The National Palace Museum
The National Palace Museum
Whereas most literary practices in Taiwan until the 1920s carried on the classical Chinese tradition, a new strand of modern Taiwanese literature emerged in the early 1920s in a process commonly referred to as the Taiwanese New Literature movement (T’ai-wan hsin wen-hsueh yun-tung).1 Compared to its counterpart, Modern (vernacular) Chinese Literature, Taiwanese New Literature displayed two distinctive features that seem to universally characterize colonial cultural products: multilinguisity and political impact. In addition to works in Chinese, many of the literary products of this movement—especially in the later stage—were written in Japanese. There was also a viable Taiwanese language movement (T’ai-wan hua-wen yun-tung) in the early 1930s, advocating the use of a new written language based on spoken Taiwanese, which is a version of the southern Min dialect used by the majority of the population in Taiwan. Moreover, from the beginning, Taiwanese New Literature was an integral part of a new phase of sociopolitical resistance by the Taiwanese people to the Japanese colonial rule. In the 1920s, the Taiwanese intelligentsia, revolving around the Taiwanese Cultural Association (T’ai-wan wen-hua hsieh-hui) (1921–31), launched a large-scale cultural reform program with a political agenda, which replaced the futile and often brutally suppressed armed revolts in the first two decades of the Japanese period. Key figures of the early stage of the movement, such as Lai Ho (1894–1943), frequently regarded as the “father of Taiwanese New Literature,” Chen Hsu-ku (1896–1965), and Ts’ai Ch’iu-t’ung (b. 1900), were also active members of the Cultural Association, participating in its well-known islandwide lecture tours. Unsurprisingly, their literary works contained a strong nationalistic component. Even after 1931, when a harsh crackdown by the colonial government put an end to the lively resistance activities of the previous decade, the New Literature, nourished by the sociopolitical movements of the 1920s, continued to grow among the increasingly bilingual intellectual class in Taiwan. The legacy of resistance to colonialism also persisted, in either overt or covert forms, until the very end of the Japanese period.
However, the broadly defined political nature of the Taiwanese New Literature refers not only to explicit criticism of the colonizers, in works by such undaunted anti-imperialist fighters as Lai Ho and Yang K’ui (1906–1985), but also to the cultural hybridity in later works of the Taiwanese New Literature movement written in Japanese. That tongue, as the colonizer’s language, is by definition a political product and thus is shaped by an unjust power relationship. The first generation of writers of the Taiwanese New Literature, even though most of them were born after the Japanese takeover, still exhibited characteristically Chinese cultural and artistic outlooks; but the second generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers exhibited a notable shift. This shift, the overall increase in the degree of hybridity in Taiwanese culture in the second half of the Japanese period, can be explained by changes in the colonizer’s governing policies.
Beginning in 1918–19, the Japanese adopted an effective assimilation policy (nei-ti yen-ch’ang chu-yi, or the principle of treating Taiwan as an extension of Japan proper), which moved from high-handed police control and differential treatment of the Taiwanese to more enlightened civil governance, emphasis on education, and cultivation of a more congenial relationship between Japanese and Taiwanese. As the new colonial condition steadily took shape and Japanese-language education became more effectively implemented, more students in the colony went to study in Japan. Those among them who enrolled in college literary departments and had contact with famous Japanese writers later played influential roles in Taiwan’s literary scene. An even more drastic change was that, during the last phase of the Japanese period (1937–45), as Japan declared war on China, the colonial government mobilized great social resources to enforce an intensified Japanization program, including a ban on Chinese-language publications.
The hybrid nature of the colonial literature should not be regarded with embarrassment, as it often has been by narrow-minded nationalists, but, rather, as a true testimony to collective atrocities done by one culture to another in the period of imperialist expansion. A state comprising Han settlers since the seventeenth century and a province of the Manchu-governed China since 1885, Taiwan in the early part of the twentieth-century was incorporated by Japan into a different geopolitical and economic system and as a result experienced the initial stages of modernization because of its East Asian colonizer, which had itself recently modernized based on the Western model. The kind of society produced in Taiwan by this process was inevitably of a hybrid nature, with modern and traditional institutions of different ethnic origins coexisting side by side. What makes it even more complicated is Taiwan’s strategic position in Japan’s imperialist project and its capacity to serve as a base for Japan’s further advancement in South China and Southeast Asia. For this reason, it allegedly received relatively benign treatment from the Japanese—as compared to Japan’s other colonies, such as Korea—which considerably mitigated the hostility between the colonizer and the colonized. The colonial condition in Taiwan is thus a product of the extremely intricate political and cultural negotiations between the colonial government and the local elite, and between the elite and the more disadvantaged classes in a capitalist economy, for whom the progressive intellectuals served as spokesmen. Because writers of Taiwanese New Literature overlap considerably with the last group, their work offers rich materials for general studies of colonialism, which have until now largely overlooked the East Asian experience.
