Foreword to the Special Issue on New Generation Women's Fiction from Taiwan
Kuo-ch’ing Tu
Taiwan is home to an impressive number of women authors who are producing remarkable work. Very early on, in July of 2002 and January of 2003, this journal published Women’sLiterature in Taiwan in two issues (#11 and #12). These issues included short critical pieces, prose, fiction, new poetry, and research essays. There were nine short stories (by authors Yeh Shiht’ao, Tzeng Ching-wen, Su Wei-chen, Chu Tien-hsin, Yang Chienhe, Lü Hsiu-lien, Hwang Chuan and Chi Chi); three short critiques; six prose pieces; fifteen new poems; and four research essays. For details of the contents please refer to issues #11 and #12.
In the Foreword to Issue #11 of the journal I explained that the women’s movement in Taiwan began in the 1970s. The initiator of the movement was former vice president Lü Hsiulien and its development was continued in the 1980s by Professor Li Yuan-chen. In the 1980s a group of young women writers, including Li Ang, Shih Shu-ching, Hsiao Sa, Hsiao Li-hung, Yuan Chiung-chiung, Liao Hui-ying, Chu Tien-wen, Chu Tien-hsin and others, appeared on the literary scene in Taiwan and established the place of women authors. The work of these writers described the difficulty of women in marriage, family, and traditional society. After 1987 and the lifting of martial law, freedom of speech and ideological diversity were guaranteed in Taiwanese society. That meant that such topics as politics and sexuality proliferated because they were no longer proscribed. In the early 1980s, the content of Li Ang’s novel The Butcher’s Wife (1983) shook the literary establishment. Her Lost Garden, published in 1991, pushed women’s writing toward new milestones by probing the topics of sexual desire and consciousness of reality, and initiated a reevaluation of political subjects such as national identity, ideology, and communal memory. Professor Sylvia Lin’s English translation of Lost Garden was published in 2016 by Columbia University Press. In the stories of women writers from the post-martial law period of the late 1980s, the issues of gender identity and political identity often intersected and compounded each other, becoming a commonly observed mode of post-colonial literature and feminist discourse, wherein colonialism and anti-colonialism, patriarchy, and feminism, empowerment and disempowerment, violence and resistance were arrayed in relations of opposition. With the 1990s and the arrival of post-modernism, women’s literature and feminist discourse began more diverse explorations, including fiction and discourse on special proclivities, gay experience, and female homosexual desire, as well as queer writing and LGBT literature. Women authors dealing with topics of gender identity and heterosexual desire continue to appear and contribute their voices.
As discussed above, we generally understand the direction and development of feminist thinking in Taiwan as well as the nature and extent of the presence of Taiwanese women writers in the literary world. Since the works chosen for translation in our journal are predominantly literary, we hope the ideas and experiences will be reflected from a female perspective. By publishing this special issue on “New Generation Women’s Fiction from Taiwan,” which comes twenty years after our first special issues on women’s writing and represents a different generation of writers, we can see the differences between gendered writing in earlier and later eras, as well as social changes since the lifting of martial law and the progressive evolution in the themes and styles of women’s writing. The work of contemporary Taiwanese women writers provides a realistic view of the lived experience of Taiwanese society, reflecting the fabric of its historical development and elucidating the special characteristics of Taiwanese women’s literature. The writings in this issue all represent the voices of women and interpret women’s own innermost experience, thereby presenting the unique sounds and colorings of contemporary Taiwanese women’s literature.
For this special issue on “New Generation Women’s Fiction from Taiwan,” we have specially invited Professor Lee Kuei Yun of the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at Taiwan’s Tsing Hua University to be guest editor and take responsibility for the selections. Because of space limitations it has been possible only to select twelve short stories by eleven woman writers. These writers were all born in the 1970s or later and their works were published in the year 2000 or later. Thus, they represent a period of social change in twenty-first century Taiwan and the spirit of the new generation. The introduction that we asked Professor Lee to provide is entitled “Trauma, Desire, Contemporary Women’s Voices.” Aside from giving a brief account of the eleven writers and their works, Professor Lee sketches “a number of writerly qualities that become perceptible… [that] represent the internal trauma, female consciousness, physical lust, cat-human metaphors, and everyday life, etc.” In her introduction, what she particularly stresses is that the sexual desire depicted in these works exposes the internal wounds derived from private individual experience hidden away in the deepest levels of the female consciousness that are exposed for direct observation, and “… [from this] we can tease out a clear semblance of a feminine texture that reverberates with the unique sound of contemporary women’s voices.” This then is one of the most important qualities of the new generation of Taiwanese women’s fiction.
