Homegrown Stories: Gan Yao-Ming’s Fiction

This chapter introduces short stories and novels written by Gan Yao-ming (甘耀明) vis-à-vis the genre of xiangtu fiction. I consider possible influences of the Hakka writer’s employment as a reporter and teacher on his fiction: especially the preponderance of youth in his novel Killing Ghosts (殺鬼) and selected short stories, and the surfeit of details and dialects found elsewhere. On dialect, I draw parallels with Paul Kingsnorth, Mark Twain, cinematography, and period piece films. On details, I note similarities to Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and bring to the table maximalist and encyclopedic novels. Furthermore, I suggest the idea of anime-realism partially to augment suggestions by Liou Liang-ya on the cartoonish qualities of Killing Ghosts and partially to augment arguments for reading Gan’s writing as Magical Realism by Chia-rong Wu and others. I conclude that these texts offer a growing body of xiangtu fiction to study with an evolving language and map of Taiwan; they offer a new critical and literary link to several historical moments including Japanese colonization, Retrocession, and martial law; and they offer impetus for overdue meditations on marginalized populations of women and Indigenous persons so often overlooked in research focused on local, homegrown, xiangtu culture.