Viewed from another perspective, the fact that such fine Taiwanese writers of the later period as Chang Wen-huan (1909–1978), Lu Ho-jo (1914–1950), Yang K’ui, and Lung Ying-tsung (b. 1911) achieved their distinctive art under the influence of Western artistic trends through Japanese literary institutions exemplified the frequently convoluted trajectory of cross-cultural literary influences. And this is by no means a purely artistic phenomenon: Appropriation of Western literary codes constitutes a crucial part of the larger Westernization program undertaken by East Asian intellectuals in the past century and a half. Whereas an individual government’s official policies toward the West vary, as a pervasive intellectual discourse, the Westernization program invariably promotes the assimilation of Western cultural products as a means of self-strengthening, that is, of equipping oneself for the Western-dominated modern world. Thus bilingual intellectuals with access to knowledge of a foreign culture, while endowed with useful personal capital, also unwittingly play a part in the country’s publicly conceived nationalist project.
From the point of view of cultural studies, this nationalist project operates with a negative logic: Its potency rests precisely in its ability to challenge, by virtue of its reformist or oppositional discourse, the dominant culture in the native context. Thus such literary trends as Realism before World War II and Modernism after the War, with their specific—emancipatory, revolutionary, or liberalizing—ideologies, have served, for several East Asian countries, as powerful alternative intellectual discourses vis-à-vis the dominant cultures. The Taiwanese colonial intellectuals’ involvement in this cross-national East Asian movement, because of their peculiar environment—the facts that the dominant culture in Taiwan was a mixture of Chinese and Japanese elements and that the particular form of their nationalism was increasingly plagued with a sense of indeterminacy (Chinese or Taiwanese?)—constitutes an exceptional case that demands better understanding.
As stated earlier, the Taiwanese New Literature movement began as part of a larger cultural reform movement during the 1920s. A brief introduction of this cultural movement, sometime called Taiwanese New Culture movement (T’ai-wan hsin wen-hua yun-tung) may be in order. The first events of this movement took place in 1920, when some Taiwanese expatriates in Tokyo organized the New People Association (Hsin-min hui), followed by a student-based Taiwanese Youth Association (T’ai-wan ch’ing-nien hui). The two organizations published a journal called Taiwan Youth (T’ai-wan ch’ing-nien) to propagate progressive ideas and voice opinions about the current state of affairs in Taiwan. The zeal for cultural reform soon spread to the island itself and was carried on by the Taiwanese Cultural Association. There were significant parallels between the Taiwanese New Culture movement and China’s May Fourth movement (wu-ssu yun-tung).2 First of all, intellectuals in both societies, faced with the imperative to modernize, identified the cultural sediments of the neo-Confucianist moralism and the feudalist social orders as the reactionary forces that obstruct progress. Inspired by democratic ideas of modern Western society, both groups had come to associate the “old” with the conservative mentality of the gentry class and the “new” with ways of the “modern citizen”—to be transformed through popular education and cultural enlightenment. The idea of social Darwinism, which equates rejuvenation of national culture with survival of the people, adds to the urgency of the task of cultural reform as a means of national self-preservation. In addition, the new intellectuals of both societies were acted upon by the dynamics of progressive discourses on national emancipation and socialist revolution in years after World War I. Such currents of thought created an imaginary alliance among the “weak and oppressed” nations in the world and provided a powerful rationale for nationalistic resistance by victims of imperialist aggression, as obviously China and Taiwan both were. Thus a patriotic discourse combining and constantly negotiating the two components of socioculturel modernization (cultural enlightenment) and anti-imperialism (national salvation, anticolonialism) was developed in the 1920s and shared by the new intellectuals in both China and Taiwan.