There is perhaps no better example of the unmasking of the wounds of female desire than the case of the young woman writer Lin Yi-han whose suicide shook Taiwanese society in 2017. The incident, that involved Lin committing suicide by hanging herself, was deeply troubling. Lin Yi-han, who was born in 1991, was an outstanding younger representative of the generation of woman writers whose works we have gathered in this special issue. At the beginning of February of 2017, she published her only novel, The Paradise of Fang Si-Ch’i’s First Love. The book relates the story of how a thirteen-year-old girl, Fang Si-ch’i, was seduced and abused by her fifty-year-old cram school teacher, Li Guo-hua. Their sexual relationship, which lasted for five years, led Fang Si-ch’i to suffer from depression and emotional trauma. Her self-internalization, and attempts to persuade herself that she had fallen in love with her teacher eventually resulted in her mental collapse. Despite it being Lin Yi-han’s first book, it is highly eloquent. The writing is elegant, the use of metaphor intricate, and the psychological depiction meticulous. The title page indicates that the book “is dedicated to my sisters who are waiting for the angels” and that it was “based on real people and real events.” Clearly, the author employed the novel as a means of narrating her personal experience and to expose the harm that sexual violence brings to its victims.
Lin Yi-han’s novel points out the wounds, just as the “Introduction” to this issue refers to how “through incisive, exacting depiction the authors of these stories draw out the internal trauma and engage in the naming of names,” and how “the works in this issue emanate a strongly inward-looking quality. They look squarely at all forms of desire, pointing out the wounds one after another.” Sadly, on April 27, 2017, not three months after the publication of her first and only novel, Lin Yi-han’s traumatic experience and her writing about sexual desire led to her choice to hang herself at the age of twenty-six. Her tragic life and despairing fate evoked my deepest sympathy and therefore I drafted a poem to commemorate the circumstances of her life and examine the unavoidable necessity of facing the nature of sexual desire and the final decision that she made in her life. I have included the poem below in hopes that it may correlate with the theme of this issue and provide a footnote to such writing on desire and the injury that it can bring.
A Maiden’s Prayer—Mourning Lin Yi-han
—Heaven is almost enjoyable, there is no suffering there
After being defiled she grew ill
The demons entangled her heart
Wringing out every last drop of blood
Which fell trembling on the manuscript word after word
The painful color of blood smeared
Before her eyes as she wept through the night
How could she navigate her life
That river so turbid
She could only lock herself in her room
Reading thinking praying to the demons
Praying them to let go to let her truly live
To live happily like other girls
Nightmare confessions revealed the true nature of the pain:
What had been thrust in and could not be withdrawn!
The blood that she spat out page after page melancholic lines of text
Reveal a young girl’s talent her style her compassion
And her life the remains of her pride
When arousing sensation became a habit oh, the hypocriticalreaders
How could I explain to you when I was a young girl
I fell in love with the teacher who raped me!
Her writings became the art of exorcism
Hoping to extract herself from the depravity and filth
Expelling drop by drop the defilement of her lust
Exorcizing word by word the temptation of the demons of her youth
Ah ah! from the paradise of Fang Si-ch’i’s first love
A concentration camp survivor when depression attacks
She prays over and over to the angel in her mind
Dear Lord I beg you, take me to another world
Please understand the hardship of my life
Allow me to return the hypocrisy ugliness and cruelty of humanity
To the human world allow me the true me
To break free from my cursed life
She tied a perfect knot for herself
Extended her long, graceful neck and gazed toward heaven
Then an angel of pure goodness and true love
Peered from the clouds with a smile
And beckoned earnestly to her
(May 4, 2017)
In the final analysis, trauma and writing about desire are two major themes of Taiwanese women’s literature. It is curious that of the twelve short stories in this issue, three refer to cats in their title: Huang Li-chun’s “Cat Sickness,” Shu-wen Hu’s “A Cat Floating in Blood,” and Yan Shuxia’s “Wife’s Cat.” There is a reason for this connection between cats and artists and writers. American author and arts and culture reporter Alison Nastasi has published two best-selling books, Artists and Their Cats (2015) and Writers and Their Cats (2018), which collect endearing stories about famous authors and artists and their kitties.
