Taiwan Today

Fleeing American bombers in the final days of World War II, Yang Mu (楊牧), a child of no more than 5, takes refuge in the mountains surrounding his hometown of Hualien, situated on Taiwan’s eastern coast. Yang is indifferent to the Japanese constructing an airfield nearby, and occasional visits by US bombers provide more excitement than destruction. What upsets him, however, is an encounter with a water buffalo.

Coming upon three men whispering conspiratorially and a water buffalo, Yang looks into the animal’s eyes and imagines it to be crying. Like the moocow in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the water buffalo presents Yang’s still undeveloped mind with a sensory image that lingers into adulthood. After being shooed away by the men, Yang returns the next day to search for the crying animal and discovers a patch of ground soaked with blood, the remains of the slaughter and an explanation for the men’s air of guilt.

This anecdote is told at the beginning of Memories of Mount Qilai, an autobiographical collection of vignettes written by Wang Ching-hsien (王靖獻), who, under the penname Yang Mu, is one of the most widely read poets in the Chinese-speaking world. Part of the ongoing Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series published by Columbia University Press, Memories of Mount Qilai is beautifully rendered into English by the translation team of John and Yingtsih Balcom. This is an impressive feat considering that the power of Yang’s prose emerges from its subtle descriptions and lyrical imagery.

Like Joyce’s autobiographical Portrait of the Artist, Memories of Mount Qilai sets out to recapture the magical world of a child’s perceptions. It makes no pretense to logical presentation and frequently mixes the internal workings of the young poet’s mind with external realities. Yang, in fact, makes plain his distrust of logical thinking when he comically fires a broadside at philosophy. “Philosophers lack an external world and its phenomena,” he writes. “All they have is the mind, the complicated and complex mind, which, because it is inflated with too much thought, resembles an overripe tomato in summer.”

The humorous image of an intellectual’s brain swollen with too many ideas and beginning to rot like an overripe tomato undercuts the pretention that humans can make sense of the world by thought alone. The earthy image also places Yang back in the comfort of the natural world, which acts as his most important teacher and his developmental home throughout the volume.

Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that Yang was raised by mountains, so important are they to the world he inhabits as a child. The Mount Qilai of the title is the highest of the layered peaks that form a boundary on one side of his childhood home, Hualien. While people come and go in his stories—especially outsiders like the Japanese and the Americans in their bombers—the mountains are a constant companion and the gravitational center of his thoughts. Perhaps most importantly for the young poet, they also speak to him. “They narrated myths from time immemorial to me and told me secrets that no one else knew about,” he writes.

The mountains are a regular feature in all the three parts of the volume—“Mountain Wind and Ocean Rain,” “Return to Degree Zero,” and “Long Ago, When We Started”—which were previously published separately. The prevalence of nature in these three sections, and the struggle to place people within it, gives the volume the feeling of a shanshui painting. This type of traditional landscape painting generally features water (shui) meandering through dreamily rendered mountains (shan), and when humans are present, they are tiny, motionless figures dwarfed by looming peaks.

Yang manages to create this sensation by layering his memories and developmental history over a backdrop of the natural scenery from his childhood. The stories cover a decade or so, from about the age of 5 to 15. And while the narration—when identifiable at all through the thickets of natural imagery—unfolds in a circular pattern, the autobiographical story progresses through the three parts as a journey of self-discovery.

The first section covers the sensory impressions from the author’s earliest years and is, not surprisingly, the most innocent in theme and tone. Serious things are treated with little seriousness at all. The war, for example, represents more of a temporary curiosity than a major event in the author’s mind.

The Japanese, moreover, make no permanent impression on the natural landscape at the center of Yang’s world. “Amid a total absence of emotion on my part, the Japanese withdrew,” he writes. “The betel nut palms were still there, as were the flame trees, old banyan trees, breadfruit trees, and that unknown broad-leafed tree that I was most familiar with, which belonged to the insects.”

What seems important to Yang is not the presence of humans but a growing awareness of the land that he calls home. “Hualien slept at the intersection of the railroad and the highway on an alluvial fan of a beautiful river,” he writes. “It was pillowed by the lullaby of the Pacific Ocean, as the waves surged up and down on the beach, repeating a melody of tens of millions of years, regardless of whether anyone was listening or not.”

