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COLONIALISM AND THE PREDICAMENT OF IDENTITY

Liu Na’ou and Yang Kui as Men of the World

PENG HSIAO-YEN

On May 5, 1927, Liu Na’ou (1905–1940), watching his younger brother leave for Tokyo from their home in Tainan , wrote in his diary, “Bon Voyage! O! frère!”¹ (Happy voyage! O, brother!; Liu’s French). He himself, though thirsting to return to Shanghai, had to remain in Tainan until his grandmother’s funeral. Inspired by Baudelaire,² Liu’s seafaring feeling sounds a mumbo jumbo of cultural blending and affectation.

Born into a landlord’s household and having lost his father when he was twelve, Liu Na’ou always had a problem with his mother, who represented the “feudal system” to him. Fortunately enough, his mother, though uneducated herself, did what most wealthy Taiwanese parents were doing at the time, sending her two sons and one daughter to Japan and China to study while generously providing for them. At the age of twenty-two Liu Na’ou was already an experienced traveler, constantly journeying between Taiwan, Japan, and China. Like the language in his diary, written in awkward Chinese studded with English, French, Japanese, German, and Taiwanese expressions, he was very much “a man of the world,” a phrase concocted by one of his closest friends after his much-disputed murder in 1940.³ This phrase was intended to connote an artist who aspires to artistic freedom and perfection while transcending national boundaries.

Indeed, his everyday life was by no means free from limitations. Born in colonial Taiwan in 1905 and a Japanese by nationality, in 1920 he transferred from the Presbyterian School in Tainan to the high school division of Aoyama College in Tokyo, because there were limited opportunities for a colonized citizen to continue higher learning in the colony.⁴ He continued his studies at the Kōtō gakubu (advanced learning division) of Aoyama College in 1923 and graduated with honors from the English Department in March 1926.⁵ In the summer of 1926 he entered the special French program at L’Université L’Aurore in Shanghai and became Dai Wangshu ’s classmate; Shi Zhecun and Du Heng entered the program the following year.⁶ Liu’s diary relates how in January of 1927 these students, who would later make a name for Shanghai neosensationism, dreamed together about an aborted plan of establishing a journal called Jindai xin (Modern heart), which, incorporating illustrations and lighted-hearted vignettes, was intended to bridge the chasm between elitism and popular tastes.⁷ Such a dream would not come true until December 1932, when Furen huabao (Women’s pictorial) was established by the cartoonist Guo Jianying with Liu’s coterie’s support.

During the time Liu Na’ou was in Shanghai he pretended to be Fukienese, mainly because in the semicolonized metropolis in China a Taiwanese was likely to be suspected of being a Japanese spy.⁸ There were contemporaries, such as Ye Lingfeng , who thought he was half-Japanese.⁹ A man with multiple identities imposed on him, he eventually chose to be a self-styled modernist, an identity that accorded well with his personality and lifestyle as a dandy.

Liu was not alone in his experiences of diaspora and in resorting to art to defy the predicament of identity during the Japanese occupation. Yang Kui , also born in Tainan in 1905, was the son of a laborer who made tin utensils such as candlesticks and plates for a living.¹⁰ In 1915 as a youth he witnessed Japanese cannons and armed forces marching in front of his house on the way to suppress a local revolt.¹¹ Realizing how the Japanese distorted history and law to rule the colony, he decided to resort to the power of literature to reestablish the truth about the events of the time. In a 1982 interview saying that the Japanese colonial rulers had treated the Taiwanese fighters against colonialism as hooligans and rebels, he stated that it had been his intention to point out that injustice in his works.¹² In 1924 he dropped out of Tainan Second High School and went to Tokyo. The following year he entered the night school of Japan University to study literature and arts, supporting himself by working part-time during the day. While in Tokyo he participated in demonstrations against colonialism and was once jailed for three days, together with thirty-six Koreans.

Sensing the urgency of the socialist movement in Taiwan, Yang gave up his study and returned home in 1927 to join the Cultural Association Movement.¹³ In no time he became the foremost of the proletarian writers on the island, undertaking to propagate European and Japanese proletarianism while urging his fellow proletarianists to be “writers of the world” (see discussion below). Throughout his life he was in and out of prison because of his socialist beliefs, which, because they demanded allegiance to the international proletariat instead of the nation, were not welcomed by either the Japanese colonial government or the postwar Nationalist regime in Taiwan. Unsurprisingly, as an activist and writer during the most turbulent years in Taiwan’s socio-political history, he ended up in jail twelve times, ten times during the Japanese occupation and twice under the Nationalist government. The last time kept him incarcerated for twelve years, from 1949 to 1961.

Liu Na’ou and Yang Kui were born in the same city in the same year, but into two distinct classes. Although both chose literature to be their vocation, their aesthetic preferences form an intriguing juxtaposition: modernism and proletarianism. During the 1920s and the 1930s, these two dominant cultural trends exerted such an impact globally that it is hard to imagine that these two young men from Taiwan, in their quest for intellectual enlightenment in such metropolitan cities as Tokyo and Shanghai, would not have been influenced by them. Liu began his literary career in Shanghai with a few mediocre stories written in the proletarian vein, while the bookstore he established in 1929 with his own funds was a rendezvous for leftist intellectuals before it was eventually closed down by the Nationalist government.¹⁴ He switched to modernism almost immediately, because he was tired of the proletarian emphasis on content at the expense of form.¹⁵ On the other hand, Yang Kui found the modernists “indulging in petty skills”¹⁶ and “groaning without being ill.”¹⁷ Yang’s relentless support of “kuso realism” (feces realism), a phrase used by Japanese proletarian leaders to highlight the propensity of realist literature for disclosing the dark side of reality, bespeaks Yang’s lifetime commitment to proletarianism.¹⁸ The distinction of taste manifested here is closely connected to, if not determined by, the social classes in which they were born and brought up.

Class consciousness, a complex psychological state that involves identity and value judgment, is not easy to clarify. The observation Bourdieu makes in La distinction may provide us with a point of departure for our investigation here: distinct lifestyles and distinct tastes for culture form a system of evaluations, securely institutionalized by the education system, which operates both to identify and to maintain social difference.¹⁹ A profoundly political discourse, taste functions as a legitimizer of social difference as well as a marker of class. Modernism and proletarianism maintain a strict distinction of lifestyles and tastes, which Liu Na’ou and Yang Kui found congenial to the classes they belonged to. The aesthetic choice each made is the result of the “system of evaluations” that each was acculturated to and trained to sustain.

For Liu Na’ou and Yang Kui, acquiring the class values of modernism or proletarianism required a complex process of acculturation, which is “a process of intercultural borrowing marked by the continuous transmission of traits and elements between diverse peoples and resulting in new and blended patterns.”²⁰ While it was a prerequisite for each to imitate and show allegiance to international modernism or proletarianism, at the same time the modernist or proletarian traits and elements manifested in each were inevitably blended with the characteristics of their own cultural traditions and personal histories. Liu, disguised as a Fukienese in Shanghai with Baudelaire as his mentor, or Yang, always following the teachings of his Japanese and European counterparts such as Abramovich Lapidus and Funahashi Seiichi, remained Taiwanese at heart, though certainly transformed. The “new and blended patterns” manifested in Liu’s modernism and Yang’s proletarianism were no longer the original patterns found in Baudelaire or Funehashi, while our two writers, acculturated in these international trends through the experiences of diaspora, were in a sense emancipated from the limited visions of insulated islanders.

Denouncing the injustice of the colonial policy and the loss caused by exile, forced or self-willed, does not prevent one from recognizing the modernization brought about by colonialism, which benefits the colonized as well as the colonizer. Nor does it prevent one from appreciating the liberating capacity resulting from the experiences of diaspora. The question is, if for writers such as Yang Kui and Liu Na’ou the aesthetics of universal literary laws created the possibility of liberating the self, how did they come to terms with the particulars? Terry Eagleton, dealing with a similar situation confronting Irish writers, points out that the contradictions are not so irresolvable that “Particularity is either suppressed in the totality of universal Reason, the concrete Irish subject sublated to a citizen of the world, or celebrated as a unique, irreducible state of being impenetrable to all alien Enlightenment rationality.” ²¹ Indeed, while governed by a universal aesthetic law, the work of art manifested in each artist is inscribed with individual emotions, sensations, and impulses as well as local, regional, and national particularities.

For 1930s Taiwan there was no totalizing vision that could easily reconcile the radical view of individual enlightenment and the regionalist particularity of twentieth-century Taiwanese Nationalist consciousness, especially when that consciousness was divided among Japan the colonial sovereignty, China the motherland, and Taiwan the native land. As Seamus Deane puts it when he refers to the Irish condition, it is not oppositions to be erased or a theoretical paradox to be resolved, “it is a condition to be passionately lived.”²²

Liu Na’ou and Yang Kui did live passionately through the contradictions facing their artistic lives during the Japanese occupation. Liu, as a dandy philandering in Shanghai, and Yang, earning his living as a gardener in Taiwan, infused their personal tastes and lives into their literary beliefs. Their respective literary practices, inseparable from the literary or socialist activities that implicated them in the semicolonial politics in Shanghai or colonial politics in Taiwan, eventually brought dangers to their lives. Liu’s death by assassination and Yang’s constant imprisonment bespeak the insurmountable laws of semicolonial or colonial politics that entangled individual identities while leaving universal aesthetic laws powerless.

As far apart as they seem, modernism and proletarianism have something basic in common: both ideologies originate from class identity. That proletarianism is a class ideology is a given. That modernism is a class ideology, on the other hand, needs justification. We can tackle the problem by examining the fact that Liu Na’ou’s modernism is most effectively manifested in his dandyism.

A dandy by definition is a man with means and leisure, who pays meticulous attention to his dress and appearance. Liu had particular tastes about his clothes, as can be seen in his 1927 diary. It was his habit to go to specific stores for different styles of clothes, all tailor-made. For instance, on April 5 he writes: “Had a suit and two summer outfits made at Wang Qingchang ’s”; on December 8 he writes: “Had a tuxedo made at Wang Shunchang ’s”; and on December 12: “Tried on the clothes at Wang Shunchang’s.”²³ In a family film, “The Man Who Has the Camera,” probably taken in the mid-1930s in Shanghai, Liu is seen in different scenes wearing a white suit and a white hat, apparently his favorite outfit.²⁴ In addition, he is a devout dancer with the nickname “The Dancing King,” regularly frequenting dance halls and exercising dance steps with his friends as well as studying dance manuals to perfect his skill. For instance, on February 3 Liu writes, “Returned to his home and taught him fox-trot.”²⁵ Here “him” refers to his childhood friend from Tainan, Lin Chengshui , who was at the time studying in Shanghai. On Liu’s August reading list there is a dancing manual with an English title “Dancing do’s and don’ts.”²⁶

Dandyism in Liu is a lifestyle and a matter of taste; it is the taste of the affluent class in metropolitan Shanghai, and the new aristocracy in democratic China. As much as Liu exhibits a fine specimen of a Shanghai dandy in the 1930s, however, we should not forget that the lineage of the dandy can be easily traced to Baudelaire in Paris or Oscar Wilde in London in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire, though not exactly a dandy himself, wrote the single treatise on dandyism that defined the dandy as a species. The dandy as a species has crossed the boundaries of nations and time.

The thing to be noted is that the performance of the dandy, no less than a task, needs constant practice in order to achieve perfection. As Foucault argues in “What Is Enlightenment,” the dandy is the quintessence of modernity, while to be a dandy requires an “ascetic elaboration of the self”²⁷ (pp. 41–42). For Foucault, modernity is an attitude, or an ethos. It is a “mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people … a way of thinking and feeling; a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.” Diction such as “ascetic elaboration” and “task” denotes the idea that being a dandy requires a kind of rigorous discipline similar to that of a religion. If we check the passages titled “La modernité” and “Le dandy” in Baudelaire’s Le peintre de la vie moderne (The painter of modern life), we realize that Foucault’s interpretation of modernity comes mainly from Baudelaire, while the meaning of the “ascetic elaboration of the self,” which is in fact the central idea in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, becomes much clearer.

