Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up

Chang Ta-chun¹ is not just a writer; in his native Taiwan he is a cultural phenomenon. He is one of the rare literary figures on the island to have crossed the bridge from popular writer to pop culture icon. During the eighties and nineties Chang’s image moved from the jackets of his books to the sides of public buses, life-size cardboard bookstore displays, and ultimately every television set in Taiwan. Chang Ta-chun hosted and produced two popular television shows in the nineties, Navigating the Sea of Literature (Zhongheng shuhai) and Super Traveler (Chaoji lüxingjia). A press conference held in 1996 to announce the publication of Wild Child even made it into the entertainment section of Chinese-language newspapers, placing Chang’s image right alongside those of Chow Yun-fat and Jackie Chan.

Although seemingly comfortable in the spotlight, Chang is by training a literary critic and by profession a writer. Born in 1957, Chang Ta-chun attended Fu Jen Catholic University where he pursued both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Chinese literature. A voracious reader, he has been influenced by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez and the acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. Chang Ta-chun began to win acclaim as a writer with his very first short story, “Suspended” (Xuandang), published in 1976 when he was just nineteen years old. Following two years of compulsory military service, Chang worked as a reporter and editor at one of Taiwan’s leading newspapers, China Times, and eventually returned to his alma mater as a lecturer. Meanwhile, his writing career flourished, and by the mid to late eighties he had firmly established himself as Taiwan’s most inventive and creative writer.²

Chang’s major, breakthrough success came in 1986 with his second collection of short stories, Apartment Building Tour Guide (Gongyu daoyou). The thirteen stories included were a rare display of literary creativity by an increasingly productive writer. The title story of the collection is an intricately woven portrait of how a group of seemingly alienated and disconnected urbanites living in an apartment complex in contemporary Taipei unknowingly affect one another’s lives. Fellow writer and critic Yang Chao (Yang Zhao) notes that it was with the publication of this book that “Chang Ta-chun ceased to cover up his impatience with traditional narrative conventions”³ and embarked upon a new linguistic and literary voyage.

Two years later, Chang produced a follow-up collection of stories hailed by critics. Lucky Worries About His Country (Sixi youguo) features the award-winning story “The General’s Monument” (Jiangjun bei), a historical parable of sorts about a retired general who can travel through time. First published on the eve of the lifting of martial law in Taiwan,⁴ “The General’s Monument” not only struck a sensitive chord in readers but also foreshadowed Chang’s later politically and current event-inspired literary experiments.

Chang’s literary field of vision expanded even further when he produced a volume of stories written in the spirit of the knight-errant or wuxia novels of Jin Yong, Happy Thieves (Huanxi zei), in early 1989 and a collection of science fiction stories, Pathological Changes (Bingbian), in February 1990. Chang’s arguably most inventive effort, however, was begun in late 1988. Hailed as the world’s first “spontaneous news novel,” The Grand Liar (Da shuohuang jia) was part hard-boiled detective fiction, part political satire, part fact, part fiction. From December 12, 1988 until June 13, 1989 Chang went to his office at the China Times each morning and wrote the morning’s news directly into that day’s segment of his novel, which would be published in the evening edition of the newspaper. The result was a spontaneous mixture of news, politics, history, and literature that served to challenge and deconstruct traditional narrative and literary structures. What The Grand Liar lacks in plot it recovers in ingenuity and form, making it one of the decade’s crowning works of Chinese fiction.

Chang followed The Grand Liar with two additional full-length political novels, No One Wrote a Letter to the Colonel (Meiren xiezin gei shangxiao) (1994) and Disciples of the Liar (Sahuang de xintu) (1996). The latter work, marketed as the “Taiwanese Satanic Verses,” was published to coincide with the first-ever free presidential election in Chinese history in 1996. The novel is a highly satiric journey into the mind of Li Zhengnan, a clearly recognizable literary incarnation of Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui. It was Chang’s most heavily marketed and overtly commercial literary venture.

In between his politically inspired novels of the early to mid-nineties, the ever-productive Chang still found time to give birth to a literary alter ego. In 1992 he published his first novel under the pen name Big Head Spring (Datou Chun). In both structure and voice, The Weekly Journal of Young Big Head Spring (Shaonian Datou Chun de shenghuo zhouji) was yet another major turn for Chang Ta-chun. The novel is a fictitious collection of mandatory weekly journal entries written in the tone and style of a middle school student. The utter frankness and tell-it-as-it-is nature of the narrative are also a stark and refreshing contrast to the world of fictions and lies Chang constructed in The Grand Liar and Disciples of the Liar. Upon the work’s publication, noted critic Pang-yuan Chi (Qi Banyuan) even went so far as to state, “Chang Ta-chun’s speed in inventing new writing tactics can be compared with America’s current speed at which it produces high-tech products.”⁵ The Weekly Journal of Young Big Head Spring not only went on to become Chang Ta-chun’s best-selling work to date,⁶ but also inaugurated a series of novels by Big Head Spring. The second and third installments of Chang’s Big Head Spring trilogy, My Kid Sister and Wild Child, both postmodern versions of the “formation novel” (Bildungsroman), are the focus of this volume.