When Yang comes across people previously unknown to him, he can conceive of them only as part of the natural world. Taking refuge from American bombing raids with the Amis tribe, one of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples, in the mountains, Yang meets an Amis hunter in the forest. The hunter’s speech blends into the sounds of the forest as seamlessly as that of a bird. “Behind every tree in the forest,” he writes, “I frequently heard him talking with his people and their passing on messages, right behind the forest, like a bird crying, the wind blowing, or raindrops falling, stirring behind every tree and flower, from a direction I couldn’t pinpoint, outside my common knowledge, though there was no end to my curiosity.”

While Yang would eventually learn the Amis dialect, his understanding that people were in fact different than the creatures of the forest dawns on him only in the second part of the collection, “Return to Degree Zero.”

Throughout the volume, Yang’s lyrical imagery lends a playful air to the work and reflects the joys of innocence. But thematically the work darkens through sections two and three. In part two, Yang describes the melancholy postwar years, when he becomes aware of the differences between people.

Even remote Hualien was subject to considerable changes in postwar Taiwan. The Japanese had gone, but another set of newcomers presented entirely new ideas in an entirely new tongue. This group was the wave of immigrants from mainland China that arrived with the Nationalist government in the wake of World War II. Like the Japanese, who had wrested Taiwan from Chinese control in 1895, the Nationalist government was determined to reshape local society in its own likeness. This consisted in part of an intensive program to rid society of Japanese customs, language, and education.

During this period, Yang becomes increasingly interested in language and its role as an arbiter between people with different histories. He describes, for example, the sudden appearance of propaganda slogans painted in giant characters on chimneys, walls, and the sides of buildings—“characters the size of tires telling you to obey, support, and implement.”

The Nationalists were using language to stitch together a national identity that would encompass the recently arrived mainlanders, the Taiwanese locals, and the aboriginal peoples. Yang describes how a Japanese propeller plane was repainted and repurposed as an aerial propaganda distributor. “The fliers floated down out of the heavens like flocks of white pigeons,” he writes, “fluttering and shining for miles in the clear sky, making you think it was an absurd dream.”

In Yang’s elementary school, the nation-building project had some success in assimilating students from different backgrounds—mainlanders, Taiwanese, aborigines. But the process awoke in Yang the knowledge that people’s differences could also be a source of conflict, that language could be divisive as well as magical, that people would never be as pure as the natural world of his earlier childhood. “I learned to coldly observe,” he writes, “not just gaze far away at the mountains and the sea, the moon and the constellations, but to open my eyes and pay attention to the relationships among people.”

In the final section of the three-panel portrait, the colors darken further, reflecting the growing seriousness of a young poet who is beginning to find his own voice and to experience the pain of maturity and the loss of innocence. As a young man, Yang is increasingly self-aware and able to express complex feelings toward society. “I could look squarely at the ugly,” he writes. “Such was progress. I knew that lies, deceit, and betrayal were human.”

Yang at this time grows sensitive to the ideas of others and welcomes the comradeship found in literary circles. Teachers help him subvert the strict literary censorship of the time. They lend him banned books and delight in his discovery of literature from their own childhoods in mainland China. These literary friendships broaden Yang’s understanding of postwar Taiwanese society and the many voices helping shape it.

But Yang also discovers that people, even his literary friends, lack the constancy and reliability of the mountains watching over Hualien. After he has a falling out with a friend named Yan, who openly criticizes Yang’s literary efforts, Yan dies an early death. The episode haunts Yang. He writes of his fascination with Yan’s hometown of Yilan, and the differences in their Mandarin pronunciation.

The imaginative journey to understand Yan, driven by nostalgia, leads Yang to travel by train to Yan’s family home. The search deepens Yang’s understanding of the world that he has lost—the Hualien of his childhood. The vignettes bring Yang back full circle to his childhood and thematically connect this third panel to the three-part autobiographical painting of the poet’s life.

Both Yang and Joyce eventually left their homelands. Joyce spent the rest of his years in continental Europe, but he ceaselessly explored the Ireland of his childhood through literature. Yang eventually traveled to the United States for graduate school and today teaches comparative literature at the University of Washington. The Taiwan of his childhood, however, still haunts his poetry and prose.

Memories of Mount Qilai helps create a firsthand account of that world, a deeper understanding of the poet, and a record of national identity in postwar Taiwan. “His autobiographical essays,” notes John Balcom in the preface, “also move toward the construction of a Taiwanese identity.”

Yang and Joyce’s narratives both follow a similar pattern: a child exists in nature, discovers his connection to other people, and finally struggles to make sense of historical events, fragments of memory, and the formation of an identity, both personal and national. “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience,” Joyce writes at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

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Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.

Copyright © 2015 by Robert Green