone. Emotions are expressed symbolically rather than directly:

A border-crossing butterfly
Is like the shoaled fragrance of lilies
At dusk, the color of hibiscus
It melts in a ceremony's bouquet of kisses
Beautiful striped wings possess
Poems in flowers
O, dance of petals
The music of light trembles at the
 camellia's window
The song of butterfly love
Is on your rose earrings
Beneath a white balcony
An organ plays a fragrant tale

In this poem, Yang makes use of a poetic technique known as synesthesia ―the description of the perception of one sense in terms of another― was quite popular among surrealist poets. The technique makes the everyday unfamiliar by allowing the reader to 'hear' colors and 'see' music. The poet creates a musical painting, a symphony of color.

Li Chang-tuan, another important surrealist, was also a member of the Windmill group. He graduated from the Tokyo Agricultural College and worked in water management after he returned to Taiwan. Li disappeared in 1951 during a government political stabilization campaign directed against alleged leftists. "Deprived of a Body" is typical of his work:

Alone
A coral-like shell pipe Left on the lips of a
Shy young girl
I close the north window
I distill tragic mental games from the
Sound of the universe
White smoke Purple white
Okay, I won't think about anything
Love, life, dreams, or beds

Deprived of a body
I flirt with an evil goddess
And calmly offer my body

There is a certain fin-de-siècle decadence about Li's poems. The lyric voice in his poem offers itself, body and soul, to an evil goddess. A feeling of ennui pervades the poem-reasonable, perhaps, in a time when Taiwan intellectuals were excluded from an active social or political role. The tone of the poem is much like late symbolist poems in the West, where a private world of sensual dissipation and spiritual enervation is all that exists.

Regardless of whether a poet wrote in a realist or surrealist mode, the writers during this period of poetic flourishing had one common fate: one year after Taiwan was returned to China in 1945, the government banned the use of Japanese. Both surrealists and realists were silenced. As Kuo Shui-tan says, "I be came a poet without an audience. I wrote new poems but had no place to recite them." His words speak for an entire generation of gifted writers. To this day, a good deal of Taiwan's literary heritage remains inaccessible to the people of Taiwan because it is written in a foreign language. ―John Balcom, formerly an editor of the Free China Review, is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on contemporary Chinese literature. This article is the second of a three-part series.