In “Le dandy” the dandy is defined as “l’homme rich, oisif” (the rich, idle man), whose only occupation is “l’élégance,” and who is raised in luxury and, from youth on, accustomed to the obedience of other people. He enjoys at all times “une physionomie distincte” (a distinct appearance), with a love for “distinction.” In addition, dandyism is “une institution vague,” meaning it is an institution without written laws. According to Baudelaire, dandyism as an institution is “en dehors des lois” (outside of laws), but has its own rigorous laws to which all its subjects strictly submit themselves, in spite of the fieriness and independence of their characters. For the adepts in the unwritten doctrines of this institution the main driving force is “le besoin ardant de se faire une originalité” (the ardent need to make oneself an original; p. 710).

Besides the idea that dandyism is an “institution,” Baudelaire also points out that dandyism verges on “spiritualisme et … stoicisme.” In his mind, all the extravagant taste and material elegance a dandy subjects himself to are only a symbol of the “supériorité aristocratique de son esprit” (aristocratic superiority of his spirit). Baudelaire claims that dandyism is a sort of religion, with the most rigorous doctrine of all religions, namely that of elegance and originality. According to him, dandyism appears mostly in transitory periods, when democracy is not yet fully in force and aristocracy is partially faltering, with a view to engaging in “le projet de fonder une espèce d’aristocratie” (the project of founding a new species of aristocracy). Hence Foucault’s claim that the dandy is a new aristocrat in democracy.²⁸ Thus dandyism, an institution with the unwritten doctrine of elegance and originality, is a class marked by the distinction of taste that separates itself from the mediocre and the trivial. (For Baudelaire, being trivial is an irreparable dishonor.) One can also easily see that Bourdieu shares with Baudelaire the idea of the distinction of taste.

In addition, dandyism embodies a particular attitude toward woman, as one can tell from the passage titled “La femme” (Woman) in The Painter of Modern Life. A dandy like Liu Na’ou is a woman lover and a relentless misogynist at the same time, in whose mind only man is capable of intellectual thinking and performance, while woman, a creature indulging in lust and using men to gratify her sexual desire, is totally alien to the realm of intellect. On the other hand, ironically enough, a dandy like Liu, a frequenter of dance halls and brothels, is always involved in carnal relationships with women. As Baudelaire puts it, “Si je parle de l’amour à propos du dandysme, c’est que l’amour est l’occupation naturelle des oisifs. Mais le dandy ne vise pas à l’amour comme but spécial” (If I speak of love in regard to dandyism, it is that love is the natural occupation of the idle. But the dandy does not aim at love as a special goal; p. 710).

From Liu Na’ou’s 1927 diary one can tell that the image of woman as femme fatale, alluring but destructive at the same time, is deeply rooted in his psyche. That in his diary he should call his wife a “vampire” sapping his energy and blood is illuminating. She was one year older than he was and his first cousin, their mothers being sisters. They were married in 1922, when Liu was only seventeen years old. Right from the beginning he was dissatisfied with the marriage, the reason being partly that it was an arranged marriage, a “feudal remnant” in his eye, and partly that the two were incompatible in education and personality. Like most women of her time, his wife was educated at home by private tutors. The fact that the two did not get along can be told from his wife’s scarce appearances in his 1927 diary. In January of that year, having finished his French courses at L’Université L’Aurore in Shanghai, he was living the leisurely life of a dandy there, idling and philandering, without doing anything specific. She is first mentioned in the diary entry of January 17, in which Liu complains that her letter in Japanese is so poorly written that he can hardly understand what she intends to say. On April 17 he returned from Shanghai to Tainan for his grandmother’s funeral, but he does not mention his wife in the diary until May 18. This is also the second time she appears in the diary.

In the entry of that day and the next one his description gradually takes her as a representative of “woman,” or even femme fatale, in general. In the May 18 entry he says, “Ah! Marriage is truly the gate to hell. … Woman is dumb, good for nothing.… Ah! that I should have been raped by her, the insatiable man-beast, the goblin-like vampire, knowing nothing except indulgence in sexual desire!”²⁹ In the following entry he says,

Women, whatever types they are, may be said to be the emblem of sex. Their life and existence depend entirely on the gratification of sexual desire. At the time of … compared with what men can feel, how much more powerful is their orgasm! The center of their thought, behavior, and act is sex. Therefore besides sex they are completely devoid of intellectual knowledge. They don’t like to learn things and they are incapable of learning. You see, aren’t most women idiots and stupid jerks? Her stupidity really makes me mad.³⁰

One can compare this passage with the description of femmes fatales in Baudelaire’s “Spleen et idéal” and see the similarity:

Et vous, femmes, hélas! pâles comme des cierges,

Que ronge et que nourrit la débauche, et vous, vierges,

Du vice maternel traînant l’hérédité

Et toutes les hideurs de la fécondité!³¹

(And you, women, alas! pale like the candles,

gnawed and nourished by debauchery, and you, virgins,

From maternal vice dragging along heredity and all the hideousness of fecundity!)

In Liu’s mind woman, incapable of true feelings or love, wants nothing but sex, while her sexual drive more often than not causes man’s downfall. In the vocabulary of the dandy, man is the emblem of intellect and ruler of the spiritual, and woman is a sex symbol and physical creature. To him a woman has only two functions, all tied to her body: to bear children and to make love.

Yet the dandy is also a keen observer of woman’s physical form, which to him has a deeper meaning. In Liu’s diary we can see that he is constantly strolling the street, looking for images of women that would meet his taste. Like Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” these women are passersby, or chance encounters in a café or a brothel, unknown to him, but all of them reveal the same quality: an intensity of desire that draws out their beholder’s passions more than their own. Observing a woman, he is not concerned with what she thinks or feels, since to the dandy a woman is an unthinking and unfeeling creature; rather, he is concerned with her physical form with all its adornments and refinery adding to her allurement, which is the quintessence of “the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment,” in Foucault’s words.³² Once in a brothel, looking at a young prostitute who awaits his patronage, Liu sighs, “Ah, My hungry heart! Ah, the translucent eyes that I can hardly devour, the face of Modernité!” ³³ As Foucault’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s flâneur, he “has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur,” who is “the idle, strolling spectator … satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories.” In contrast, he is “looking for that quality which [is called] ‘modernity.’”³⁴

If we compare Foucault’s words with Baudelaire’s definition of le flâneur in “La modernité,” we can see that he nearly quotes the latter verbatim. Baudelaire equates the modernist to a loner:

[C]e solitaire doué d’une imagination active, toujours voyageant à travers le grand désert d’hommes, a un but plus élevé que celui d’un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu’on nous permettra d’appeler la modernité. (p. 694)³⁵

(This loner endowed with an active imagination, always voyaging across the great desert of men, has an aim more elevated than that of a pure flâneur, an aim more general than the fugitive pleasure of the moment. He is looking for the thing that we might call modernity.)

From the point of view of the laboring class, the flâneur seems idle and unproductive, but in fact it is his vocation to stroll the city, to flâner. His idleness is his labor.³⁶ As l’observateur, his imagination transforms the physical form he sees into something spiritual. Woman as a real-life being is not what attracts him; it is the woman in his imagination, seen through the dandy’s eye. Thus to the dandy the complex image of woman is bewildering. No words are more telling than Baudelaire’s own in “La femme”: “C’est une espèce d’idol, stupide peut-être, mais éblouissante, enchanteresse, qui tient les destinées et les volontés suspendues à ses regards” (She is a kind of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching, who holds wills and destinies suspended on her glance) (pp. 713–714).

One more passage from Liu’s 1927 diary will suffice to illustrate how women’s images are transformed through the aesthetics of the dandy. On November 10, when he was visiting Beijing, he went to see the performance of Jin Youqin , a renowned Peking opera singer. Even though he meant to see the performance of a particular actress, in his description of her it is clear that he looked upon her as the representative of the collective noun “Peking women.” In other words, Jin Youqin in his imagination was not a woman endowed with personal thoughts, emotions, or life history, but a representative of Peking women. His association of ideas with this particular Peking woman’s voice and body discloses his prejudices against women in general. First, according to him, the idea that Peking women are good at speaking is probably wrong, because speech belongs to the realm of the intellect, and one needs to be well educated in order to be good at speech. In his view, since Peking women are totally uneducated, they cannot possibly be good at speech; they are talkative. Second, even though Peking women are talkative, their beautiful voices are a pleasure to listen to for men. Third, this particular Peking woman’s voice reminds him of the reality of the panegyric “talking like swallows and singing like nightingales.” But, according to him, this voice only reaches the realm of reality. In other words, in his mind’s eye Peking women (or any other women) are incapable of being associated with spiritual beauty and sublimation.³⁷

Liu’s prejudices against women as shown in the aesthetics of a dandy certainly mold the images of women constructed in his work. This is true of the images of woman in the stories written by Shanghai neosensationists in general, as amply illustrated by Mu Shiying ’s “Craven ‘A,’” in which the features and body of the woman gazed at by the male narrator are turned into a sight-seeing spot fit for men’s short visits.

The male narrator of “Craven ‘A’” uses the trope of “a map of a country” to describe the woman he gazes at. As she sits and smokes alone in a café, the eyes of the woman are in his view “two lakes” that sometimes get icy cold, sometimes hot beyond boiling point. Her mouth is a “volcano” that spews forth the smoke and odor of “Craven ‘A,’” the foreign cigarette she is smoking. Inside the volcano the milky larva (teeth) and the flame in the middle (tongue) can be seen. “The people here are still quite primitive, using men as sacrifice at their volcano festival. For travelers this country is by no means a safe place,” says the narrator. Then he describes the landscape under the “thin clouds” of a black-and-white checkered design, apparently a blouse made of semitransparent material. As a result the “purple peaks” (nipples) of the “two hills ostensibly juxtaposing each other on the plain” seem to “protrude from the clouds.”

Then the lower part of the map, blocked from view by the table the woman sits at, is likened to the landscape of the “South,” which is even more enchanting than that of the “North.” The narrator imagines how the “two breakwaters” (legs) under the table join to form a “triangular alluvial plain,” and how the “important harbor” with “the majestic entrance of the giant steam boat” arouses “billows and splashes on the prow.” When the narrator finds out the woman’s name from an acquaintance, he says, “I know many of her stories. Almost all of my friends have traveled in that country. Since the traffic there is convenient, almost all of them manage to visit the whole country in one or two days.… Experienced ones are able to land on the harbor right from the start.… Some sojourn for one or two days, while others stay on for a week. When they return they boast to me about the alluring landscape of that country, and all look upon it as a wonderful sightseeing spot for short visits.”³⁸

Here we have a description of the “New Woman” typical to 1930s Shanghai, in a literary mode unique to the neosensationists. The story describes the kind of man-and-woman relationship typical of metropolitan Shanghai, in which no love is involved. It is mainly a one-night stand, purely for fun on both sides. There is no psychological stress or ethical judgment, unlike the stories of erotic love by Creation writers such as Yu Dafu or Zhang Ziping . For instance, the male protagonist in Yu Dafu’s “Lost Lamb,” tormented by his love for the fickle actress who walked out on him, ends up in an asylum. The new women in Zhang Ziping’s stories, though aspiring for sexual liberation, always lament and complain about the inability to be really free in a society still bound by traditional ethics. In contrast the light-hearted theme of neosensationist stories is marked by a playful tempo, as if the scenes were flickering with the male narrator’s salacious eye seeing through the camera. A woman under his scrutiny becomes a mere object of desire, with all the parts of her body serving to provide men with pleasure. Always viewed from the outside, it is no wonder that her heart and mind are a mystery to the reader as well as the narrator.

