Considering just how much Taiwan is in the news these days, right between China's imminent accession to the World Trade Organization and the United States' unfolding plans to develop a missile defense system against potential attack by Chinese-developed (or even Chinese) missiles, I thought it was time to try to understand the voice of the "rogue province," Chinese Taipei, the Republic of China, or Taiwan.
Short of reading the volumes of "literature" put out by the powerful Taiwan lobby in the U.S. I was at a loss for where to turn for my taste of Taiwan. That was until an advance copy of "Wild Kids" by Chang Ta-chun, Taiwan's best-selling author of all time, landed on my desk from the Columbia University Press.
"Wild Kids" turned out to be not only just the window on Taiwan I was looking for, but also a quick and enjoyable Summer read. It is not without depth nor short of something to sink your teeth into. Though the book is short -- the gathering together of two coming-of-age novellas -- it managed to leave me with both a kind of Spring optimism befitting its youthful characters but also a odd sense of apprehension usually found in folk with a few decades under their belts.
Its playful humor, born of often painful self-awareness, proved a tiny but addictive taste of a feeling akin to what many Taiwanese must have felt when they ushered in a new President and a new political party this March by electing Chen Shui-bian. Free to choose for themselves I imagine they were at once elated but almost as equally wary of the result.
Existentialism, Taipei Style
The two novellas, "My Kid Sister" and the shorter "Wild Child" are actually the second and third parts of a trilogy that began with what translator Michael Berry said was the greatest piece of publishing success in Taiwan's history. That first segment, not yet available in English, is in the form of a longer journal entry of a middle school child in Taiwan. Its first person narrator, Big Head Spring, carries over as a "sociological phenomena," said Berry, into the two newer novellas. "But the characters are so different as to be different people," Berry said.
Big Head Spring is a watcher. He watches his family, his little sister in particular, with the eye, and often the mind, of a psychiatrist glowering at the couch. No small wonder since Chang has his narrator discovering Sartre and Freud just as his interest in girls blossoms. Big Head's father is trysting with an artist, leaving his mother to go mad by herself. His sister, a kind of imaginary ideal, gets hurt and pregnant and asks interminable questions about the nature of love. Big Head Spring is at turns fascinated and disturbed by the indiscretions and foibles of his family.
Of course, many of Big Head's more painful realizations about young life in a dysfunctional family are good for belly laughs. His ability to remember and reflect on the details of his family and, rather like a young existentialist, string those eccentricities together in an equation amounting not to nothingness, but to an edgy excuse for living.
Catcher in the Rye
Big Head's excuse for living turns out to be writing. Like the author, according to Berry, the narrator draws on real life experience and people to paint and occupy his tales. He gains fame and recognition "profiteering" from his family's stories and even scores with the ladies, promising each some tidbit of immortality in a story he might someday write. Not unlike so many coming of age novels in the English language tradition, "Wild Kids" is peppered with popular culture. Instead of being a hindrance to the non-Taiwanese reader, it's amusing to grasp just how many of Taiwan's pop idols were born in Reagan's America.
Chang Ta-chun's portraits of modern youth in Taiwan in the 1980s provide an excellent lens though which to view America's influence on Greater China and grasp at a better understanding of the post-colonial legacy endured by the island nation caught between today's two great powers, the PRC and the U.S.A.
Though the second novella, "Wild Child," might be read as a Taiwanese version of J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", I found "My Kid Sister" more compelling for the depth of its cast of characters. It, too, has a good dose of Salinger in it, but never seems to actually copy the revered American literary hermit. Chang Ta-chun is anything but a hermit. He's hosted television talk shows and his books have been turned into popular stage plays in Taiwan and Hong Kong in recent years. The stage version of "My Kid Sister" won the Best Director award in Taiwan in 1999, and starred Wan Fang, one of Taiwan's biggest pop music icons.
Chang's favored Western writers are Raymond Chandler and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, according to Berry. Their influences are reflected in Chang's sense of man's complex place in the shadows and bright spots of the modern urban landscape and in his narrators' fantastic imaginations. But, as Berry points out in his preface to "Wild Kids", Chang Ta-chun also tips his hat to the knight errant tales of traditional Chinese fable and opera. His characters do too, even if only in half-hearted references to the complex animal that is Taiwan, fast-fading today as a new generation of Taiwanese citizens try to hold their ground between China and the West.
Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up will be published in hardcover by the Columbia University Press in September, 2000. Order Wild Kids from Amazon.com
Other works by Chang Ta-chun (Zhang Dachun in pinyin) translated into English:
"Alley 116, Liaoning Street." Translator, Ying-tsih Hwang. The Chinese Pen (Winter 1992): pp. 53-59.
"Birds of a Feather." Translator, Hsin-sheng C. Kao. In Joseph S.M. Lau, ed., The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction Since 1926. Bloomington: Iowa University Press, 1983, pp. 262-75.
"The General's Monument." Translators, Ying-tsih Hwang and John Balcom. The Chinese Pen (Spring 1987): 58-84. Rpt in Michael S. Duke, ed., Worlds of Modern Chinese Fiction. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991, 13-28; and in Pang-yuan Chi, ed., Taiwan Literature in Chinese and English. Taipei: Commonwealth Publishing, 1999, pp. 177-239.
"A Guided Tour of an Apartment Complex." Translator, Chen I-djen. The Chinese Pen (Winter 1989): pp. 1-24.
"Lucky Worries About His Country." Translator, Chu Chiyu. Renditions 35-36 (1991): 130-43. Also in Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 460-73.
"Speaker of the Aside." Translator, Hwang Ying-tsih. The Chinese Pen (Winter 1986): pp. 75-85.
"Ximi in the Metropolis." In Kwok-kan Tam, Terry Siu-Han Yip, Wimal Dissanayake, editors. A Place of One's Own: Stories of Self in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. NY: Oxford University, 1999, pp. 376-89.
"The Wall." Translator, Chen I-Djen. The Chinese Pen (Summer 1987): pp. 1-21.