Published in 1993, My Kid Sister was a stylistic reinvention of Big Head Spring. Although thematically it still dealt with the frustrations and woes of youth, the journal format and Chang’s sarcastic teenage narrative voice were gone. The Big Head Spring of My Kid Sister is a mature twenty-seven-year-old writer delivering an unforgettable document of growing up in Taiwan in the eighties. Ingeniously crafted, the novel is temporally complex, meticulously interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator’s younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen. My Kid Sister is a portrait of both the sorrows and the hysterics of youth.

“Compared with the way in which The Weekly Journal serves as a direct mouthpiece [for the youth], the narrative style of My Kid Sister is clearly much more intricate,” writes Yang Chao. “In weekly installments, The Weekly Journal writes reality and records the present. My Kid Sister, on the other hand, is continually chasing after the past, summoning up memories, and amid the repetitive voices of yesterday, carries an ever-present confessional overtone of varying subtleties.”⁷ The result of this narrative maturity is, ironically, an enhanced feeling of uncertainty, not just of memory but of meaning. No longer does the narrator seem to know what went wrong, or why. This feeling of powerlessness is further enhanced by playful discussions about fate, psychology, existentialism, and genetics. Chang Ta-chun creates a wave of sarcasm, wit, and humor that inundates My Kid Sister; however, beneath the laughter lies a somber portrait documenting the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family.

Wild Child is the darkest chapter in the trilogy; it intimately traces the protagonist, Big Head Spring, as he drops out of school, runs away from home, and seeks out a new life in the Taiwanese underworld. Although all the works in the trilogy are written in the first person, thematically similar, and feature the character Big Head, readers will be hard pressed to identify this “wild child” with his beloved counterpart in The Weekly Journal. We would perhaps better view Big Head as an allegorical symbol (or sociological phenomenon) than as a recurring character.

In Wild Child, an unbridled, rebellious, and at times surprisingly mature fourteen-year-old Big Head Spring embarks upon an adventure that will forever change his life. In both style and content, Wild Child will inevitably invite comparisons with the modern American classic The Catcher in the Rye. Both protagonists are teenage school dropouts who run away from home to explore the decadent side of big city life. However, unlike Holden Caulfield, who is continually given second chances, Big Head gets none. In this entertaining yet heavy-handed portrayal of Big Head and other members of his gang, the author ultimately testifies to a new form of spiritual and cultural bankruptcy.

According to Chang Ta-chun, the central theme of the work is “escaping,” from society and from oneself. “As Annie, the débutante of Wild Child, says, just as ‘all the cars in the junkyard were wasted before they were even delivered there,’”⁸ so Big Head was also wasted before he ever ran away from home. From the beginning, the characters are not simply delinquent but more broadly, spiritually dead (thus the mention of ghosts from the onset of the novel). Wild Child is as much a portrait of death and wandering ghosts as it is of wasted youth. “Death,” says Chang Ta-chun, “is what starts everything, as long as one keeps ‘escape’ in mind.”⁹

The literary mindscape of Chang Ta-chun is a unique and complex collage of news, history, politics, literature, personal experience, and, sometimes, irony. In 1999 both of the “wild kids” followed in the footsteps of their creator and successfully made the leap into pop culture—My Kid Sister was transformed into a major stage production in Taipei, while Wild Child was adapted into a made-for-TV movie. The tales of the “wild kids” have continued to captivate and to evolve, even beyond the realm of the written word. Wild Kids humorously and insightfully captures not only a slice of Taiwanese life, but also what it means to grow up.

This work began with a handshake just before the subway doors closed between the author and myself beneath the streets of Manhattan in May 1998. Thus began my one-year period of cohabitation with Chang Ta-chun’s “wild kids.” Since that time, a number of individuals have aided in making this project a reality. My sincere thanks to Chen Lai-hsing, Chang Ta-chun, and Push for generously allowing their artwork to be reproduced. Thanks to Steve Bradbury for suggesting the jacket art and taking the time to secure the rights from the artist. Lois Tai and Grace Sun provided valuable assistance with Taiwanese phrases that appeared in the novels. Thanks to Carlos Rojas, Joshua Tanzer, the two anonymous readers for Columbia University Press, and especially Leslie Kriesel, my editor at Columbia University Press, for their careful reading and invaluable editorial and stylistic comments. I would also like to thank the faculty and students at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University for their encouragement, and Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press for her interest and support. Special thanks go to Professor David Der-wei Wang, who was instrumental in guiding this project to fruition, and my heartfelt appreciation to the author for his enthusiasm and his unwavering support of this translation.