In contrast to realistic stories such as those written by Creation writers, which often resort to the technique of psycho-narration to render the characters’ psychology transparent,³⁹ the characters in neosensationist stories as a rule are a-psychological. We are told their looks, behavior patterns, and words, but their psychology remains opaque. As a result these characters are almost like actants in the stories, often without names. Even with names they are interchangeable. It makes no difference at all if one character is moved from one story to another, since all the characters are endowed with the same single character trait: seductiveness. Thus a woman in the aesthetics of dandyism is not a real woman who has heart and feelings, but a collective noun with a symbolic meaning beyond the real woman herself. Looked at from another perspective, these characters share the nameless characteristic of the masses that were becoming the central subject matter of proletarian literature at the time. The main difference is that the characters in neosensationist stories are members of the bourgeois class enjoying cosmopolitan life, whereas those in proletarian literature are either lower-class people described as victims of social injustice or the bourgeois meant to be targets of attack.

With outer looks becoming the one most important element to describe, it does not come as a surprise that fashion and material elegance turn out to be the focus of attention in neosensationist stories. The dandy is a species of man who believes in artifice rather than nature, as Baudelaire states in “Éloge du maquillage (Eulogy on make-up),” “la nature n’enseigne rien, ou presque rien.… La nature ne peut conseiller que le crime.… La vertu, au contraire, est artificielle (Nature doesn’t teach anything, or almost nothing.… Nature can advise nothing but the crime.… Virtue, on the other hand, is artifice).”⁴⁰ Hence the dandy’s heavy dependence on materiality. Fashion, the quintessence of materiality, reinforces woman’s beauty, of course. Yet fashion is by no means an end in itself; it is the symptom of taste, which is the manifestation of the ideal in human mind to surpass and reform nature, where the unrefined, the terrestrial, and the squalid are accumulated. For Baudelaire, fashion is “une déformation sublime de la nature” (sublime deformation of nature). Fashion should not be considered in itself; it should be imagined when vitalized and vivified by the women who wear it (p. 716).

The new women in neosensationist stories are exactly like mannequins that display fashion and make it alive. They usually wear modernized qipao (Chinese gowns) or Western dresses, which were à la mode in 1930s Shanghai. Yet fashion in these stories is certainly more than an end in itself: it is a marker of class. The hooligan in Mu Shiying’s story “Shouzhi ” (Fingers), with an envious eye for new women, describes in fitful ejaculation their fashionable outfit: “Today they crave Western products, tomorrow National goods. Their qipao, either long or short, in soft silk, satin, American chiffon, or Indian rayon … fashion shows, exhibitions … silk stockings, high-heeled satin shoes, tea-time dresses, party dresses, wedding gowns, salacious dresses, casual wear, short wear …”⁴¹ Fashion, an inseparable part of the new woman, adds to her dazzle and enchantment, while marking her off as belonging to a class that the hooligan both envies and hates. Not only does the class distinction here involve the differences of taste between the high and the low, and the bourgeois and the proletariat, but it involves the native and the foreign. It is the conflict between nationalism and colonialism that is at work here.

Shanghai with its many foreign concessions was a semicolony where foreign infiltration was felt everywhere. In Liu Na’ou’s 1927 diary we see an ordinary citizen’s daily life in Shanghai inconvenienced by English or Japanese soldiers who set up road blocks or check people’s identifications.⁴² There are entries in which he expresses the fascination he felt for the enchanting hybridity of the semicolonial human landscape there, as the January 12 entry, where he engages in a eulogy of Shanghai:

Shanghai, o! Shanghai the enchanteresse!

.…

O what a golden pit you are! O Land of beauties! Red, white, yellow,

dark, a shaft of light in the night, from the hands of narrow waists!

A smile with floating gaze, the hybridity of short hair and bare knees.⁴³

In contrast, there are also passages that show his aversion to foreign presences. For instance in the January 19 entry, after mentioning an unhappy episode with a Caucasian woman in the tram, he says, “An eye for an eye, the fire of hatred, you devil-like Caucasian women! Stand steady, or the oriental man burning with indescribable fire would rush you to the tramway hell!”⁴⁴ While Liu does not seem to sympathize with Caucasians, he does not feel akin to the Japanese way of life, either. In June of 1927 before he returned from Taiwan to Shanghai, he visited Tokyo and studied French and Latin briefly at the Athena-Francais Language School there, but was bored and missed Shanghai tremendously. He writes in the June 17 entry, “In these few days I feel suffocated. There is nothing serious, but I simply don’t like the Japanese way!”⁴⁵

Reading through Liu’s diary one senses that on the one hand the diarist feels genuine resentment toward foreign exploitation and colonial expansion, while on the other he undeniably enjoys the cosmopolitan atmosphere and luxurious foreign products. The new women in neosensationist stories in fact share with him a fascination for things foreign. As if to highlight their colonial connotations, these women as a rule have foreign looks, with “a small square face in Parisian style,” as the woman in “Craven ‘A,’” or “a slender, straight Greek nose,” as the one in Liu Na’ou’s “Youxi ” (Game).⁴⁶ Coupled with Westernized fashion and their foreign looks, their love of foreign cars, cigarettes, and outdoor Western sports culminates in their image as the consummation of the modern in 1930s metropolitan Shanghai.

Dandyism as a matter of taste is also manifested in Liu Na’ou’s preferences for friends and associates. The year 1927, when Liu wrote the diary extant today, was also the year the Nationalist regime started the Northern Expedition and Party Purge. In the 1920s and the 1930s flocks of writers immigrated to Shanghai either to take shelter from the war in the north or to seek opportunities for artistic development there, since, with big publishing companies continually moving from Beijing to Shanghai starting in the early 1920s, it had become the new cultural center in China. Famous literary men such as Lu Xun , who came to Shanghai in September 1927, and Shen Congwen , who moved there in early 1928, gathered in the metropolis and fought for their livelihood. Teaching and writing were the main sources for them to earn a living, as writing gradually emerged as a full-time profession during that period.

Liu Na’ou, who came in 1926 and lived the life of a dandy there, did not get along with writers like Lu Xun or Shen Congwen. Or one should say more exactly, he did not bother to associate with them at all. He was intimate with friends from Taiwan, frolicking with them together and often letting them stay in his apartment. They included schoolmates from the Presbyterian School of Tainan and the renowned advocate of the vernacular literature movement in Taiwan, Huang Chaoqin, who had studied in Tokyo and Illinois and had written in 1923 one of the earliest important treatises on that subject.⁴⁷ He was at that time looking for a position in Shanghai and from 1928 on would work for the Overseas Chinese Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Nationalist government.

In addition, Liu was closely involved with friends he had met at L’Aurore. They worked as a team in his bookstore, and after work they would frequent dance halls and brothels, ogling women together. In the dance halls he was always marveled at when he tangoed; people would stop dancing, spread out, and leave room for him to perform. He taught his L’Aurore friends Japanese whenever there was time in between work and play. Even during a trip to Beijing with Dai Wangshu from September 28 to December 3, they still continued their Japanese lessons.⁴⁸ They were held together by ties of common interests and taste.

Of the leaders of the many literary coteries in Shanghai, Liu and his companions chose to befriend Shao Xunmei , who, also from a wealthy family, was a dandy of great renown like Liu. Shao’s residence in Shanghai, a palacelike marble building and a legend in itself,⁴⁹ became a salon where literary men and artists gathered for meals and conversation.⁵⁰ Among the distinguished guests constantly invited were people like Xu Zhimo , Zeng Jinke , Zhang Ruogu , and Xu Beihong , besides Liu and his friends.⁵¹

In contrast, Liu’s coterie and Lu Xun’s never hit it off. There could have been, in fact, a great many opportunities for these two parties to meet and associate with each other. When Liu was experimenting with proletarian literature during the late 1920s, Wugui lieche (Trackless train), the journal he established with Dai and Shi Zhicun, often published Feng Xuefeng ’s articles. Feng belonged to Lu Xun’s coterie, but Liu and his friends never had direct contact with Lu. Shi did write Lu some letters concerning matters of the bookstore, but thought he was a “narrow-minded man.”⁵² As a matter of fact, Shi was living two blocks from Lu Xun’s house at the time, but they somehow or other missed the chance to get to know each other, or they never intended to, since the two parties lived such distinct lives and developed gradually diametrically opposed literary beliefs.⁵³

When the haipai (Shanghai types) controversy broke out in the early 1930s, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, though they never befriended each other, both became fervent enemies of Shanghai types. From the language they used in the debate, one senses that the contention lay as much, if not more, in taste as in literary convictions. As a matter of fact, during the time of the controversy, there were no such literary schools as the Shanghai School or the Beijing School; the formation of these two schools of writers was a later invention. The controversy concerned mainly the incorporation of popular taste into literary works and the commercialization of literature in Shanghai, as opposed to the “serious” May Fourth literary tradition represented by the north, which Shen embraced so dearly even while he was living in Shanghai and had to conform to the popular taste there one way or other.⁵⁴

Shen connected Creation writers such as Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping and neosensationist writers such as Mu Shiying with the Saturday School writers by calling the latter the “Shanghai types” and their followers the “New Shanghai types.” Shen said that Zhang Ziping, like the Saturday School writers, was a master of “low, vulgar taste,” or “popular taste.” He adds, “The most suitable place of appreciating Zhang Ziping’s works is at the desk of those college students who, while looking at the beauty queens of Girls’ Colleges in Liangyou (The young companion), talk about ways of kissing in the movies.”⁵⁵ As for Mu Shiying, Shen says, “His works are almost like romance (with man-and-woman relationships as the subject matter, romance in Shanghai, so to speak). It is suitable for him to write works for pictorials or design magazines, or write for women, movies, and playful magazines. The city has made this writer, and yet limited him at the same time.”⁵⁶ One is instantly reminded of Women’s pictorial, to which Liu and his coterie constantly contributed articles.

The ridicule, and even contempt, in Shen’s attitude toward the Shanghai types is unmistakable. Lu Xun, who did not have any thing nice to say about either of the two contending parties, on the other hand, pointed out the stereotypical views connected with regional prejudices, stating that “the literati in Beijing is akin to officials, those in Shanghai to merchants.… In a word, the ‘Beijing types’ are the protégés of officials, while the ‘Shanghai types “are the protégés of businessmen.”⁵⁷

If the neosensationists were despised for their metropolitan taste, Shen showed remarkable perception in singling out their fetishizing of the “New Woman,” who in their stories represented the spirit of modernity in Shanghai. It was the spirit of an affluent society marked by the aesthetics of commodities, a cult of things Euro-American, light-hearted entertainment, and the fanfare of la bourgeoisie. It was the popular taste promoted by pictorials such as Companion and Women’s Pictorial, a taste shared by college girl students, call girls, taxi dancers, and gentlemen’s and merchants’ wives, concubines, and daughters. In fact, we see the representations of these women not only in neosensationist stories, but in contemporary writers’ works such as Mao Dun’s Ziye (Midnight, 1933), in which the call girl Xu Manli , personifying the carpe diem spirit of the age, pursues sexual pleasures till the end of the story despite the ravages of civil war and the financial crises that destroy people’s lives.

In such stories the women become enemies of the proletariat; they exist simply to highlight the necessity of proletarian revolution. In 1935 the leftist movie “Xin nuxing ” (The new woman), featuring the famous actress Ruan Lingyu , depicts a decadent woman writer who commits suicide in the end. In the movie the hard-working women laborers who are always in the background throw into relief the decay and decline of the woman intellectual who indulges in sensual pleasures and pursues her own destruction. The fact that the star Ruan Lingyu did commit suicide shortly after the movie was released⁵⁸ seemed to point to the apocalyptic vision of art and its inevitable unification with life.

After Liu Na’ou reverted from proletarianism to modernism during the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the collision between his coterie and the proletarianists eventually erupted in the “hard films/soft films” debate. In 1933 Liu, together with Huang Jiamo , a friend from Taiwan, and others, established the journal Xiandai dianying (Modern Screen; the editors’ own English title). In the mission statement of the journal Huang states that with the importation of foreign movies into the Chinese market, the editors of the journal hope that Chinese will “produce movies that represent the Chinese spirit and taste,” so that Chinese movies can be exported to the world and compete with foreign movies.⁵⁹ One article in the same issue points out that Chinese enterprises, especially the movie industry, were facing bankruptcy because of “the infiltration of foreign capital and the penetration of imperial culture.… This explains the bankruptcy of our national capital in a semicolony.”⁶⁰ In 1933 and 1934 there was in China a general movement to promote national products and enterprises in order to boycott Euro-American products and prevent further draining of the agricultural population, which would eventually deplete the rural areas.

