Taiwan is like no other place in the world. One of a handful of countries shunned by the United Nations (the others are tyrannical pariahs), it is a democracy, the first in the history of Chinese society, a place where a lively, pluralistic, rich, and unrestrained culture flourishes and the standard of living is among the highest anywhere. And yet Taiwan (officially, the Republic of China) has no international standing. Its citizens live under the constant threat of invasion by China, which, like much of the rest of the world, considers it a “renegade province” that will invite military devastation if its government one day succumbs to the desires of most of its people by declaring independence. And, as in so many other developed countries, technological innovations, scientific advances, and rampant “globalization” outstrip the ability of the populace to comfortably deal with a rapidly changing national and social landscape.
Colonized by the Japanese for the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan then sustained four decades of martial law during the regimes of the defeated Chinese general Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo. Linguistically, Taiwan functions, somewhat uncomfortably, with two mutually incomprehensible languages—Mandarin and Taiwanese—along with the widespread use of English and a smattering of other dialects and tribal languages. Since the late 1980s, writers, intellectuals, and artists have eagerly dug into the island’s past, ancient and recent, in large part, as our author has written, in a “search for one’s own country.”
Chu T’ien-hsin, whose father fled to Taiwan from China with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, sees two separate Taiwans, two distinct nations: one nationalistic, maintaining a closed-door policy in relation to the outside world; the other decidedly lyrical, cultural, philosophical. She proudly asserts that her work belongs to the second, that her writing comes closer (than politics) to revealing the true Taiwan. In truth, she writes not so much about Taiwan, with its 20-some-odd million inhabitants and half a dozen large cities, but about the northern city of Taipei—the capital, the base of the once dominant Kuomintang, and the center of commerce. Residents of central and southern Taiwan might wonder if the true division of the country is Taipei and everywhere else.
In the four stories that lead off this collection, three of which take their titles and, to a large extent, their thematic focus from movies and/or novels, Chu explores aspects of life in late twentieth-century Taiwan that will resonate with readers elsewhere, if not in their particularities, then certainly in their universal applications in modern life—philosophically, artistically, psychologically, and practically. The varied narrators share sensibilities, in spite of shifting gender and occupation, and reveal a sensual environment made compelling by detailed descriptions, with occasional tie-ins to the outside world of Marx, de Beers, and Adam Smith.
But it is the novella “The Old Capital,” a deeply layered, intertextual masterpiece, that both mystifies and gratifies the attentive reader. The narrator’s reflections “repeatedly return to the contrast between a serenely perennial Kyoto and a catastrophic Taipei rendered uninhabitable by amnesiac modernization and persistent cultural impoverishment”.1 On the surface it is a simple story: the narrator travels to Kyoto to meet a friend who doesn’t show, then returns to Taipei, where she is mistaken for a Japanese tourist and revisits the sites of her youth with the help of a Japanese map of the city. Memory—lost, recaptured, imperfect, imagined—and nostalgia are at the heart of the tale, which is carried along by the shifting use of Chinese and Japanese place names and inhabited by portions of other works—Yasunari Kawabata’s 1962 novel Koto (The Old Capital), the fifth-century fable “Peach Blossom Spring” by Tao Yuanming, and A Comprehensive History of Taiwan. The past, distant and near, informs a growing angst, as the narrator, like many of her real-life contemporaries in Taiwan, seeks a personal and, by extension, national identity.
A liberal use of English and the Chinese phonetic alphabet in the Chinese original has not been carried over in any fashion in this translation. The integrated outside texts are denoted by asterisks or italics (no distinction is made in the Chinese original). The translator has been notably aided in his task by the financial support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Communication, by the author’s responses to the most opaque references and usages, by two extremely helpful and encouraging anonymous readers, and, most importantly, by the sharp eye, creative artistry, and smiling countenance (as she wielded her red pen) of Sylvia Li-chun Lin.