Reconstructing the past
In the end, Chen’s passion resulted in the birth of a novel. Thanks to his rigorous training in research and academic writing, the task of collecting and sifting through reams of historical material was not so daunting. Before embarking on the project, he already possessed the basic skills he would need.
Having read countless surgery consent forms, Chen was intimately familiar with how to write in clear and simple language. And, as a medical professional, he did not shy away from making the bold deduction that Koxinga probably didn’t die from a heart attack or stroke, nor did he die “scratching at his face,” “biting on his fingers,” or “clutching at his face,” as has often been written. Rather, Chen argues that Koxinga must have committed suicide.
“Given his state of mind prior to death, his family history, and his personality, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that he would have committed suicide.”
As an avid reader of Michael Crichton, Chen knows how to fill in the gaps where established facts are lacking. He knows how to rest a novel upon a solid foundation of knowledge, and how to hook the reader with a captivating story line.
Japan’s Taiga dramas, in the meantime, are consistently marked by a lack of absolutely good and bad characters. But those who perform their jobs faithfully are basically positive characters. This aspect deeply influenced how Chen developed his characters, good examples being Frederick Coyett (the last Dutch governor of Taiwan) and Koxinga—Chen measures both the colonizer and the colonized by the same yardstick.
Through his novel, Chen has brought back to life a world of the past. Three centuries is not such a terribly long time ago. By Chen’s estimate, a lot more people in Taiwan than we realize—probably about a million—have Dutch blood. In the multicultural Taiwan of over 300 years ago, the adventurous spirit of the Minnan Chinese molded a unique Taiwan culture that has continued to evolve over the succeeding generations and is now recorded in our genetic makeup, the code that has determined the fate of the people living here on this resource-poor island.
In his second book, Taiwan Dossier, Chen wrote movingly in the preface: “As a physician, I’d like to combine the kindness and literary talent of Dr. Zhivago with the forthrightness and integrity of Tomáš [from The Unbearable Lightness of Being]. But I’d like to be free of their loneliness and weakness. Furthermore, I’d like to have the ability to inspire people, and rouse them from lethargy. To the extent that my meager abilities allow, I’d like to be something in the history of Taiwan, something more than just a physician—I want to be an intellectual.”
That was 2008. Three years later, with the publication of Three Families in Formosa, he did indeed transcend the man he had been up to that point.
A hand-drawn map of Taiwan dating to the reign of the Kangxi Emperor.