Besides answering the call to promote national enterprises, Huang makes it clear that Modern Screen is completely free from the control of any ideology or the demand of propaganda, implying the existence of unwanted ideological domination by revolutionary literature and nationalist literature at the time. He points out that the movie is more than a kind of entertainment; it is “the highest class entertainment in modern times.” It is in the second issue of the journal that Liu Na’ou further spells out the entertainment function of the movie. He says that it functions “like sleeping pills that help people escape reality.… If we eliminated from current movies the sleeping pills like sentimentalism, irrationalism, fashionableness, intellectual fun, and romanticism and fantasy, would not this favorite of modern man become a great desert?”⁶¹

For Liu the success of a movie depends not on its content, but on the way the subject matter is handled and adapted into the movie. In other words, it is the form and autonomy of art that matters.⁶² From the fifth issue on, he wrote a series of articles on movie techniques, for instance, “Dianying jiezou jianlun ” (A brief essay on the rhythm of the camera), “Kaimaila jigou—weizhi jiaodu jineng lun ” (On the mechanism of the camera—the function of angle and position),⁶³ as a way to demonstrate his thesis that technique and form were everything for the movie. The article that directly triggered the debate with the leftist camp, though, was Huang Jiamou’s “Yingxing yingpian yu ruanxing yingpian ” (Hard films and soft films) in December 1933, in which he complained that the leftist “revolutionary movies” had “hardened” the soft films of the movie, and as a result meaningless slogans and didacticism were driving away audiences who used to throng to the movies. He emphasized the entertainment function of the movie by saying, “Movies are the ice-cream for the eye, and the sofa for the soul.”⁶⁴

Liu’s coterie’s theories met with severe opposition from the leftist writer Tang Na, who published in 1934 a series of articles in Chen Bao (Morning post) rebutting their emphasis of form over content. In the article “Qingsuan ruanxing dianying lun—ruanxing lunzhe de quwei zhuyi (Purging the soft-film theory—the entertainment theory of soft-film theorists), which was serialized from June 19 to 27, Tang states that “art expresses not only emotions, but also thoughts.… These emotions and thoughts are derived from the world of reality, and should be aroused from the inside of a person. Therefore on the one hand there is the reality that exists objectively, while on the other, there is the subjectivity of the writer in society.” He emphasizes the social function of art and its didactic value, as opposed to Liu’s coteries’ entertainment theory. Tang says that since Liu and his coterie “fail to understand the unification of content and form,” they criticize the leftists for “overemphasizing content,” and thus insist on “the superiority of form over content in a work of art.”⁶⁵

Liu’s coterie’s modernist stance, which valorized the autonomy of art, their literary practice manifested in the aesthetics of the dandy, and their entertainment theory were poles apart from the politicized aesthetics of proletarian literature. A controversy of this nature was inevitable.

As much as modernism is a celebration of the metropolitan mode of life and an unthinking embrace of capitalism, proletarianism condemns the city and capitalist evil. The modernist dandy belongs to an affluent class that is ignorant of poverty and suffering, while the proletarianist takes it as his mission to fight head on against social injustice. A dandy such as Liu Na’ou, though marked by an aestheticism defying bourgeois mediocrity, is undeniably a product of bourgeois culture and capitalist expansion. A dandy like him seems to be a stark contrast to a proletarianist like Yang Kui, who looks upon the bourgeois and colonialism as his mortal enemies. Yet it is exactly in this sense that both can be considered the products of the amalgamation of the bourgeoisie, capitalism, and colonialism.

Besides belonging to two distinct classes, modernism and proletarianism certainly embrace different aesthetic values. If we can say that the modernism of Liu Na’ou is manifested in the neosensationist mode, which emphasizes the pleasures of the senses and thus highlights the metaphysical void of modern society, then Yang Kui’s proletarianism resorts to the persuasive mode instead, which, like the discursive method used by the most stringent religions history has known, aims to convert the readers to the proletarian ideology. If we agree with Foucault that “the deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism,” it is no less true that the proletarianist executes his task with an asceticism equal to an angry prophet.

While the modernist experimentation with representation and narrative point of view throws into relief the flimsy demarcation between reality and fiction, the proletarianist insists that the nature and function of literature is to “tell the truth.”⁶⁶ Hence Yang Kui’s revulsion toward the modernist idea of the autonomy of art and his promotion of reportage, or documentary literature. We can say that in contrast to modernism, which is “the ironic heroization of the present,” in Foucault’s words, proletarianism is the urge for the reform of present society with a view to effecting a utopian future. The modernist seeks the “ascetic elaboration of the self,” whereas the proletarianist subsumes the self into the cause of the masses.

The condition of the masses is the main subject matter in the work of Yang Kui, who all his life prided himself as being one of them. Readers remember him as “the old gardener,” due to the well-known stories of how he supported his family by growing and selling flowers both before and after the war. The image of a lean old man with a hammer in his hand has become a perennial symbol in the public mind.⁶⁷ It is the image of a worker close to the land and the people, who survives ordeals by his strong will and persistence.

During his life Yang established two gardens. Shouyang Garden was built in 1937, a few months after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and Donghai Garden was built in 1962, a year after he was released from his twelve-year imprisonment on Green Island. The name “Shouyang ” is an allusion to two Chinese intellectuals of the tenth century B.C. who refused to be subjects under the enemy and hid in the Shouyang Mountain until they starved to death. This allusion is of course a strong suggestion of Yang’s own refusal to live under the Japanese, who were at war with China. Because these two gardens were built at such crucial moments in his life, the pieces of prose he wrote concerning them are invested with symbolic meanings hard for the reader to overlook.

These pieces, using the garden as a metaphor of literature as well as life, include “Shūyōen zakkan (Random notes on Shouyang Garden; 1937), “Yuanding riji ” (The gardener’s diary; 1956), and “Momo de yuanding ” (The silent gardener; manuscript, circa 1966). In “Random Notes on Shouyang Garden” the narrator states that, while people are actively answering the call for talent at such a crucial moment—implying the Sino-Japanese War—he chooses to grow vegetables and flowers in the garden and manages to avoid starvation because of what he grows. He says, “Not all who hide in the Shouyang Mountain will die of starvation. It all depends on the psychological state of the hermit.”⁶⁸ For the narrator, the garden represents a small world that he can control. While he may not be able to make the outside world right, where weeds grow at will and prevent the growth of flowers, in the garden, with diligence and care, he can get rid of the weeds so as to ensure the flowers’ growth. Yet on the other hand, the weeds, though unwanted in the garden, represent to the narrator the persevering spirit of the lowly bred, since they are endowed with the ability to grow profusely all of a sudden if unattended to.

In “The Gardener’s Diary,” written and published while Yang was imprisoned on Green Island, the narrator tells how the inmates cooperate to build a garden in the prison compound. The green patch that is gradually coming into being becomes a source of hope for them, “the way travelers in a desert look upon an oasis as heaven.”⁶⁹ Their dream is to grow in the middle of the garden a banyan tree that would provide shade for all in the years to come. Banyan trees in the narrator’s mind represent fond memories: the photographs sent him of the archway formed by two banyan trees planted by his children at home; under the hundred-year-old banyan tree in his hometown, villagers, passengers, and workers in the field take shelter in hot summer, with children playing and old men telling stories or singing popular tunes accompanied by a folk string instrument. During the typhoon season the prison garden faces a series of setbacks. With typhoons coming one after another, the trees are repeatedly blown down and then replaced, but the inmates never lose heart. According to the narrator, if one wants to make contributions in life one will certainly face and overcome similar setbacks: “All careers good to the people are inherited, expanded, and fulfilled in a like manner.”

“The Silent Gardener,” not published during Yang’s lifetime, was probably written five years after he was released from Green Island.⁷⁰ Like most of his prose works, this piece again aims to give the reader some wisdom. In the beginning the narrator states that his aim in cultivating the garden is to fulfill an ideal: to secure an independent life so that he does not have to work for others and thus will be able to write as he likes. For him the garden represents a “paradise” that he can create and monitor, and he compares it to the reality outside: “Silently he weeded the garden and drove away the malicious worms, while at the same time he cannot overlook the weeds and malicious worms in life and society. Whenever he heard of a moving story, he would think of his pen that has been left idle and getting rusty.”⁷¹ Literature for Yang Kui has the function of righting the wrong; it should not be looked upon as an end in itself. He soon discovers, however, that this dream of an independent life through gardening seems impossible, since out of good will his children’s families have moved in, thinking such a family reunion would compensate him for his long absence from home. Yet the output of a small garden, though sufficient to feed an old couple, is not enough to feed more than a dozen people. In addition to the debt he has gone into to establish the garden, he is forced to borrow more money to expand it and buy necessary equipment. As a result the interest he has to pay accumulates to such an exorbitant amount that he is afraid that he may have to sell the garden eventually.

For Yang Kui, being a writer is equivalent to being a gardener. He says in the article “Wo you yikuai zhuan ” (I have a brick):

Right now I am the gardener of Donghai Garden. More than thirty years ago, when Taiwan xinwenxue (Taiwan new literature) was banned by the Japanese government for its anti-Japanese stance, I became the gardener of “Shouyang Garden.” … More than twenty years ago, I was again the gardener of Taiwan wenxue (Taiwan literature).⁷²

Taiwan New Literature and Taiwan Literature were the two journals that he founded in 1935 and 1948. The effort of establishing a garden, including tilling the land, sowing, irrigating, fertilizing, worming, and weeding, is likened to establishing a literary career, the purpose of both being to create a taoyuanxiang , a paradise or a utopian world.⁷³ It is from this trope of looking toward a better future that the politicized aesthetics of his proletarianism derives its vitality and meaning: the writer should expose the evil of the present society while envisioning in his literary works a better society so that the masses will cherish hope and follow the right path to that better world. His article “Ya bubian de meiguihua ” (The indomitable rose), written in 1957 when he was still serving time on Green Island, tells about a rose that manages to grow out of the rocks it has been buried under. The article, originally titled “Chunguang guan buzhu (The uncontainable splendor of the spring), was first published in Xinsheng yuekan (New life monthly), a journal for inmates on Green Island. In 1976 it was included in a junior high school textbook with the new title that is better known today. “The indomitable rose” has become in the public mind the symbol of the writer who overcame hardships and emerged triumphant in the end.⁷⁴

According to Yang Kui, a writer should live, think, and labor like the masses; he should look upon the interest of the people as his own, with a full understanding of the sources of the people’s joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. Yet, given all this, it is most important that a writer’s wisdom and vision be above those of the masses; he should be able to see the tendency of the times and have a keen eye for the corruption and customs that thwart progress. In other words, a writer should aim at the reform of society, while this reform should be based on a thorough understanding of reality.⁷⁵

Throughout his career Yang was highly concerned about the role of the writer in society. In “Sakka, seikatsu, shakai ” (Writers, life, and society; 1934) he makes “those who maintain art for art’s sake” the target of attack:

They are those who maintain art for art’s sake, cut off from social reality because of one reason or another. They might be dandies from rich families, loose girls, or those who, due to some sort of bewilderment, are unconcerned about reality and remain onlookers, or they might be bohemians who have lost their feelings.⁷⁶

Yang’s criticism of “art for art’s sake” can be seen in many of his articles. He thinks “pure literature” such as the “I-novel,” which looks inward and is negligent of the outside world, is the product of “decadent literary men, whose will power to live is weak.”⁷⁷ In “Geijutsu wa daishu no mono de aru ” (Art belongs to the people) he states that the writers of “pure literature” have escaped into the small world of “literature on the desk,” caring for nothing but their own feelings, while completely neglecting the reader. They intend to hide in an ivory tower, writing only for people of like mind. In contrast, those who write popular literature, with a view to catering to the reader’s taste, resort to erotic, eccentric, and melodramatic means. In his opinion both these two kinds of writers have departed from the path of real art. Instead, he advocates proletarian literature, which appeals to the masses, i.e., laborers, farmers, and the petty bourgeois. Although the main subject matter should be their lives, it is by no means restricted to these. One should, from the worldview of laborers, write about their enemies, such as the intelligentsia and the bourgeois, as well as their comrades. However, such a worldview must be not just an empty idea, but something concretely described in the kind of writing that will “touch our hearts, make our blood boil, and point to the correct road for us.”⁷⁸