Although the first two issues of the journal Taiwanese Youth contained articles on the topics of language reform and the need for contemporary Taiwanese literature to rejuvenate itself, it was not until the heated New Versus Old Literary debate (hsin-chiu wen-hsueh lun-chan), which began with Chang Wo-chun’s attack on traditional poets in 1924 and lasted until 1926, that the Taiwanese New Literature movement was formally launched.3 During the debate, new literary concepts—mainly those focusing on the advantage of adopting vernacular Chinese as a new literary medium and the social function of literature in the modern age—were introduced, criticized, and defended. Traditional poets were castigated for using literature to achieve social gains and political favor, and their literary style was criticized as hackneyed and insincere. Advocates of New Literature, on the other hand, were branded as shallow and ignorant charlatans, and their literary views were seen as ungrounded in solid learning. The result was a visible division in the cultural field. As in the case of many literary debates in modern times, the pumped-up antagonism between opposite sides of the participants precluded a meaningful exchange of ideas, and there was very little theoretically sound defense on the ground of aesthetics. Rather, the debate performed an important ritualistic function: After the debate, traditional literary activities were increasingly confined to poetry clubs that continued to thrive but with limited social reach, while New Literature was legitimized as a powerful social institution. Through this institution, the new intellectuals denounced their Chinese cultural heritage—in part by making traditional men of letters and their world views into scapegoats—and endorsed a vision of “modern civilization.” The denunciation and the vision constituted the major component of Taiwanese New Literature for at least a decade.
If the two New Culture movements in China and Taiwan were analogous but separate, the relationship between the Chinese and Taiwanese New Literature movements, as constituting parts of the former, was actually much closer. At the initial stage, terms of literary reform in the Taiwanese New Literature movement nearly copied those of its slightly earlier Chinese counterpart (1917–25). When Chang Wo-chun wrote the polemical essays that triggered the Old Versus New Literary debate, he was a student at Peking Normal University. During the debate, the major tenets of the May Fourth literary revolution, such as Hu Shih’s “principle of eight don’ts” (pa-pu chu-yi) from his “Preliminary Suggestions for a Literary Reform” (Wen-hsueh kai-liang ch’u-yi) were introduced with slight modifications. Even the harsh way Chang Wo-chun castigated the traditional poets is immediately reminiscent of the radical Chinese reformist Ch’en Tu-hsiu. Furthermore, throughout the decade of the 1920s, creative works by Chinese New Literature writers, such as Lu Hsun, Hu Shih, Kuo Mo-jo, Ping Hsin, Wang Lu-yen, and Ling Shu-hua, were reprinted in Taiwanese journals and undoubtedly served as literary models.
However, within a decade, this dependent relationship began to change. Apparently, during this time the deepening of Japanese colonization had begun to structurally transform the society of Taiwan and veered it further away from China. Consciousness of this new reality among the Taiwanese intellectuals manifested itself in two consecutive literary debates in 1931–32: the Nativist Literary debate (hsiang-t’u wen-hsueh lun-chan) and the Taiwanese Language debate (T’ai-wan hua wen lun-chan), which represented a turning point in the Taiwanese New Literature movement.
The Nativist Literary debate testified to the prominent leftist influence on Taiwan’s literary scene. The literary program proposed by its chief advocate, Huang Shih-hui—suggesting that writers target their creative works at the working class—was clearly modeled after the leftist concept of proletarian literature. And the split of the Taiwanese Cultural Association in 1927 was primarily a result of disagreement between the nationalist right wing and the socialist left wing over resistance strategies. After the split, the Association was controlled by the left-wing members, led by Lien Wen-ch’ing and Wang Min-ch’uan. The more moderate members formed the Taiwanese People’s Party (T’ai-wan min-tsung tang) and continued to fight for greater constitutional rights for the Taiwanese people. Yet the political climate in the colony was so disillusioning that even the Taiwanese People’s Party later displayed a leftward leaning tendency and in 1931 was forced to dissolve by the colonial government.
This phenomenon can be attributed in part to the popularity of various strands of leftist thought around the world at the time. More important, it should be seen as a consequence of the rapid social transition Taiwan underwent in the 1920s. At its initial stage, the Taiwanese New Culture movement focused on cultural enlightenment to address the society’s internal needs to modernize; the main targets of its attack were old Chinese customs and the lingering social ills of feudalism. As Taiwan proceeded along the course of modernization, however, new types of social problems arose. The worldwide economic depression in the early 1930s made typical social problems of a capitalist society, such as unemployment and class exploitation, even more manifest, which necessarily contributed to the thriving of socialist ideology in Taiwan and, subsequently, the rise of hard-core nativism.
