Wang the Leftist is the latest collection of short stories of writer-at-large Lucy Tuann. Earlier on in the sixties, Tuann attracted people's attention with her book The Drama of the Final Night. But what really made her widely famous was the series of novels including Mayor Yin, published in the mid-seventies. At the beginning of the mainland's Cultural Revolution, Tuann, a Taiwanese student who had studied in America, moved to mainland China to "take part in the great event." But the upheaval that ensued ultimately extinguished her enthusiasm for the revolution. In dejection, she left the mainland. As she ruminated over the pain she had suffered, such fine works as Mayor Yin and Jing Jing's Birthday came into being. Those works portrayed the passion and betrayal in communist society, the injustice and inequity of the "Worker's Paradise." Tuann didn't come forth with accusations of blood and tears; instead, she reflected upon the passage of this historic Chinese tragedy in a more detached manner. Compared to the "scar literature" that appeared after the death of Mao, Lucy Tuann's achievements are obviously superior.

Her Cultural Revolution experience, however, has become an increasingly distant memory. After a circuitous journey, she returned to America to settle down, committed to redefining her creations. That ample land of China was still the object of her concern, but now that she resided in a foreign country, she had to confront the various circumstances in her new home. The little snippets of daily life among the American Chinese became her new resource for story topics. Especially for the past ten-odd years, large numbers of Chinese have migrated to America from Taiwan, the mainland and Hong Kong. The dramatic changes they have brought to the overseas Chinese community are far beyond the imagination of the overseas student literature or immigrant novels of the past. Westerners and Chinese, new immigrants and old, people from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland all make appearances in her tales. Sometimes they live in harmony; sometimes they plot against one another. The practicalities of life force those Chinese who have come from different areas at different periods of time to form an "early reunification" overseas. What is most noteworthy in her works is her scrutiny of the various odd phenomena in these overseas Chinese circles.

This generation of overseas Chinese has a high level of education and professional skills. They are vastly different from the Chinese immigrant workers of a hundred years ago. The photo shows the inaugural ceremony for the chancellor of University of California at Berkeley, C.L. Tien. （photo by Lily Huang）

The unhappy residents of paradise

Wang the Leftist serves up "Let's Go to Reno," in which we see a female immigrant from mainland China who puts her lifelong happiness at stake just to get a green card. In "Husband's Own Space," the desire to escape Hong Kong before 1997 leads to a husband's betrayal of his sulky Hong Kong wife. "Leaving the Drizzle" affords us a glimpse of a Taiwan girl who suffers greatly for love and idles her youth away. "Ah Lan's Donation" introduces us to a Taiwanese businessman and a mainland lass who enjoy a 'Tiananmen Marriage.' "Ah! Chopin's Hometown!" introduces us to the war of money between a new immigrant from the mainland and his parents whom he left behind in Hong Kong. In "Roses and Calamus" we learn of life-or-death extramarital love between an old pop from Taiwan and old maid from Hong Kong. Because of problems of politics, economics or romance, those people have sailed over the seas to start up all over again in a strange land. Unexpectedly, many untoward events take place. Perhaps America and Canada are heaven on earth in quite a few people's minds. But the characters that come to life under Lucy Tuann's pen are the unhappy residents of paradise.

How should we approach Tuann's characters and stories? From a most practical point of view, we can say that although this group of Chinese are living away from their homeland, their joys and sorrows are not necessarily more worthy of our compassion or amazement. Especially for Taiwan's readers who have an ever-stronger sense of native pride, the temptation invoked by foreign experience, no matter good or bad, has long ago lost the mysterious magnetism of the past.

Long out of date are the sentiments of concern for the motherland and nostalgia for one's hometown depicted in Yu Li-hua's novel Seeing the Palm Tree Again and S.K. Chang's Yesterday's Rage. New immigrant stories call for new storytellers. Telling a story without being either too haughty or too humble is a challenge to Lucy Tuann and her Chinese literary peers living in America.

The little disappointments of heaven

From another angle, we can say that Tuann has extended the realistic style of Mayor Yin to describing the current situation around her. Thereby she ponders on her strategies for coping with life. We can still recall how her Cultural Revolution works, such as Mayor Yin, Ren Xiulan and Gen Er in Beijing, shook the readers of that generation. Lucy Tuann's political beliefs might have never swayed, but between beliefs and practice, she saw cracks and contradictions, and she had something to say. Lucy Tuann in the 1990s is in fact not far removed from her starting point. Her tone is methodical and even, and her characters might exist next door to you or me. But whereas Tuann's descriptions of the Cultural Revolution are without precedent, her stories based on her American experience have to fall in comparison with too many similar early works. Furthermore, in terms of subject matter, the torment of hell is "easier" to approach than the little disappointments of heaven.