For Yang Kui, the main value of literature lies in its content and subject matter. Writers of “pure literature,” lacking theoretical thinking and enthusiasm, spend their whole lives pursuing “petty skills” and thereby fall to the level of vulgar craftsmen. To point out the complexity of the war between form and content, he comments on the kōdō shugi (activism) proposed by Japanese writers such as Komatsu Kiyoshi and Funehashi Seichi, who introduced the works of French writers André Malraux and André Gide into Japan from 1934 to 1936 and maintained that the autonomy of art and the theoretical thinking of proletarian literature should be fused together, so that writers could exert their activism in society and art, while literature could reach a higher level. In an article titled “Kōdō shugi kentō ” (Examining activism), Yang Kui states that the nature of art is to express the praxis of life and the active will power of the masses, and the reason why those who advocate kōdō shugi in Japan are opposed by leftists is that they have not been able to pinpoint a definite direction. Yang thinks that the dilemma they face is shared by all writers. He agrees with Funehashi that, although the autonomy of art is a must, the pitfall of shuji shugi (rhetoric-ism, or the overemphasis on artifice and virtuosity) is a great loss for literature. According to him, the prevalent opposition between activism and shuji shugi is totally unorthodox. Yang thinks that the advocacy of kōdō shugi is an inevitable result of this dilemma. Yet while admitting that it is a good tendency, he makes it clear that these writers of kōdō shugi have yet to find their right direction, that they will face a series of difficult choices on the way, and that the efforts they make are to be approved of even if they fail in the end.⁷⁹

In “Bungei hihyō no hyōjun(The criteria of art criticism) Yang further expounds on the idea of art for the masses. He insists that the most important aspect of writing is to convey the writer’s emotions, thoughts, and ideas to the reader. Of those who think that the aim of art is self-fulfillment, while the reader’s or the viewer’s reaction is not their concern, Yang says, “It is like speaking Japanese to foreigners who do not know it.” He thinks that the field of modern art criticism likewise shows this tendency. Most critics would put literary works on the anatomy table, analyzing in detail the specific descriptions of certain scenes and the virtuosity of certain passages, forgetting completely the overall impact of the works on people. To Yang, this is similar to the case of a doctor who takes the patient’s pulses and listens to his heartbeat with a stethoscope, but feels nothing for the dying patient or his heartbroken family. He says,

Among literary men today this kind of people seem to be the majority. They indulge in petty skills, but feel nothing for the essence of art that moves people’s hearts. It is like some doctors who treat patients simply by taking their pulses and detecting their breathing but feel nothing for their lives and deaths. These writers, valuing rhetoric over art’s nature to move people … have lost sight of the holistic feeling of literary works, which is what gives them life.⁸⁰

Yang then points out that in fact literary criticism should exist for literary works the way doctors exist for their patients. But when a school of critics, highly applauded by the media, becomes an overwhelming presence in journals and newspapers, almost all writers exert their every power simply to meet with the criteria set by these critics. He thinks that this phenomenon has veered off the right path. He proposes to use the “scientific method” to observe reality, since it is the only method that can create verisimilitudes to move the reader. He points out that the first priority of proletarian literature is to instigate the reader to move toward the right direction. If this is too difficult, one can then resort to “fiction.” “Fiction” for Yang Kui means to “tell lies,” and to write novels one needs the skills of telling lies while making the reader believe that the lies told are “truth.” Truth for Yang Kui has an unsurpassable value in literary criticism, and this can be seen in his advocacy of reportage literature.

Yang thinks of realism as the genre that can best convey the truth of reality, however ugly that reality may seem. At the outbreak of the “kuso riarizumu ” (feces realism) debate in Taiwan in 1943, he defended its position, challenging the notion maintained by Nishikawa Mitsuru , a Japanese writer living in Taiwan, that it was only Taiwanese writers’ poor imitation of Western realism. Kuso realism was in fact a key term invented during the Nihon rōmanha/Jinminbunko (Japanese Romanticists/People’s Literature) debate around 1935 to criticize the style advocated by the leaders of the journal People’s Literature.⁸¹ In a column titled “Bungei jihyō” (Contemporary literary criticism) in the journal Bungei Taiwan (Literary Taiwan), Nishikawa pointed out that the mainstream of Taiwanese literature had recently been kuso realism, a Euro-American literary trend that entered Japan during the Meiji period. To Nishikawa, the Japanese literary tradition was represented by romantic writers and works (distinct from Western Romanticism) such as Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) and Genji monogatari (The tale of the Genji), and he urged contemporary writers to learn from this tradition while contributing works called for by the prospect of establishing the “Kōkoku bungaku” (Imperial literature) under the Great East Asian War. He labels kuso realism a “fragment of cheap humanism,” which describes the vulgarity of worthless life.⁸²

Nishikawa’s article in fact criticizes writers in the journal Taiwan Literature such as Lu Heruo and Zhang Wenhuan , while disclosing his own superiority as an imperial subject over the colonized. Two months later Yang Kui’s article titled “Kuso riarizumu no yōgo ” (In defense of kuso realism) appeared in Taiwan Literature, jokingly taking up the theme “kuso realism” by expounding on the function of feces: helping vegetables and rice grow so that people can be fed. If one, like Nishikawa, who puts a lid on a can of rotting organic matter, refuses to look at reality, one is covering up one’s own nose and eyes instead of reality, which always exists. To rebut Nishikawa’s praise of imperial literature at the expense of realist literature, Yang cites the 1943 story “Tomoshibi ” (Lamp) published in Taiwan Literature by Sakaguchi Reiko , another Japanese writer living in Taiwan. The story describes a merchant’s wife who sees her husband off to war. The wife, though complying with the emperor’s command to unflinchingly support the holy war, cannot help worrying about her husband’s safety.⁸³ Yang praises this story as a model work of realism, saying:

In this way her mind is tossed by this and that thought, while savoring at the same time every worry and distress. The joy and ease that eventually grow out of this state of mind would be real feelings. Since they are family, it is impossible for either the husband or the wife to feel nothing about the family. If it is possible, it would be disgraceful. The Japan that complies with the emperor’s commandment is a big family of one hundred million people. If one does not feel the responsibility for the small family, how does one take action to fulfill one’s responsibility for the big family? Thus, this work, though based on reality, does not indulge in reality, while it is able to create a romantic story to move us.… “To propagate the Japanese spirit, how moving is such a beautiful short story compared with rhetorical outcries and lengthy theories!” said Mr. Wu Xinrong in Kōnan shinbun [Southern reconstruction daily], and I tend to agree with him.… We understand that the Japanese spirit has a twenty-six hundred year tradition. Exactly because of that, if one thinks that it is like a hat that once put on can fit immediately, it would be tremendously ridiculous.⁸⁴

In this passage the attitude shown by Yang toward the so-called Imperial Literature, or Kōmin bungaku (Imperialization Literature), as it is more usually known, is ambivalent. One senses his contradictory emotional and psychological reactions to this new genre, established during the Sino-Japanese War, which demands allegiance of all subjects of Japan, colonizer or colonized. What is not expressed is probably louder than what is directly stated: as colonized, the couple about to be separated for the holy war find it hard to reconcile themselves to the imperial command. Yang says, “Even if one can understand the emperor’s will and has the same patriotic feelings, distinct ways of life and specific environment control people’s way of thinking.”

For many critics of Yang Kui and contemporary writers, the most embarrassing aspect of their writing careers is that most of them wrote works in the spirit of imperialization literature at the time of the imperialization movement during the war.⁸⁵ Yang, proclaimed an anticolonialist writer by Taiwanese critics in the postwar era, in fact wrote quite a few pieces supporting the Great East Asian War. But if we examine these pieces carefully, we find that the pro-imperialization movement rhetoric found in them often shows a heightened ambivalence between tongue-in-cheek exaggeration and supportive rhetoric, which is difficult to take at face value. For instance, in “Ari ippiki no shigoto (Ant’s work), which he wrote for the column “Omoide no shojosaku ” (Memories of my first literary work) in Southern Reconstruction Daily in 1943, he talks about the personal experiences incorporated in his first literary work, “Jiyū rōdōsha no seikatsu danmen ” (Profile of a free laborer’s life).⁸⁶ This piece tells his own story of working as a part-time construction worker while studying in Japan. It is a dangerous job, with the workers shouldering cement bags as they climb up and down stairs made of wooden planks. One time he has to walk over a plank placed on top of the two walls of a tall building. He trembles all over, with the wind blowing and the sand getting into his eyes. When he hears a big bang, he thinks he is dying. But in fact it is the cement bag that has fallen to the ground, while he is lying flat on the wooden plank. A few years later, six years before he writes “Ari ippiki no shigoto,” he visits Tokyo again and admires in awe the building he helped to build. It has become the magnificent Imperial Parliament Building. The concluding part of the story then takes a surprising turn, eulogizing great jobs accomplished by many a little ant like himself. He says, “In the great construction job of building the Great East Asia, I would like to be the little ant that I used to be.” ⁸⁷

Such contrived incorporation of the imperialization spirit can be found in similar stories by Yang. Another example will suffice. In a short piece titled “Wude kurabe ” (A wrist wrestling) the opening sentences are as follows:

Someone asked me to write pro-war stories. To conceive an idea, I smoked three cigarettes. Great people’s brave contribution should, of course, be the subject matter that one writes incessantly about. But I lack such knowledge, therefore I would like to write about citizens who diligently labor like ants, and the lives of those citizens who have sacrificed themselves and turned themselves into pawns, silently working as the foundations of the files and ranks of war.

This is a direct statement of why and how he wrote imperialization stories. But the piece ends with an event that has little or nothing to do with the beginning statement. His second son, scared by a dog that jumps at him while he is playing games with a friend, bursts into tears. His friend teases him and says that a crying baby cannot be a soldier. So the two engage in a wrist-wrestling match to see who is stronger.⁸⁸

During the war the jōhōka (information section) of the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan demanded that Taiwanese writers write literary works with a view to supporting Japan’s all-out mobilizing effort for the war. Yang Kui and others certainly responded to that demand, yet somehow or other, while managing to convey the sense of the ambivalent situation they found themselves in, these works are also imbued with the authors’ oscillation between irony and straightforward conformity. To write such works was clearly not a matter of choice. Whether they really felt for the rhetoric and to what extent they were sincere are questions in history that even the testimony of these writers themselves would find hard to answer.

Connected with the ambivalence of Yang Kui’s writing of imperialization literature is the problem of the editions and revisions of his works, the study of which is an industry in itself. Most of his works, originally written in Japanese, were revised when translated into Chinese after the war, often translated and revised by himself or by another translator, sometimes revised by editors of newspapers, journals, or publishing companies intending to republish his works. There is also evidence of revisions made in his own handwriting in the manuscripts he left behind.⁸⁹ Some critics point out that the patriotic rhetoric and anti-Japanese slogans were added to the revised editions after the war, and thus question his position as an anticolonialist writer.⁹⁰

Many writers during the Japanese occupation, such as Zhang Wenhuan and Long Yingzong, abruptly stopped publishing after the war, partly because of their inability to write in vernacular Chinese, which had replaced Japanese and become the official language on the island, and partly because of the unstable sociopolitical situation during the postwar years, which were marked by such horrific events such as the February 28 Incident⁹¹ in 1947 and the so-called White Terror, which lasted for two or even three decades after the war.

