Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century

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.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the poetry and poetics of Xia Yu (Hsia Yü 夏宇), a leading poet in the Chinese-speaking world. By focusing on the themes, language, and formal innovations of her work to date, I highlight the unique style and contributions of the poet.

In 2003 and 2004, some emerging Taiwanese novelists established the society of “Novelist-Readers” (小說家讀者, later renamed “Eight Wolves” 八P狼) in an attempt to break down the wall between high and low culture, the intellectuals and the masses, “belles-lettres” and popular fiction. They staged a series of creative literary events such as flash mobs, literary workshops, and a “live” writing experience in a bookstore’s display window. Although conservative critics took a dim view of some of these “deviant” activities, the literary achievements of the Eight Wolves eventually justified themselves and arguably brought fresh inspiration and style to the increasingly conventional literary culture and the shrinking reading public. Their writings put a great deal of emphasis on local Taiwanese cultures, which has been criticized as “post-regional literature” (後鄉土) for their representations of Taiwan in the era of globalization. Among these young writers, Egoyan Zheng (伊格言) stands out for his use of sci-fi to express serious contemporary concerns under the guise of futuristic concepts such as artificial intelligence, dream “inception,” and transhumanism in his depiction of a distant future in Dream Devourer (噬夢人, 2010) and by imagining a horrific nuclear disaster in the near future in Ground Zero (零地點, 2013). At first glance, both novels appear difficult to situate in the history of Taiwan literature. However, in this chapter, I argue that Egoyan’s works are deep and provocative reflections on Taiwan’s recent political history and ongoing search for a distinctive Taiwanese identity. The exploration of infinite time and full-scale space in Egoyan’s sci-fi worlds should be read as metaphors not merely for globalization but also for the particularities of Taiwan—its specific aspirations, fears, perplexities, and sorrows in the abiding shadow of Japanese colonialization and the KMT’s “Free China” dictatorship.

In this chapter, I will conduct a comparative reading of Zhang Yixuan’s (張亦絢) The Love that is Temporary (愛的不久時) and A Farewell Letter (永別書) and discuss the female protagonists’ traumatic memories caused by domestic violence and intimate partner violence. The two novels are written in the fashion of “traumatic realism,” a term proposed by Rothberg (2000) in an attempt to “produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture” (p. 103). As both protagonists are writers and the stories are narrated in the first-person perspective, they represent the traumatic realism “under the sign of trauma” through “self-reflexive metanarrative techniques” (Chen, 2020, p. 46). I argue that the self-reflections of the two female protagonists point to the issues of sex and sexuality, as a possible leeway in processing their traumatic memories.

This chapter introduces Paiwan author Liglav Awu (利格拉樂·阿烏), who asserts her Indigeneity by promoting tribal unity in her militant works. Since the 1990s, Awu has brought to the fore silenced Indigenous women in the margins of a predominantly Han Taiwanese society. Echoing their feelings of alienation, she defends their place and visibility by rectifying the dominant society’s arbitrary and hegemonic discourse. Awu’s literary style, drawing upon her varied cultural heritage, is open to plurality and alterity. In her writings, personal and tribal (hi)stories are interconnected, acting as a literary bridge linking Indigenous families, nationally and internationally, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples. Through this chapter, readers will acquaint themselves with Awu’s literary production—from personal narratives, detailing the experiences of a child of the “double country” who grew outside of Native tribes and stories, to the testimonies of Indigenous women, their observations and knowledges—analyzed from an emic perspective. They will also be able to grasp how social and environmental issues, made manifest in the stigmatization of Indigenous women in exile on their own land, are explored and translated by Awu into a committed literature through which these women reclaim their cultures, (hi)stories, and territories.

This chapter examines oceanic discourse in Taiwan literature with a focus on Syaman Rapongan (夏曼·藍波安), whose seafaring writing diversifies Taiwan’s land-centered Indigenous literature and goes beyond the political arena of the island-state and the long-established cross-Strait dynamic. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part tackles the overlapping of Taiwan’s Indigenous literature and marine literature with an extensive survey of Rapongan’s literary journey as an Indigenous writer, his cultural resistance against the island-state, and his love of the ocean. The second part provides a critical analysis of Rapongan’s Floating Dreams in the Ocean (大海浮夢, 2014) and Mata nu Wawa (大海之眼, 2018). Rapongan provides a deconstructive critique of the Han Chinese-dominated ideology in Taiwan and employs the Pacific Ocean as an expansive, all-encompassing entity across geographical, racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. Rapongan’s writing strategy sheds light on the heated discussions of the reproduction of Taiwan’s Indigeneity in response to the oceanic discourse of Taiwan. Through an Indigenous lens, Rapongan’s works help reshape Taiwan literature and connect Taiwan with the global tribal communities via ocean passages.

In this chapter, I explore the theme of the figure of the “migrant” in the literary works of contemporary Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi (吳明益; b. 1971). Wu Ming-yi is the author of prose collections on butterflies and other animal species endemic to Taiwan, novels on the history of the Second World War in the Pacific, and short stories and novels exploring the coming climate crisis (his novel translated into English The Man with the Compound Eyes has even been the first novel to be referred to as “Climate Fiction” by American journalist Dan Bloom, known to be the first user of the “Cli-Fi” term). For Wu Ming-yi, the phenomenon of migration is to the history of Taiwan (especially in the twentieth century), to its present (such as recent immigration displacements from Southeast Asia), and to its future (climate refugees). In this chapter, I analyze how the theme of migration as it appears in Wu’s works is at the same time a marker of both human history and environmental history in Taiwan, as well as a condition of (co)existence that inevitably transforms the neighborhoods of yesterday and tomorrow. Based on reading several works by Wu Ming-yi (collections of sanwen—prose essays—and works of fiction), my contribution will put Wu’s literature in perspective with ecocritical and philosophical studies and authors from different regions.