Lucy Tuann is very familiar with both of these writing challenges. The stories in Wang the Leftist rarely exaggerate the cliched tearful sentiments surrounding vagabonds and rootless globe-wandering. There are fantasies and uneasiness that new immigrants feel toward setting up new households, getting married, having children, getting divorced, having extramarital affairs, running real estate agencies and restaurants, and making investments in exchange for citizenship. Looking back at the more than half a century of overseas writers' fretting about the times and the country, Tuann's posture is rather healthy. At the same time, she keeps an eye out for the undesirable aspects of life in North America to use as topics for her stories. In "Evergreen Valley" how could the well-intended laws of a democratic country become loopholes for law breakers? In "Putting on an Act?" how could marriage and love in a free society have become the prelude to betrayal and abandonment? Only after answering such questions can Lucy Tuann's characters have the energy to think about their hometown and their motherland back in Hong Kong, Taiwan or mainland China.

A follower of the "proletarian revolution"

Nevertheless, after I finished reading the whole book, I still have to say this is an unfulfilling collection of stories. Compared to the standards she set in her previous works, Tuann should obviously work a little harder. As I stated above, she doesn't have any advantages in her creative environment and subject matter. And she has failed to pursue an even higher quality of creative style, and her intellectual offspring are naturally less than ideal. Almost all the stories collected here are too brief, and the exposi tion of her plots and characters is too sketchy. Good works don't necessarily have to be lengthy, but just because short stories are limited in size, their formats must be even more precise. For example, in the story "Refusing to Lose 20,000 Dollars," Tuann writes about an old lady who invests in California real estate. Constrained by regulations on rental rates, she earns no money at all after operating for many years, and finally her capital is exhausted. The motivation of this story is too obvious--to expose the loopholes in America's real estate operations. It certainly has journalistic value, but not necessarily literary merit. At the end, the old lady decides to sell off everything and move back to Taiwan. This carries too much of the scent of a "motivational story." Another example is "Wang the Leftist," which portrays a past leftist who returned to his hometown on the mainland to set up a library to help upgrade education. It ends loosely with all the books being stolen. Is this another example showing that the people on the mainland are more and more immoral?

Those stories may have a direct connection with everyone, but they are trivial. However, perhaps they are the kinds of overseas Chinese experiences of the current era which are most important to the author. Although Tuann has identified the problems, she fails to cautiously analyze the crucial elements of the stories. Tuann herself was once a follower of the "proletarian revolution." Now, confronted with problems of real estate, marriage and family in bourgeois society, there should be more room for her to exert her abilities. In contrast to the tumultuous events depicted in Mayor Yin and her other novels of that era, what permeates this book is a feeling of discretion, a desire for security and a fear of change. I do not want to imply that Lucy Tuann is not worth reading because of that. On the contrary, I believe she could find a most advantageous creative viewpoint by reviewing the differences between her past and her present. Mayor Yin has a passion for communism, but he dies wrongly under a Red Guard's gun. Taiwanese immigrants have a passion for America, but they are put in predicaments by various allegedly "bad" laws. Lucy Tuann has seen thousands of logical breaches in her mainland and American experience, but she needs more room for interpretation to make a good transition from the former to the latter.

Getting together and breaking apart

In contrast, "Yuantung Temple" is a good piece. It deals with a couple of cousins who have long been apart. They meet each other again at Yuantung Temple on the outskirts of Taipei. They have been separated for more than 20 years, as one lives in Taiwan and the other lives in the USA, and each has had her own difficult experiences. After a lot of laments and sighs, each finds flexibility and equanimity in the other. There the story shifts from a heavy tone to a light one, bearing witness to a religious sentiment of sudden enlightenment.

As a Chinese fiction reader who resides overseas, I see eye-to-eye with Lucy Tuann's literary direction, and I am still confident in her potential. In her 1970s-era stories like Mayor Yin, we not only witness political tragedy laden with sarcasm; we also saw a devoted writer who made a most complete exposition of this tragedy with her sincerity and ingenuity. It is both her and our blessing that Lucy Tuann does not need to write those nightmarish stories anymore. But facing the environment she has chosen to preside over, it seems that she needs to carve and polish a broader vision and better techniques. A recent hot topic has been whether to separate or to reunify Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland. As luck would have it, the Chinese in North America are living all together in advance. With Lucy Tuann's sensitivity toward politics, she shouldn't just find an interest in romantic infidelities in foreign lands or the superficial results of real estate sales. The various "trivial" political activities among overseas Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland, where there is division in their unification and unity in their division, are worth her being acutely aware of and meticulously observing and recording.

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Title: Wang the Leftist Author: Lucy Tuann Publisher: Yuan Liou Publishing Company Price: NT$110

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This generation of overseas Chinese has a high level of education and professional skills. They are vastly different from the Chinese immigrant workers of a hundred years ago. The photo shows the inaugural ceremony for the chancellor of University of California at Berkeley, C.L. Tien. (photo by Lily Huang)