Yang kept on writing as well as publishing during this period. He certainly paid dearly for his relentless effort to “tell the truth,” with twelve years spent in prison for an article of less than seven hundred characters titled “Heping xuanyan (Manifesto of peace), written in 1949. Advocating a general effort to build Taiwan as a “model country of peaceful construction,” he urges the government to guarantee freedom of speech, gathering, publication, philosophical thinking, and religious beliefs for the people, and to enforce the autonomy of local administrations. Finally, he hopes that Taiwanese people of both mainland and native origins will give up their prejudices against each other and live in peace together so that Taiwan can be a “paradise.”⁹² This “manifesto,” originally meant to be circulated among friends, was incidentally seen by a journalist from the Shanghai-based Dagongbao (Grand justice daily), and eventually saw publication on January 21, 1949. On April 6 Yang was arrested.

In fact Yang did not stop his socialist activities after the war. Before the war he was an active member of Nōmin Kumiai (Farmers’ union), but he deliberately kept at a distance from the communists who infiltrated it, mainly because, with a literary career in view, he did not want to work “underground.” The night before his wedding in February 1929 to Ye Tao, a Farmer’s Union comrade in charge of the women’s movement division, they were both arrested for the speeches they had been invited to give that day at the union’s Tainan headquarters. After the war he did not see eye to eye with Xie Xuehong, the famous female leader of Renmin xiehui (People’s association), a communist organization in Taiwan,⁹³ and seldom visited its headquarters, Dahua jioujia (Grand China Restaurant), in Taichung. He was nevertheless still active in the cause of the Farmers’ Union. Immediately after the February 28 Incident in 1947, he and several friends designed, printed, and distributed cards containing a poll to find out people’s reaction and an announcement of a protest meeting on March 3. It failed to convene because of police intervention, while Yang and his wife disguised themselves as a farmer couple and went on a tour in neighboring villages to encourage young people to join the “27th division” of the Farmers’ Union. The mission having failed, they escaped from home, hid in the mountains for a dozen days and then in a barn, and finally tried to escape by sea, but to no avail. They were arrested in mid-April and released in September.⁹⁴

During his twelve-year term on Green Island resulting from his second arrest after the war, Yang wrote stories of how he and his wife learned to speak mandarin Chinese with one of their daughters, stories that have endeared themselves to the public. “Wo de xiao xiansheng ” (My little teacher) was first published in January 1956 in Xin shenghuo bibao (New life bulletin), a newsletter posted on the wall for inmates to read. It tells his memory of how after the war, the little girl, a first grader at elementary school then, took every opportunity at home to teach her parents to speak simple phrases such as “wash hands before meals” and “eat lunch.” But their lessons were interrupted by the uninvited visitors who barged into the house to arrest her parents. When the visitors came, she had just been back from school and was eating lunch. The image of her tears silently dropping into the bowl of rice in front of her had been imprinted on the father’s memory since then. At the time he writes the story, he has been separated for seven years from his family, while the little girl, having finished elementary school and junior high school, is now studying at Taichung Normal College, looking forward to being an elementary school teacher someday and finding her lost childhood among innocent children.⁹⁵

For decades before the publication of his Complete Works (1998–2001), the general impression was that Yang Kui had never written in Chinese before the war. In fact in 1935 he published a story, “Si ” (Death), in Chinese in Taiwan Xinminbao (Taiwan new people daily). There is an unpublished version of the same story written in the Taiwanese dialect, “Pinnong de biansi (The unfortunate death of a poor farmer), in a manuscript discovered after his death. Compared with his writings in Chinese during the Green Island period and afterward, the language in “Death” is awkward, and full of grammatical and syntactical errors, disclosing the author’s unfamiliarity with the language. The Taiwanese version of the story is in a like state, or even more unreadable, since there are words invented or borrowed from Chinese to imitate the Taiwanese sounds with no characters to match. One senses that these two versions of the same story might have been an experiment carried out by Yang Kui, since “Death” was published during the height of the famous Beijing huawen/Taiwan huawen (Beijing vernacular/Taiwanese vernacular) controversy on the island.

The controversy started in the early 1920s, before the Chinese vernacular literature movement was systematically introduced in Taiwan in 1924 by Zhang Wojun , a Taiwanese who had studied in Beijing. With Taiwan starting its own vernacular literature movement, Taiwanese intellectuals began to question the meaning of “vernacular” in the Taiwanese context: is the Beijing dialect the synonym of “vernacular,” or is it possible to use the Taiwanese dialect to write vernacular literature on the island? In his 1923 article Huang Chengcong resorts to Hu Shih ’s rhetoric on the superiority of vernacular literature over classical literature. He does not think the Taiwanese dialect a suitable medium for vernacular literature, since it is used in limited areas, while Taiwan, unlike an independent country with a written language, will soon find its culture wiped out by another country backed up by the supremacy of its language, meaning Japan. Therefore he urges Taiwanese people to learn the Chinese vernacular so that they can expand their vision and sphere of movement to China.⁹⁶ Shi Wenqi in his 1924 article points out the deficiency of the Taiwanese in writing the vernacular; they tend to stud their articles with Minnan and Japanese expressions and thus make laughingstocks of themselves.⁹⁷

On the other hand, there were also scholars who supported the idea of using Taiwanese in writing in the vernacular. For instance, Lian Wenqing , the famous historian who published Taiwan tongshi (General history of Taiwan) in 1921, maintained that the Taiwanese dialect should be improved in order to cope with the times. He proposed the establishment of standard pronunciation and grammatical rules for Taiwanese through a sound phonology.⁹⁸ Zhang Wuojun agrees with him in this regard, saying, “Our New Literature movement has the mission of reforming the Taiwanese dialect. We should change our dialect into a rational language suitable for the written form. We should reform the Taiwanese dialect with the Chinese vernacular as a model.”⁹⁹

During the 1930s when the xiangtu wenxue (native literature) debate broke out, the Taiwanese vernacular became an issue that attracted much attention again. In the special column titled “The Taiwanese Vernacular Forum” in the inaugural issue of the bimonthly Nanyin (Southern sound) established in 1932, someone with the pen name of “Jing ” uses the katakana of Japanese to illustrate the correct pronunciation of the Taiwanese dialect.¹⁰⁰ Guo Qiusheng , on the other hand, maintains that the “basic work” of establishing the Taiwanese vernacular is “creating new words.”¹⁰¹ In the third issue, Lai Ho , Yang Kui’s mentor and close friend, continues the discussion of the same topic:

I think to some extent it is necessary to create new words, but by all means it should be done when there is no choice, when in existing characters we are unable to find words that can match the sounds and meanings of what we need to express. If there are existing characters that match the meaning but do not match the sound, I think it would be easier for more people to understand by using the existing words with notes on the side.

Guo Qiusheng in response agrees with Lai’s view, but points out that it is essential to try out the theories, and hopes that at this time of establishing the Taiwanese vernacular, more people will devote themselves to transcribing popular songs and ballads in the Taiwanese vernacular, so that by trial and error they can discover the “right method.”¹⁰²

Lai Ho certainly tried to influence Yang Kui with his view about the Taiwanese vernacular, as can be evidenced by the handwriting attributed to Lai changing into Chinese characters some of the new words Yang had created to match the Taiwanese sounds in the manuscript of “The Unfortunate Death of a Poor Farmer.” It was in fact common for writers during the 1930s to create new words for the Taiwanese vernacular. These writers, including Lai Ho and Yang Shouyu , were eager to put into practice the theories discussed during the controversy.¹⁰³ But as Lai had predicted, since each writer had his own way of inventing words, it was hard to arrive at a unified system accepted for general usage. As a result mutual understanding became a problem, and the experiments did not last long. But Yang Kui continued incorporating phrases of the Taiwanese and Chinese vernaculars in his works written in Japanese, while he made an effort to transcribe popular Taiwanese songs and ballads, including those of Minnan, Hakka, and aboriginal origins, even during the Green Island period.

Whatever their contrasting ideologies, both modernism and proletarianism need to resolve the contradictions between the metropolitan and the native, the universal and the particular. In his article “Hōkoku bungaku ni tsuite ” (On Reportage), Yang Kui, urging his fellow Taiwanese writers to be sekai no sakka (writers of the world) and produce works such as Lu Xun’s The Story of A Q, realizes that it is essential to base the universal on native experiences:

The reason that we are advocating colonial literature is because we need to write about the Taiwanese society in which we were born and brought up, not because we intend to isolate ourselves on Taiwan. We sincerely hope that everyone of our writers is equipped with the broad perspective of a sekaijin (a man of the world), and looks at Taiwan and writes about it with such a perspective.¹⁰⁴

In his theoretical works he constantly alludes to Japanese proletarian writers such as Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958) and Funahashi Seiichi (1904–1976). Among his posthumously published works can be found the remaining segment of the translation of Russian writers Iosif Abramovich Lapidus’ and Konstantin Ostrovitianov’s 1929 book Politicheskaia ekonomiia (An outline of political economy: Political economy and Soviet economics).¹⁰⁵ In “Hōkoku bungaku mondō ” (Reportage: Questions and answers) Yang Kui draws on Komatsu Kiyoshi ’s introduction of Russian, French, and German reportage writers like Il’ya Grigorevich Erenburg, André Malraux, Egon Erwin Kisch, and so on.¹⁰⁶

Yang is familiar with the international lineage of the proletarianist, and he spares no effort in drawing his reader’s attention to the global condition of the proletarian movement. Yet within the broad view of the universality of the proletarian condition, how does one manage not to lose sight of one’s native self? Does identifying with class compromise or further complicate one’s identity quest? Yang Kui is, of course, keenly aware of the contradictions and repeatedly discusses the issue, as can be witnessed in his article “Geijutsu ni okeru ‘Taiwan rashii mono’ ni tsuite ” (On the Taiwanese flavor in art), in which he states that it does not matter at all in what form a literary work is written. As far as literary form is concerned, it certainly transcends the boundaries of nation, people, and native land. But when one is talking about the content of literature, it is another matter. Yang unflinchingly emphasizes that Taiwanese writers should strive to describe the reality of Taiwan through a Taiwanese point of view.¹⁰⁷

In 1920s Taiwan, young men aspiring to literary careers, like Yang Kui and Liu Na’ou, did not lack international models to emulate. Yet if Yang Kui followed the footsteps of Japanese proletarian writers, he would be imitating the colonizers of his native land. Identifying with the proletariat did not ease the colonizer-colonized tension for him. Liu Na’ou, practicing Baudelaire’s theory of the dandy in life as well as in writing, found himself in a similar predicament. As much as he aspired to the universal aesthetic values of modernism, the laws of national boundaries still cornered him in the end. Perhaps due to his lack of territorial or national allegiance as a Taiwanese in semicolonial Shanghai, during his literary and film careers he did not hesitate to associate with the various contending political forces there: the leftists, the Nationalist government, the Wang Jingwei puppet regime, and the Japanese.

The cause of Liu’s murder on September 3, 1940, by an unidentified gunman, who ambushed him from the staircase of a restaurant and shot him three times,¹⁰⁸ has been a mystery in literary history. The murder took place right after a lunch party held in his honor, celebrating his succession to the directorship of Guomin xinwenshe (National subjects’ daily) after Mu Shiying , a fellow neosensationist writer and filmmaker. National Subjects’ Daily was a news agency run by the Wang Jingwei puppet regime. On June 28 of the same year while functioning as its director Mu had likewise been shot to death.¹⁰⁹ No one knew if these two murders were connected or instigated by the same agency. There were rumors that Liu’s murder was committed by the Japanese secret agency because they thought he was a double agent for the Nationalist government. Some, on the other hand, believed that the Nationalist Party secret agency had him killed because he was thought to collaborate with the Japanese.¹¹⁰ Shi Zhecun even suspected that Liu’s killer was sent by Du Yuesheng ’s gang because of outstanding gambling debts.¹¹¹ Whatever the real cause was, Liu’s tragic death points to the danger inherent in the semicolonial society in Shanghai, where no single government enforced its laws and protection was not guaranteed to subjects of any nationality; Liu’s ambiguous identity certainly did not assist him in this regard.