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwanese society has gradually moved away from a nationalist critique of Japanese colonialism to positive recognition of the contribution of Japanese colonial rule to the transformation of Taiwan into a modernized society. This view is also seen in many Taiwanese literary works in the twenty-first century. To demonstrate the complexities of “Japan” found in Taiwanese society, this chapter focuses on the literary works of the Borneo writer Li Yongping (Li Yung-ping 李永平), who lived in Taiwan for more than half a century, as well as examination of the changes represented in his writing on Japan. Li Yongping was born and grew up in Borneo and moved to Taiwan in the 1960s. Due to Borneo’s history of Japanese occupation, a strong anti-Japanism sentiment can be observed in Li’s early works. However, it is intriguing that Li’s writing on Japan has transitioned into a new phase in the twenty-first century after Li settled and lived in Taiwan for more than half a century. Hence, this chapter approaches Li Yongping’s writing on Japan by applying dual perspectives of “anti-Japanism” and “becoming-Japanese” and examines the translocal intersection of colonial consciousness between Taiwan and Borneo.

Readers have observed how Huang Chong-kai’s (黃崇凱) novels present new ways of writing the local literary history of Taiwan. In this chapter, I argue that Huang’s literary-historical intervention can also be understood in relation to his pursuit of questions of historical fate and freedom, which he raises through acts of gleaning as a writing method and a citizen’s inherent right, thus asserting a sense of common ownership to a place. I discuss Huang’s The Content of the Times (文藝春秋, 2017) and The Formosa Exchange (新寶島, 2021) as examples of the “novel of ideas,” and how Huang’s works, when viewed within this typology of a gimmick, specifically, one that reflects borrowed space and time—for example, in virtual reality and population exchange—modifies the terms of Taiwan’s diaspora across the long twentieth century. Huang also presents literary history as media history, and his fascination with extraterrestrial forms and Latin America, in particular Cuba, thus providing readers with new frameworks and entry points into studying Taiwan’s literary pasts and futures.

Kevin Chen (Chen Sihong 陳思宏; b. 1976) is a Berlin-based Taiwanese author known for his award-winning quasi-autobiographic family saga Ghost Town (鬼地方, 2019), which recounts the change of Chen’s hometown Yongjing, a rural township in central Taiwan. In 2020, Chen published Florida Metamorphosis (佛羅里達變形記), a dystopian tale about several teenagers’ unbridled adventures in Florida that ends in almost ineradicable guilt and resentment. In 2022, Chen completed his “Summer Trilogy” with the addition, The Good People Upstairs (樓上的好人), a novel straddling between Berlin and Yuanlin with a focus on the middle-aged heroine’s awakened sexuality and changed attitude toward homosexuality. Employing close reading, this chapter examines Chen’s portrayal of home (Yongjing and Yuanlin) and abroad (Florida and Berlin), especially its dialectics between the protagonists wanting to leave and being drawn back. It first analyzes the intertwining of homophobia and political authoritarianism, which makes Yongjing a ghost town. It then discusses the broken teenage protagonists’ failed escape from home and its implications in Florida Metamorphosis. Finally, it examines the repair of the “broken” body and familial relationships in The Good People Upstairs. It posits that Chen stands out from his peers for his continued exploration of many dark elements, such as homophobia, upon which his distinct “ghostly” narrative is constructed. The chapter also points out two special features of Chen’s trilogy—his nightmarish portrayal of home and body-focused writing—and that the three novels together demonstrate his unrelenting pursuit of freedom through his protagonists.

This chapter has a threefold agenda. First, it aims at positioning Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan and her literary work in the context of literary Taiwan, illustrating how identity policy, transpacific politics, and national desire intersect. Second, it demonstrates how the February 28, 1947 “impact event”—key to Ryan’s Taiwan-oriented novel Green Island—is charged with perceptual patterns that share at least three common features: a national trauma, a forced collective amnesia and, a history of betrayal. Third, it shows how Green Island employs family history to reanimate and interact with these cultural patterns by embracing and reconfiguring the traumatic experiences of the generation of witnesses/victims from a transgenerational and transnational perspective. Her ideology-oriented narrative not only formulates ethical concerns and builds a future-oriented historical consciousness, but it also creates a transpacific space from which the trans/formation of Taiwanese American identity can be negotiated against the background of trans/national history.

This chapter explores the effects of cosmopolitanism on racialized immigrants in the context of Taiwan and Japan. Using the two female characters, a Taiwan-born Japanese lesbian citizen and a Japan-born Taiwanese straight-identifying citizen, in Li Kotomi’s novella Count Down to Five Seconds of Crescent Moon (2019/2021), this chapter argues that the practice of cosmopolitanism should not be necessarily considered as empowering; instead, it must take into account broader factors such as immigration policies or national discourses in the cosmopolitan subjects’ host nations. The chapter provides two examples of the practice of cosmopolitanism, the speech of secondary language and the consumption of foreign cuisine, to demonstrate that the embodied effects of characters’ cosmopolitan practices can be both connective and restraining. It introduces the concept “minor transnationalism” proposed by Lionnet and Shih (2005) to accentuate the connectivity generated across the minoritized immigrant characters.