Primarily concerned with internal social problems and conflicts between classes, leftist intellectuals called for a Taiwan-centered literature. Aside from a class-oriented literary view, Huang Shih-hui also was known for forcefully arguing that Taiwanese writers should write in their own language and write about things in their own homeland. Considered by historians to be following the direction of “self-improvement based on one province (Taiwan)” (yi-tao kai-liang chu-yi), advocates of Nativist Literature clearly envisioned a “Taiwanese consciousness” as something to be distinguished from the more inclusive “Chinese consciousness,” or ethnic Han consciousness.
This Taiwanese consciousness was precisely the core spirit of Kuo Ch’iu-sheng’s campaign for Taiwanese language the following year. The Taiwanese language debate, with the literary journal Nan-yin as its major forum, revealed the anxieties and ambivalent feelings of a colonized people in their attempts to develop a national language. As an effort to assert the Taiwanese subjectivity, the movement also, even by implication, functioned to sever the Taiwanese intellectuals’ emotional ties to China. Primarily, the movement called attention to the fact that early advocates of the Taiwanese New Literature had followed the Chinese model of the May Fourth movement too closely. They had thus unwittingly mistaken the latter’s problematics and strategies for their own, without giving proper attention to the objective circumstances of Taiwan.
To facilitate popular education in a country with an extremely high illiteracy rate, advocates of the May Fourth movement proposed to replace the difficult, obsolete classical Chinese language with modern Chinese vernacular as the official written language. The basic theoretical assumption was that, since there would be a close correspondence between the spoken and written versions of modern Chinese, as reflected in the famous slogan “wo-shou hsieh wo-hsin” (My hand writes down whatever my mouth utters), the efforts required to become literate in Chinese would be greatly lessened. In reality, however, a standard Chinese vernacular was yet to be popularized within the country; people from different regions still predominantly used dialects for daily communication; and some Chinese dialects are mutually unintelligible. There was, to be sure, a considerable disparity between the standard Chinese vernacular and the southern Min dialect used by the majority of Taiwanese. Moreover, as Taiwan had already been politically separated from China for more than two decades, its people had many fewer channels for learning the standard Chinese vernacular through public institutions such as education, publications, or a state bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, early advocates of the Taiwanese New Literature movement still favored the adoption of Chinese vernacular as the medium for Taiwanese New Literature. The fact that this position was uncontested at the time shows that by then the ethnic-cultural identity of Taiwanese intellectuals was still predominantly Chinese. One popular argument they espoused was that, since most of the Taiwanese gentry class members were still tutored in the written language of classical Chinese in their childhood, minimal additional efforts would be needed to enable them to use the Chinese vernacular as a literary medium. The advantage of this was that it would facilitate the circulation of Taiwanese literary works in the larger Chinese community, which shows that Chinese recognition was still regarded as significant symbolic capital by Taiwanese intellectuals. In practice, however, despite the good will among most Taiwanese New Literature writers, the disadvantages were by no means negligible. It is said that Lai Ho had to write his works in classical Chinese first, then translate them into the Chinese vernacular, and finally revise them with the more lifelike Taiwanese colloquialisms. Yang Shou-yu (1905–1959), a writer well versed in the Chinese vernacular style, regularly had to rewrite the works submitted for publication when he served as the editor for the literary section of the Taiwanese People’s Newspaper (T’ai-wan min-pao). Such a cumbersome and laborious process works against the fundamental principle of realistic literary writing, which explains why the kind of re-evaluation offered by the Taiwanese Language movement was well received even by Lai Ho, whose cultural identity was ostensibly Chinese.
Without political enforcement, however, the goals of the Taiwanese language movement were very difficult to realize. The fact that many words in the Taiwanese spoken language do not have corresponding Chinese characters made the development of a new writing system an enormous undertaking, beyond the reach of private groups. It is said that Lai Ho, after extensively using the Taiwanese language in writing his short story “A Comrade’s Letter of Criticism” (Yi-ko t’ung-chih te p’i-hsin) (1935), was so frustrated with the experiment that he completely stopped writing fiction in the New Literature style. The colonial government, unsurprisingly, tried to cripple such a nationalistically motivated project, seeing it as an obstacle to the implementation of Japanese as the official language in Taiwan. The Taiwanese language debate thus reveals a typical dilemma facing colonized people: Because the project to develop a new national language based on the native tongue was conceived mainly as a linguistic strategy of resistance and as a means of asserting one’s own identity, it did not receive the political support required for its success. Despite the failure, the Taiwanese language movement must be regarded as a significant turning point in the Taiwanese New Literature movement. After 1931 there was a marked decline in the number of works by Chinese New Literature writers reprinted in Taiwanese journals. From this point on, the development of Taiwanese New Literature began to consciously depart from the Chinese model and embark on a path of its own.