As much as the language of creative writing became an issue for Yang Kui’s generation of Taiwanese writers, Liu, living and writing in Shanghai, was also highly concerned about his own Taiwanese origin and the inadequacy of his Chinese proficiency. In his 1927 diary we can see his self-consciousness at being a nonnative speaker of mandarin Chinese and the efforts he made to improve his mandarin proficiency. For instance, on January 3 he wrote, “Practiced mandarin Chinese conversation tonight.” On January 5, when he was reading a Japanese translation of the Russian writer Alexandre Kuprin’s (1873–1938) novel Yama: The Pit (1901–1915) he wrote, “The author has really a great ability to tell stories.… I keenly feel that my ability to tell stories is limited. Perhaps because Fukienese has a limited vocabulary, I often fail to come up with the right expression to express what I have in mind.” But even though he was highly conscious of his Minnan origin, Minnan expressions pop up from time to time in the diary, probably without himself being aware of them. For example, in the April 6 entry where he writes, “The trains to Jiangning were all full of soldiers,” the Minnan expression “bingmuanmuan ” is used instead of “full of soldiers.”¹¹² In the July 14 entry where he writes, “This telegraph awakened my nightmare of five or six years,” the Minnan expression “meimeng ” is used instead of “nightmare.”¹¹³

As a Taiwanese during the Japanese occupation who became famous and was murdered in Shanghai, it took more than half a century for Liu Na’ou to be reestablished in Taiwan as a literary man. In the summer of 1997 when Liu’s family entrusted his 1927 diary to me, they were still uncertain whether it was “safe” or appropriate to have its content meet the public eye. Even though it was already ten years after the lifting of martial law on Taiwan, his second daughter, the fourth of his five children, was still uneasy when talking about her father’s murder. It had been a subject of taboo since her return to Taiwan from Shanghai with her mother and siblings shortly after the violent event. A child of seven at the time, she keenly felt the shock and horror that would persist for decades to come, over the years of the postwar handing over of Taiwan to the Nationalist government, the February 28 Incident, and the White Terror. In the summer of 1997 she still vaguely remembered her mother’s description of her father having been active in Shanghai literary circles and film industry during the 1930s, but she would not know of his stature and significance as a literary man until the publication of his five-volume Complete Works in 2001.

For Yang Kui’s family, the fourteen volumes of his Complete Works published consecutively from 1998 to 2001 was also an impossible dream come true. Compiling his works involved translating the untranslated prewar works into Chinese, comparing the various Japanese versions with the postwar Chinese versions, checking previous translations and correcting them wherever inaccuracies were found, and retranslating the original text if the previous translations differed from it too much to be simply “corrected,” a more laborious task than one could have imagined.

If anyone questions the definition of “Taiwanese literature” and doubts that works written in Japanese could be considered a part of it, I would attempt only one argument in response: Although Taiwan to some extent shares in the global colonial and postcolonial experience, the specific case of Taiwan, which forced its educated population, versed in classical Chinese, to adopt Japanese as an official language for fifty years before the war, and then to abruptly switch to vernacular Chinese after the war for another fifty years, is hard to match. For many postmartial law critics, in the past century Taiwan had been twice colonized by outside regimes before the Democratic Progressive Party took over the government in 2000.

In the past decade the dynamic energy of scholars as well as the efforts of government cultural agencies to create a literary tradition for Taiwan is clearly shown in the canon formation process, as can be witnessed by the considerable number of complete works of Taiwanese writers already compiled and now being compiled. Should Taiwanese literature be considered a literature in its own right, or is it part of Chinese literature? What is the relationship between Japanese literature and prewar works written in Japanese by Taiwanese authors? How does one create “nationalism” without being provincial? We need a new discourse for a new relationship between colonial cultural hegemony and the burgeoning native consciousness evident in the invention of a “national” tradition.

NOTES

1. Liu Na’ou’s diary, written in 1927, was found in the mid-1990s in a closet at his home in Tainan. It was published in two volumes in 2001. For the French quotation, see Liu Na’ou, Rijiji [Diary], ed. and trans. Peng Hsiao-yen and Huang Yingzhe , part I, in Liu Na’ou Quanji [Complete works of Liu Na’ou], ed. Kang Laixin and Xu Qinzhen (Tainan: Tainanxian Wenhuaju, 2001), 296. For Liu’s family background and education in Taiwan and Japan, see Peng Hsiao-yen, “Langdang tianya: Liu Na’ou 1927 nian riji [Flâneur of the world: Liu Na’ou’s 1927 diary],” in Haishang shuo qingyu [Discourse of desire in Shanghai: From Zhang Ziping to Liu Na’ou] (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 2001), 106–144. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations of Chinese and French passages into English in this article are my own.

2. In Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, sea voyage always connotes freedom of spirit and elevation of mind as opposed to the mediocrity of the world. See especially verse XIV, titled “L’homme et la mer,” in “Spleen et idéal,” collected in Les fleurs du mal. Praising man and the sea as two eternal fighters, the poem ends with the line “O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacable!,” meaning “O eternal fighters, o implacable brothers!” See Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Gilbert Lély, 1934), 29.

3. Huang Tianzuo , alias Suichu , “Wo suo renshi de liu na’ou xiansheng [The Mr. Liu Na’ou I knew],” in Osaka mainichi [Osaka daily], Chinese edition, 5.9 (Nov. 1, 1940). I will discuss Liu’s murder later in this article.

4. Under the Japanese colonial policy Taiwanese were not entitled to the same education system as the Japanese. See Qin Xianci , “Zhang Wojun ji qi tongshidai de Beijing Taiwan liuxuesheng [Zhang Wojun and contemporary Taiwanese studying in Beijing],” in Peng Hsiao-yen ed., Piaobo yu xiangtu: Zhang Wojun shi-shi sishi zhounian jinian lunwenji [Diaspora and nativism: Proceedings of the conference on the fortieth anniversary of Zhang Wojun’s death] (Taipei: Xingzhengyuan wenhua jianshe weiyuanhui, 1996), 57–81.

5. See the list of Taiwanese who graduated in March 1926 from schools in Tokyo recorded in “Liujing zuyesheng songbiehui [Farewell party for Taiwanese students graduating from schools in Tokyo],” in Taiwan minpō [Taiwan people’s daily] 99 (April 4, 1926), 8.

6. Shi Zhicun, Zhendan ernian [Two years at L’Aurore] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1996), 289–290.

7. See especially diary entries of Jan. 18 and Jan. 19.

8. Huang Tianzuo, “The Mr. Liu Na’ou I knew.”

9. See Shi Shumei, “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape,” in The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (California: University of California Press, 2001), 276.

10. In an interview with Dai Guohui and Uchimura Gōsuke , Yang talks about his family background and childhood experiences. See Ye Shitao , trans., “Yige Taiwan zuojia de qishiqinian [The seventy-seven years of a Taiwanese writer],” in Peng Hsiao-yen, ed., Yang Kui quanji [Complete works of Yang Kui] (Tainan: Guoli wenhua zichan baocunyanjiou zhongxin, 1998–2001), 14:242–65. Originally published in Taiwan shinpō [Taiwan times], March 2, 1983. Complete Works of Yang Kui will abbreviated as CWOYK from now on.

11. Yang Kui, “Riben zhimin tongzhi xia de haizi [The child under Japanese colonial rule],” in CWOYK 14:20–30. Originally a speech at Furen University on May 7, 1982. Later published in Lienhe bao [United daily], August 10, 1982.

12. In an interview Yang Kui says that his motivation for writing was to “restore truth to the distorted history.” See Tan Jia , “Fang laozuojia Yang Kui [Interview with the senior writer Yang Kui],” in CWOYK 14:226–233. Originally published in 70 niandai [The 70s], no. 154 (Nov. 1982).

13. Yang Kui, “The child under Japanese colonial rule.”

14. Huang Tianzuo, “The Mr. Liu Na’ou I knew.”

15. Huang Tianzuo, “The Mr. Liu Na’ou I knew.”

16. See the discussion below on “petty skills.”

17. Yang Kui, “Shōsetsu, hishōsetsu [Fiction, anti-fiction],” in CWOYK 13: 535–538. Original in manuscript form (June 18, 1934).

18. See discussion of “kuso-realism” below.

19. Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1979).

20. I quote the definition of “acculturation” from Webster’s Third International Dictionary.

21. See Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” in Seamus Deane, ed., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 23–42.

22. Seamus Deane, “Introduction,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 3–19.

23. See Liu Na’ou, Diary, I.232; II.762, 770.

24. The movie has another title, “The Man with a Hat.” Judging by the approximate age of his children at the time of the movie, I presume that it was made in the mid-1930s. Around 1934 Liu’s family, including his wife, two sons, and a daughter, moved to Shanghai. One daughter was born in Shanghai in 1936, and one son in 1938.

25. See Liu Na’ou, Diary, I.102.

26. In Liu’s 1927 diary there is a reading list at the end of each month. See Liu Na’ou, Diary, II.553.

27. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50.

28. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”

29. See Liu Na’ou, May 18, in Diary, I.322.

30. See Liu Na’ou, May 19, in Diary, I.324.

31. Baudelaire, verse V, “Spleen et idéal,” in Les fleurs du mal 18.

32. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 40.

33. Liu Na’ou, October 17, in Diary, II.716.

34. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 40.

35. Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne [The painter of modern life], in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1976), 683–724.

36. See Water Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Biddles Lts., Guildford and King’s Lynn, 1989), 11–66.

37. Liu Na’ou, Diary, II.702.

38. Mu Shiying , “Craven ‘A,’” in Gongmu [Public cemetery] (Shanghai: Xiandai Shuju, 1933), 107–138.

39. For the theory of psycho-narration, see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983).

40. See Charles Baudelaire, “Éloge du maquillage [Eulogy on make-up],” in The Painter of Modern Life, 714–718.

41. Mu Shiying, “Shouzhi [Fingers],” in Nanbeiji [Poles apart] (Shanghai: Hufeng Shuju, 1932), 49–55.

42. See entries of March 21, April 3, April 6, and April 9, in Liu Na’ou, Diary.

43. Liu Na’ou, Diary, 1.52.

44. Liu Na’ou, Diary, 1.66.

45. Liu Na’ou, Diary, 1.386.

46. Liu Na’ou, “Youxi [Game],” in Dushi fengjingxian [Scène] (Shanghai: Shuimo Shudian, 1930), 1–17.

47. Huang Chaoqin , “Hanwen gaige lun [On the reform of classical Chinese],” in Classical Chinese Section, Taiwan (January and February 1923), 25–31, 21–28.

48. See the entries written from September to December in Liu Na’ou’s 1927 diary.

49. Cf. Heinrich Freuhauf, “Urban Exoticism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang, eds., (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Contemporary China Series, 1998), 147.

50. For an account of Shao as a literary dandy and the literary salon he formed in his home, see Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 241–250.

51. “Wentan xiaoxi [News of the literary circle],” in Xin shidai [New age] 1.1 (August 1, 1931), 7.

52. This is Shi Zhicun’s opinion as expressed during an interview with me in October 1998.

53. Cf. Peng Hsiao-yen, “Wusi wenren zai Shanghai: Linglei de Liu Na’ou [May Fourth literary men in Shanghai: The unclassifiable Liu Na’ou],” in Discourse of Desire in Shanghai, 145–188.

54. Cf. Peng Hsiao-yen, Discourse of Desire in Shanghai, 95–103.

55. Shen Congwen (alias Jiachen ), “Yu Dafu, Zhang Ziping ji qi yingxiang [Yu Dafu, Zhang Ziping, and their influences],” in Xinyue [Crescent moon] 3.1 (March 1930), 1–8.

56. Shen Congwen, “Lun Mu Shiying [On Mu Shiying],” in Shen Congwen wenji [Works of Shen Congwen] 11, 203–205. Originally published in 1934.

57. The translation is quoted from Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 23–24. See Lu Xun (alias Luan Tingshi ), “Jingpai yu haipai [Beijing types and Shanghai types],” in Shen bao [Shanghai post], February 3, 1934, 17. For an account of the Haipai controversy per se, the emergence of the “Beijing School,” and the redefinition of the “Shanghai School,” see Yingjin Zhang, 21–27.

58. See Katherine Huiling Chou, “Representing ‘New Woman’: Actresses and the Xin Nuxing Movement in Chinese Spoken Drama and Films, 1918–1949” (Ph.D. diss., New York: New York University, 1996), 132–133.

