Working Papers

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Modern Taiwan Literature

台灣文學的風起雲湧

(Routledge Companion to Taiwan Studies, 2024)

Chapter 23

Ping-hui Liao

 To update our last interpretive account of modern Taiwan literature, we highlight two more recent trends: postmodern parody and vernacular cosmopolitan.  They largely grow out of a context in which Taiwan must cultivate its international visibility as it is constantly threatened by China in the forms of economic, military, and diplomatic pressure. To find new ways to rearticulate the local traditions has become a disruptive impulse for many Taiwanese writers, when they realize that they can’t naively claim themselves to be just cultural members of the Sinophone (or a Greater China) community.  In many respects, postmodern cynicism or parody offers a vernacular alternative or twist in exposing the global cultural politics as provincial and unstable, or even deepfake and implosively obscene.  A new ethical and aesthetical awakening about what makes Taiwanese culture relatively unique enables writers such as Chu Tianwen to offer parodic views of postmodern cultural products from the West—simulacra, mindfulness, or even queer discourse.  Younger generations even go steps further by giving voices  to the local, in learning from the environments, the subaltern, or the almost obliterated, if not totally forgotten. Wu Ming-yi’s semi-autobiographical novel regarding father’s stolen bicycle, for one, takes us back to not merely the family histories, but the multiple traces of Taiwan’s colonial past. His more recent work, The Land of Little Rain, draws on a cosmopolitan work by Mary Austin while revealing instances of climate science across borders.  Contemporary Taiwanese authors follow their footsteps in tracing the hidden clues and by unearthing what lies buried.  As a result,  ghost stories prevail, often fused with science fiction and LGBTQ, local politics, social media, artificial intelligence, multisensorial (memory, affect, among others) dimensions.

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Wu Ming-yi's Search for a Planetary Intelligence: The Land of Little Rain in Re-vision

吳明益的苦雨之地

(Cambria, 2024)

Ping-hui Liao

“There’s a language without question marks.

You can read it in the rings of trees.

And in the wind and the river.

And in the sound of birds singing.

Has their song changed since they sang it once in Eden?”

--Gene Scheer, “The First Morning of the World” / Joyce DiDonato, Eden (2022)

In her foreword to the 2022 CD titled Eden, American mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato reveals how she renews hope and perseveres during the long Covid period of isolation and loss.  She admits that several pieces of music help sustain her, among them, a song based on Gene Scheer’s poem, “The First Morning of the World.” The affirmative tone that opens the poem quoted here does not appear to be a song in celebration of pre-Edenic innocence or of nostalgic memory. On the contrary, it employs the past perfect tense to ask a complex question: “Has their song changed since they sang it once in Eden?”  Intricately, the speaker refers to birds, trees, wind, and river, among other beings, to mend our anthropocentric conception of the cosmos on top of raising a planetary consciousness. In many ways, it is also an echo or even hymn to what Wu Ming-yi highlights in a recent collection of short stories.

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