The crackdown on leftist organizations and the general suppression of sociopolitical movements in 1931 ironically heralded a period of maturation and growth for Taiwanese New Literature, which began in the mid-1920s as part of the cultural reform, anticolonial social movement. In the following decade, various literary organizations were formed and new literary journals mushroomed. Having passed its initial, experimental stage, the new literary form, particularly in technical respects, made impressive progress during this period. Whereas the first generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers continued to be productive, a group of young talents also joined the ranks. There was, however, a notable gap between the two generations of Taiwanese New Literature writers in terms of cultural outlook, aesthetic preference, and vocational orientation. This apparent disjuncture in the relatively brief history of Taiwanese New Literature is noteworthy, as it points to a rapidly changing cultural landscape in the second half of Taiwan’s Japanese period.
It has been argued that, by the time the New Literature movement began, the cultural identity of Taiwanese intellectuals was still predominantly Chinese—despite the fact that Taiwan had already been a Japanese colony for more than two decades. Members of an ordinary Taiwanese gentry family were still sufficiently exposed to the Chinese cultural tradition, as children were still sent to private tutorial classes, or shu-fang—the number of which decreased sharply in the late 1910s—to study classical Chinese. Most of the first generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers, as members of the traditional gentry class, were well versed in classical Chinese and competent in traditional Chinese poetry writing, a practice to which some of them reverted after Chinese publications were banned in 1937. The fact that there were no substantial changes in the ethnic content of cultural production is attributable to the particular colonial policies applied to Taiwan during the first two decades of Japanese rule. Acknowledging that the colony had a separate history of its own, the Japanese were primarily concerned with maintaining social stability, rather than culturally assimilating the Taiwanese people. The cultural upbringing and imagination of Taiwanese writers whose formative years took place during the first half of the Japanese period were therefore not fundamentally transformed by colonial rule, even though most of them also were trained in Japanese and received a modern education. Lai Ho, for example, went to a modern-style medical school and knew the Japanese language well, but he never used it in his creative writing. More important, as evinced in both his writing and the role he played in the literary community, he was in many ways an exemplary traditional Chinese intellectual.
Significantly influenced by the May Fourth movement and its reformist ideology, this generation of Taiwanese writers primarily played a historical role as new intellectuals in a premodern society struggling to break away from the past and to usher in progressive social visions. The past, however, was still very much with them. It can be easily demonstrated that, compared to their younger followers, this generation of Taiwanese writers carried over a considerable cultural legacy from the Chinese tradition in their works in the New Literature style. The fact that many of their works were concerned with criticism of the “spiritual ills” of Taiwanese society directly reflects the moralist world view of neo-Confucianism and the traditional intellectuals’ value system. The formal quality of literary works by writers of this generation also displays a transitional character. The omniscient narrative point of view and episodic plot structure were obvious traits inherited from Chinese vernacular fiction. Although the modern short story, the novel, and free verse were essentially forms imported from the West, this generation of Taiwanese writers’ assimilation of Western literary techniques and artistic conceptions was largely superficial.
The situation, however, was very different among writers born later (Yang K’ui was born in 1906; Ch’en Huo-ch’uan, 1908; Weng Nao, 1908; Chang Wen-huan, 1909; Lung Ying-tsung, 1911; Lu Ho-jo, 1914; and Wang Ch’ang-hsiung, 1916). During those writers’ formative years, the colonial cultural institutions were increasingly consolidated, and there was consequently a marked decrease in the value of Chinese learning as cultural capital. Overall, unlike their immediate predecessors, the generation of Taiwanese writers active in the 1930s and 1940s did not have a solid background in traditional Chinese learning and demonstrated a more hybrid cultural identity. (As the scholar Hsu Chun-ya pointed out, the use of Japanese language in literary creation gradually increased after 1933, and, by 1936 and 1937, there were very few works written in Chinese.) At the same time, rapid social change is the norm in twentieth-century non-Western countries, and Japanese colonization accelerated Taiwan’s modernization even further. The gap between the social visions of the two generations of writers was even more remarkable, as the younger writers were raised in a more modern society than that of their predecessors. The following example illustrates this point: Several critics have pointed out that Lai Ho seemed to be obsessed with the abusive power of laws and regulations enforced by the colonial government and its agents. These critics often justified Lai Ho’s criticism by noting that police control was notoriously harsh in Taiwan during the Japanese period. Nevertheless, judging from many passages in Lai Ho’s fiction in which he meditated on the demarcation line between justice and law from various philosophical points of view, one gets the impression that his ideals and frame of reference still derived from a premodern, Confucianist world view. The fact that younger writers tended to present both the evil and the benign sides of the law indicates that these writers held a more realistic view of the modern judicial system, in spite of discriminatory colonial practices. The different attitudes toward this particular issue demonstrates that in many ways the two generations of Taiwanese writers perceived differently how individuals related to the society at large.