It is hardly necessary to mention Natsume Soseki’s I am a Cat and Lao She’s Cat Country, which are renowned examples of writers and their cats, but Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Murakami Haruki, Baudelaire and many other famous writers and artists were also infatuated with cats, to the extent of becoming their slaves. In everyday life, cats can be home companions for the lonely, sources of comfort for solitary spirits, or well-springs of creative inspiration. In Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, there are three verses devoted to cats, #34, #51, and #61. For Baudelaire, cats were embodiments of women, and desire incarnate. He wrote such a poem:
The Cat
Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart;
Hold back the talons of your paws,
Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes
Of metal and agate.
When my fingers leisurely caress you,
Your head and your elastic back,
And when my hand tingles with the pleasure
Of feeling your electric body,
In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze
Like your own, amiable beast,
Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart,
And, from her head down to her feet,
A subtle air, a dangerous perfume
Floats about her dusky body.
— Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, William Aggeler, trans. (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
Real cats, whether they be “cute,” or “mysterious,” or “pure,” or “unusual,” are all as sublime as rainbows in the imagination and aesthetic sense of the poet as they are transformed into an ambience of desire, making him “sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.”
Finally, with the completion of this issue we cannot neglect to express our special gratitude to the authors for granting us the rights to publish their work, and to our team of translators and editors for their hard work and cooperation, as well as Professor Lee’s research assistant, Tai Chun Lin, for her coordination with the authors. Our guest editor Professor Lee Kuei Yun’s selection of works and her introduction provide a clear outline of the salient contours of the issue’s theme. We also would like to thank Professor Bert Scruggs for enthusiastically recommending and contacting the translators. Aside from veteran translators John Balcom and Yingtsih Hwang, who have contributed to the journal for many years, there are a number of new faces among the translators for this issue, perhaps indicating that the time to pass the torch to the up-and-coming generation of translators has arrived. We welcome these young translators to our translation team. We also would like to thank Tu Shu-wei, who has just recently earned his PhD from the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Taiwan University. He assisted by reading over the translations and original texts of the twelve stories and offered his advice on correct renderings. Our English editor, Terence Russell, and copy editor, Fred Edwards, worked over the manuscripts of the translations to ensure their readability. Special thanks to Terence Russell, our coeditor, who has worked throughout the process of preparing the issue for publication to coordinate and bring things together. His tireless work and many contributions have been indispensable. Yen Chia-yun, the editor charged with overseeing the production of the journal at National Taiwan University Press, took responsibility for the design of the cover as well as the formatting and printing, etc. With her careful attention to detail and diligent work she has ensured that the work of producing this issue has proceeded smoothly, and for this we wish to express our deep gratitude.
The cover of this edition has been meticulously designed by the graphic designers at National Taiwan University Press. On the palette of women writers’ imaginations, women, cats and desire are tightly interwoven. That is why in the composition of the cover design, the image a woman in a pure white highlights the main theme of the issue. At the same time, phantom images of two cats are interposed; one in front of the woman, one behind, one dark, one white. Living on the land of an ever-changing Taiwan, wounded emotions seep through as a melancholy pale purple hue. This provides the foundational color. While the dark colored cat represents unbearable reminiscences of the past, the white cat represents rebirth and hope for the future. All creations are the product of a particular time and space. Reminiscence implies that which has taken place, the future is filled with infinite imaginings, and the creations of the present are for healing wounds, letting go of the past, and looking toward the future. This is what Eliot meant when he wrote:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If time past implies tradition, all creative work is rooted in present time and space, yet it also exists in the future, and in the end, it will become the tradition. We hope that these writings by the new generation of Taiwan’s women authors will bring our readers some linkages between “the present” and “the tradition.”
As our journal moves forward into its twenty-fifth year of publication, when we will produce our fiftieth volume, we hope that there will be a new generation of scholars and translators to whom we may pass the torch so that they can contribute what they are able to continue our progress down the long road of Taiwan literature in English translation, and join efforts to further open international space for the study and research of Taiwan literature.