59. Huang Jiamo ,“‘Xiandai dianying’ yu Zhongguo dianyingjie—benkan de chuangli yu jinhou de zeren—yubei geiyu duzhe de jidian gongxian [Modern Screen and Chinese movies—the establishment of this journal and its responsibility from now on—a few contributions intended for the reader],” in Xiandai dianying [Modern screen], inaugural issue (March 1, 1933), 1.

60. Shen Xiling , “1932 nian Zhongguo dianying de zong jiezhang yu 1933 nian de xin qiwang [A summing up of the Chinese movie industry in 1932 and the new hopes for the year 1933],” in Modern Screen, inaugural issue (March 1, 1933), 7–9.

61. Liu Na’ou, “Ecranesque [About the screen]” [Liu’s own French title], in Modern Screen 2 (April 1, 1933), 1.

62. Liu Na’ou, “Lun ticai [On subject matter],” in Modern Screen 4 (July 1, 1933), 2–3.

63. Liu Na’ou, “Dianying jiezou jian lun [A brief essay on the rhythm of the camera],” in Modern Screen 6 (December 1, 1933), 1–2; “Kaimaila jigou—weizhi jiaodu jinenglun [On the mechanism of the camera—the function of angle and position],” in Modern Screen 7 (June 1, 1934), 1–5.

64. Huang Jiamo, “Yingxing yingpian yu ruanxing yingpian [Hard films and soft films],” in Modern Screen 6 (December 1, 1933), 3.

65. Tang Na , “Qingsuan ruanxing dianying lun—ruanxing lunzhe de quwei zhuyi [Purging the soft-film theory—the entertainment theory of soft-film theorists],” in Chen Bao [Morning post], June 19–27.

66. Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

67. See one picture of Yang Kui taken in Donghai Garden in 1979 and reprinted in CWOYK 12.

68. Yang Kui, “Shuyōen zakkan [Random notes on Shouyang Garden],” in CWOYK, pp. 478–485. Originally published in Taiwan shinbun [Taiwan news], March 30–April 2, 1937.

69. Yang Kui, “Yuanding riji [A gardener’s diary],” in CWOYK 10:337–345. Originally published in Xinsheng yuekan [New life monthly], November 1956). New Life Monthly was a journal published by the inmates of the prison on Green Island.

70. Since the narrator mentions that he has worked in the garden for four years, and since Donghai Garden was established one year after he was released from Green Island, I presume the piece was written in 1966, five years after he was set free.

71. Yang Kui, “Momo de yuanding [The silent gardener],” in CWOYK 13: 72–732.

72. Yang Kui, “Wuo you yikuai zhuan [I have a brick],” in CWOYK 10:398–420. Originally published in Zhongyang ribao [Central news daily], October 21, 1976.

73. Yang Kui, “I have a brick.”

74. Yang Kui, “Ya bubian de meiguihua [The indomitable rose],” in CWOYK 8:398–420. Originally published as “Chunguang guan buzhu [The uncontainable splendor of the spring],” in New Life Monthly (1957).

75. Yang Kui, “Zuozhe yu duzhe [The writer and the reader],” in CWOYK 13:676–679. Originally a manuscript piece in Xinsheng biji [New life notebook], which Yang kept during his imprisonment on Green Island.

76. Yang Kui, “Sakka, seikatsu, shakai [Writers, life, and society],” in CWOYK 13:543–547. Originally an unpublished manuscript.

77. Yang Kui, “Bungaku zakkan [Random notes on literature],” in CWOYK 13:571–576. Originally an unpublished manuscript.

78. Yang Kui, “Geijutsu wa daishū no mono de aru [Art belongs to the people],” in CWOYK 9:127–134. Originally published in Taiwan bungei [Taiwan arts] 2.2 (February 1935).

79. Yang Kui, “Kōdō shugi kentō Pliais [Examining activism],” in CWOYK 9: 143–146. Originally published in Taiwan Arts 2.3 (March 1935).

80. Yang Kui, “Bungei hihyō no hyōjun [The criteria of art criticism],” in CWOYK 9:154–162. Originally published in Taiwan Arts 2.4 (April 1935).

81. Cf. Chie Tarumi’s article “An Author Listening to Sounds of the Netherworld: Lu Heruo and the Kuso-Realism Debate” in this volume.

82. Nishikawa Mitsuru, “Bungei jihyō [Contemporary literary criticism],” in Bungei Taiwan [Literary Taiwan] 6.1 (May 1943).

83. Sakaguchi Reiko, “Tomoshibi [Lamp],” in Taiwan Arts 3.2 (April 28, 1943), 2–25.

84. Yang Kui, “Kuso riarizumu no yōgo [In defense of kuso realism],” in CWOYK 10:110–118. Originally published in Taiwan Arts 3.3 (July 1943).

85. See, for instance, Zhang Liangze , “Zhengshi Taiwan wenxueshi shangde nanti—guanyu ‘huangmin wenxue’ zuopin shiyi [Facing a difficult problem in the history of Taiwanese literature—about the resuscitated works of “imperialization literature”], in Lianhe baofukan [United daily literary supplement] (February 10, 1998), 41. Zhang’s article triggered a series of debate on the nature of imperialization literature, involving famous writers such as Chen Yingzhen and Peng Ge . For a discussion of the debate, see Peng Hsiao-yen, Lishi henduo loudong: Cong Zhang Wojun dao Li Ang [There are many loopholes in history: From Zhang Wojun to Li Ang] (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 2000), 42–45.

86. This work was published in a Tokyo-based journal, Gōgai [Exclusive] 1.3 (September 1927).

87. Yang Kui, “Ari ippiki no shigoto [An ant’s work],” collected in CWOYK 10:127–130. Originally published in Kōnan shinbun [Southern reconstruction daily], August 30, 1943.

88. Yang Kui, “Wude kurabe [A wrist wrestling],” collected in CWOYK 10:134. Originally published in Southern Reconstruction Daily (December 9, 1943).

89. See my discussion in “Yang Kui zuopin de banben, lishi yu ‘guojia’ [Edition, history, and “nation/state” in Yang Kui’s works],” in There Are Many Loopholes in History: From Zhang Wuojun to Li Ang, 27–50.

90. See, for instance, Tsukamoto Terukazu , “Yōki no ‘Denen shōkei’ to ‘Mōhan mura’ no koto [On Yang Kui’s “A Sketch of the country-side” and “Model village”], in Yomigaeru Taiwan bungaku—Nihon tōtsiki no Taiwan sakka to sakuhin [Taiwanese literature revived: Taiwanese writers and their works during the Japanese occupation], ed. Shimomura Sakujirō, Fujii Shōzō, and Huang Yingzhe (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1995), 313–344.

91. On February 27, 1947, in Taipei, policemen accidentally shot an onlooker in a crowd watching a cigarette vendeuse being beaten up by investigators of the Monopoly Bureau. The incident deepened popular discontent against the Nationalist government, and on February 28 large-scale strikes in the markets, factories, and schools in the city started. At noon when a crowd demonstrated in front of the office of the Taiwan governor, guards used machine guns to shoot at civilians. This triggered the series of resistance movements popularly known as the February 28 Incident. For documentary evidence of this incident, see Lan Bozhou Huangmache zhi ge [The song of the swaggering horse wagon] (Shibao Publishing Co., 1991), 118; Lan Bozhou, Chenshi, Liuwang, 2–28 [Buried bodies, exile, and February 28] (Taipei: Shibao Publishing Co., 1991). See also 2–28 shijian ziliao xuanji [The February 28 Incident: A documentary collection] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1992), four volumes. For short stories based on the incident, see Lin Shuangbu, 2–28 Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan [Collections of Taiwan short stories on the February 28 Incident] (Taipei: Zili Wanbao Pub. Co., 1989).

92. Yang Kui, “Heping xuanyan [Manifesto of peace],” in CWOYK 14:315–317. Originally printed in the Shanghai-based Dagongbao [Grand justice daily], January 21, 1949.

93. See Chen Fangming , Xie Xuehong pingzhuan [Xie Xuehong: A critical biography] (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1988), 260–280.

94. Wang Lihua, ed., “Guanyu Yang Kui huiyilu biji [About notes on Yang Kui’s mémoir],” in CWOYK 14:70–88. Originally published in Wenxuejie [Literary field) 14 (May 1985). See also Ho Xun ed., “2–28 shijian qianhou [Around the February 28 Incident],” in CWOYK 14:89–98. Originally published in Taiwan yu shijie [Taiwan and the world] 21 (May 1985).

95. Yang Kui, “Wo de xiao xiansheng [My little teacher],” in CWOYK 10: 301–306. Originally published in Xinshenghuo bibao [New life bulletin], January 1956.

96. Huang Chengcong , “Lun puji baihuawen de xin shiming [On the new mission of propagating the vernacular],” in Taiwan (January 1923).

97. Shi Wenqi , “Duiyu Taiwanren zuo de baihuawen de wojian [My opinion on the vernacular writing of Taiwanese],” in Taiwan People’s Daily 2.4 (March 11, 1924).

98. Lien Wenqing , “Jianglai zhi Taiwan yu [The future Taiwanese dialect],” in Taiwan People’s Daily 2.20–21; 3.4 (October 11 and 21, 1924; February 1, 1925).

99. Zhang Wojun , “Xin wenxue yundong de yiyi [The significance of the New Literature movement],” in Taiwan People’s Daily 67 (Aug. 26, 1925).

100. Jing “Taiwan huawen taolun lan [The Taiwanese vernacular forum],” in Nanyin (Southern sound), inaugural issue (January 1932), 9.

101. Guo Qiusheng , “Shuo jitiao Taiwan huawen de jichu gongzuo gei dajia cankao [On a few items of basic work of the Taiwanese vernacular for everyone’s references],” in Southern Sound, inaugural issue (January 1932), 14.

102. Lai Ho and Guo Qiusheng, “Taiwan huawen de xinzi wenti [The problem of new words in the Taiwanese vernacular],” in Southern Sound 1.3 (February 1, 1932), 14.

103. See Xu Junya , “Yang Shouyu xiaoshuo de fengmao ji qi xiangguan wenti [The style of Yang Shouyu’s fiction and related issues],” in Peng Hsiao-yen, ed., Minzu guojia lunshu—cong wanqing, wusi dao riju shidai Taiwan xin-wenxue [Discourse of nation/state—from late-Qing, May Fourth to Taiwanese New Literature during the Japanese occupation] (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 1995).

104. “Hōkoku bungaku ni tsuite [On reportage],” in CWOYK 9:466–468. Originally published in Osaka asahi shinbun (Osaka morning sun daily), Taiwan edition (February 5, 1937).

105. Yang Kui, trans., “Makesi zhuyi jingjixue [Marxist economics],” in CWOYK 14:326–368. Originally published by Gongnong wenku [Library of workers and farmers] in 1931. The original Russian book was written by Iosif Abramovich Lapidus and Konstantin Ostrovitianov: Politicheskaia ekonomiia [An outline of political economy: Political economy and Soviet economics], 1929.

106. Yang Kui, “Hōkoku bungaku mondō [Reportage: Questions and answers],” in CWOYK 9:512–532. Originally published in Taiwan New Literature 2.5 (June 1937).

107. Yang Kui, “Geijutsu ni okeru ‘Taiwan rashii mono’ ni tsuite [On the Taiwanese flavor in art],” in CWOYK 9:471–474. Originally published in Osaka Morning Sun Daily, Taiwan edition (February 21, 1937).

108. See Shanghai Post (September 4, 1940), 9.

109. See Shanghai Post (June 29, 1940), 9. For news coverage of the murders of Mu Shiying and Liu Na’ou, see Guomin xinwen [National subjects’ daily], from June 29 to September 30, 1940.

110. Yan Jiayan, Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo liupai shi [Schools of modern Chinese fiction] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), 131–141.

111. Shi Zhicun told me this during an interview in Shanghai in October 1998.

112. Liu Na’ou, Diary, I.234.

113. Liu Na’ou, Diary, II.450.