Another significant factor is that the younger writers were oriented to the literary profession in an entirely different manner from Lai Ho’s generation. The 1930s saw the emergence of a new cohort of writers who had studied in Japan, a group that constituted the majority of second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers. While in Japan, these aspiring young Taiwanese writers found themselves on the periphery of an entirely different cultural system, and many of them began earnestly to seek membership in the Japanese literary institutions. They enrolled in university literary classes, attended salons revolving around famous writers, and, above all, joined literary contests, which seemed to be an effective way of earning recognition from the “center,” or mainstream Japanese literary circles (often referred to as chung-yang wen-t’an). Yang K’ui, Lu Ho-jo, and Lung Ying-tsung were winners of literary prizes in the mid-1930s. Because Japanese assimilation of the West surpassed that of Chinese in the same period, the Taiwanese writers’ knowledge of Japanese enabled them to gain a closer grasp of Western artistic concepts and, more important, of the kind of vocational vision that artists in a modern society often take for granted. As they came to perceive themselves as professional artists, with technical expertise and individual aesthetic vision, it is less conceivable that they would ever become such spiritual leaders as Lu Hsun or Lai Ho, whose status as major writers derived from personal charisma and outstanding moral character as well as literary talent.
Apparently, the younger writers enjoyed access to a wide range of literary models, mainly from the West, as shown by the remarkable diversity of their works in terms of both artistic mode and ideological outlook. To give a few examples: Yang K’ui adhered to the more orthodox leftism and dedicated his literary works to humanitarian criticisms of class exploitation, imperialism, and general evils in a capitalist society. Chang Wen-huan’s approach is more humanistic in a liberal vein. His interest in the mystic power of the individual’s inner self, projected onto nature, resulted in some well-crafted lyrical pieces. Lu Ho-jo successfully emulated naturalism, offering realistic portraits of Taiwan’s degenerate gentry class through “typical characters.” Lung Ying-tsung’s works showed influences of symbolism, delicately aesthetic, with touches of decadence and agonistic impulses.
It is perhaps ironic that, whereas early advocates of the Taiwanese New Literature movement insisted on using vernacular Chinese to ensure a place in the Chinese literary world, two out of three Taiwanese stories first collected in anthologies published in China—“The Newspaper Man” (Sung-pao fu) by Yang K’ui; “The Oxcart” (Niu-ch’e), by Lu Ho-jo; and another Chinese-language story by Yang Hua (1900–1936), “The Ill-fated” (Po-ming)—were translated from Japanese. The high reputation these two stories enjoyed clearly derived from the fact that they had won prizes in literary contests sponsored by important Japanese magazines. Furthermore, Hu Feng, the editor of the Chinese collections in which these stories were published, Mountain Spirit: Short Stories from Korea and Taiwan (Shan-ling: Ch’ao-hsien T’ai-wan tuan-p’ien hsiao-shuo chi) and Anthology of Stories from Weak and Small Nations in the World (Shih-chieh jo-hsiao min-tzu hsiao-shuo hsuan), was a renowned leftist literary theorist. The fact that Hu selected Yang and Lu’s stories in recognition of their anti-imperialist spirit points to an extremely complex relationship between the Taiwanese authors and their Japanese colonizer, who simultaneously played the roles of the oppressor and the bestower of cultural prestige. Such facts eloquently speak to the profoundly ambivalent cultural positions in which the second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers found themselves in the 1930s.
After the Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, the colonial government in Taiwan started an intensive Japanization program and banned the Chinese-language sections in newspapers and magazines. The impact of the harsh reality of war was not, however, fully felt until 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and touched off the Pacific War. The year 1937, for example, still saw the publication of a literary magazine Wind and Moon (Feng-yueh pao, the only Chinese-language magazine of this period), which featured popular types of literati writings, such as pulp romance, familiar essays, and occasional pieces of traditional scholarship, and enjoyed wide circulation. A literary organization consisting mainly of Japanese writers also published in 1940 an aesthetically oriented journal, Literary Taiwan. With the escalation of the Pacific War, however, the Japanese stepped up their war campaign efforts and actively began to mobilize people in the colony to make a contribution to the “Greater East Asian War” (ta Tung-ya chan-cheng). Between 1941 and 1943, Literary Taiwan chimed in with the colonial government’s call for arms and published such stories as “The Volunteer Soldier” (Chih-yuen ping), by Chou Chin-po (b. 1920), “The Way” (Tao), by Ch’en Huo-ch’uan (b. 1908), and other unabashedly propagandistic poems and plays. Several well-known second-generation writers of Taiwanese New Literature, disapproving of both the political stance and artistic orientation of Literary Taiwan, formed their own literary organization and began to publish Taiwanese Literature in 1941. Before the two journals were forced to merge by the government under the new name Taiwanese Literature and Art (T’ai-wan wen-yi) in 1944, Taiwanese Literature published perhaps the most important works of the second-generation of writers of the Taiwanese New Literature: “Capon” (Yen-chi) and “Night Monkeys” (Yeh-yuen), by Chang Wen-huan; “Wealth, Offspring, and Longevity” (Ts’ai-tzu shou), “Peace for the Entire Family” (Ho-chia p’ing-an), and “Guava” (Shih-liu), by Lu Ho-jo; “A Village Without Doctors” (Wu yi ts’un), by Yang K’ui; and “Rapid Torrents” (Pen-liu), by Wang Ch’ang-hsiung.
The contention between Literary Taiwan and Taiwanese Literature from 1941 to 1943 represented a significant turn of events, as second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers began to directly confront oppressive relationships within the colonial structure. For these writers, who had been partially nourished by Japanese culture in their formative years and held various degrees of allegiance to it, this experience was at the same time disillusioning and educating. Above all, it became clear to them that artistic approaches were not ideologically neutral. One thing that the Taiwanese writers objected to was Literary Taiwan’s Japan-centered, typically colonialist point of view, which treated Taiwan as an exotic “foreign” place, to be romanticized for the connoisseurship of readers in Japan. To the Taiwanese writers, such a literary approach was obviously com-plicitous in the colonial government’s effort to implicate culture in political domination, by diverting people from sociopolitical concerns. Having been exposed to discriminatory and conflictual relationships between Japanese and Taiwanese artists, these writers must have been awakened to their own colonial status. Such realizations are undoubtedly behind the tactics used by writers of Taiwanese Literature in their endeavors to resist colonialism. As opposed to the exquisite aestheticism and romanticism of Literary Taiwan, writers of Taiwanese Literature privileged realism. Aside from works directly informed by leftist ideology, such as those by Yang K’ui, some writers of the Taiwanese Literature group consciously shifted to more detailed depictions of local customs, rural life, and folk traditions of Chinese/Taiwanese origin in order to register their resentment of the Japanization program.
The nationalistic orientation of Taiwanese Literature, however, failed to attract some of the ardent writers of an even younger generation, such as Yeh Shih-t’ao (b. 1925) and Chou Chin-po, who published in Literary Taiwan and expressed either aestheticism or political loyalty to the colonizer. Yeh wrote the controversial essay “Shit, Realism” (Fen hsieh-shih chu-yi), which provoked a heated response from colleagues at Taiwanese Literature. It was not until the next epoch that some of this younger generation of writers, too, began to reflect deeply upon the complicated issues surrounding colonial identity.
The unusually convoluted trajectory traveled by Taiwanese New Literature writers may also be illuminated by a brief examination of their intriguingly different attitudes toward the issue of modernity. The first-generation writers’ embrace of modernity as an advanced stage of civilization was expressed in largely vacant terms, for essentially they had no real experience of a truly modern society. Most of the second generation, pressured by wartime literary policies, engaged in indirect resistance by asserting nativism, with the effect of notably decreasing their criticism of traditional, feudalist traits of the Taiwanese society. However, if some of them consciously denigrated modern urban civilization, symbolically represented by the Japanese metropolis, still others took exactly the opposite stance. In works of the younger writer Chou Chin-po, who opted to side with progress, a prominent theme was the urgency to modernize in view of the obvious benefits that modernity could bring to the Taiwanese people. Because Japan was equated with civilization, they ardently supported Japanization, albeit not without doubts from time to time.
In artistic terms, the modern literary form of the Taiwanese New Literature significantly departed from the classical Chinese tradition, but its evolution abruptly ended at the conclusion of World War II, when Taiwan was returned to China. Several years later, the Nationalists, having lost mainland China to the Communists in the civil war, retreated to the island and started an entirely new era. The drastic changes such historical events brought to the society of Taiwan caused most of the Taiwanese New Literature writers to halt their creative activities. Much artistic potential was therefore never developed to its fullest extent, and the movement ended before any genuinely masterful works of art appeared.
The legacy of the Taiwanese New Literature movement was suppressed in the postwar years, as the dominant culture was now constituted by the mainland Chinese tradition. But there were still significant works written and published, and the exploration of colonial identity continued to be the dominant concern of works written by writers directly nourished by the Taiwanese New Literature of the Japanese period, such as The Orphan of Asia (Ya-hsi-ya ku-erh), by Wu Cho-liu (1900–1976); “The Oleander Flowers” (Chia-chu-t’ao), by Chung Li-ho; Trilogy of Taiwanese, by Chung Chao-cheng; The Man Who Rolls on the Ground (Kun-ti lang), by Chang Wen-huan; and later works by Yeh Shih-t’ao. Whereas the majority of writers directly nourished by the Taiwanese New Literary Movement were marginal to the society’s cultural production and reproduction in the martial law period, those still alive have played a crucial role in the “nativiza-tion,” or pen-t’u-hua, movement of the past two decades.
1. Chuang Shu-chih, T’ai-wan hsin wen-hsueh kuan-nien te meng-ya yu shih-chien [Early developments of the concept of New Literature in Taiwan’s Japanese period] (Taipei: Mai-t’ien ch’u-pan you-hsien kung-ssu, 1994), 22–29.
2. The following are some recently published studies on Taiwanese literature of the Japanese period: Hsu Chun-ya, Jih-chu shih-ch’i T’ai-wan hsiao-shuo yen-chiu [A study of Taiwanese fiction of the Japanese period] (Taipei: Wen-shih-che ch’u-pan she, 1995); Huang Ying-che, ed., T’ai-wan wen-hsueh yan-chiu tsai jih-pen [Studies of Taiwanese literature in Japan], trans. T’u Ts’ui-hua (Taipei: Ch’ien-wei ch’u-pan she, 1994); Kawahara Akira, “T’ai-wan hsin wen-hsueh yun-tung te chan-k’ai” [The unraveling of the Taiwanese New Literature Movement], trans. Yeh Shih-t’ao, Wen-hsueh T’ai-wan, no. 1 (1991): 217–245, 238–271; and no. 3 (1992): 225–264; Lin Heng-che and Chang Heng-hao, eds., Fu-huo te ch’un-hsiang: T’ai-wan san-shih nien-tai tso-chia lieh-chuan [Portraits of the resurrected: on Taiwanese writers of the 1930s] (Taipei: Ch’ien-wei ch’u-pan she, 1994); Liang Ming-hsiung, Jih-chu shih-ch’i T’ai-wan hsin-wen-hsueh yun-tung yen-chiu [A study of the Taiwanese New Literary Movement in the Japanese period] (Taipei: Wen-shih-che, 1996); Lin Jui-ming, T’ai-wan wen-hsueh te li-shih k’ao-ch’a [A historical examination of Taiwanese literature] (Taipei: Yun-ch’en wen-hua, 1996]; and Lin Jui-ming, T’ai-wan wen-hsueh yu shih-tai ching-shen: Lai Ho yen-chiu lun chi [Taiwanese literature and the spirit of its time: studies of Lai Ho] (Taipei: Yun-ch’en wen-hua, 1993).
3. The modern Chinese literary tradition was established in the so-called New Literary Movement (hsin wen-hsueh yun-tung) or vernacular literary movement (pai-hua wen yun-tung) between 1917 and 1919. During the following decades, literature written in the modern Chinese vernacular (pai-hua) and heavily influenced by Western literary forms has replaced the traditional literary forms, which use the literary language (wen-yen), to become the mainstream of modern Chinese literature.