In 1989, Chu Tien-hsin published a collection of short stories, I Remember ..., which received great notice in literary circles. There were two reasons for this. The first was that Chu had built a reputation as a "well-bred" young woman who wrote fiction for teenage girls, but in I Remember... her observations and intuition about society and life made people feel that she had lifted her work to a higher plane. So-called "political fiction," which reflects on the drastic changes occurring in Taiwan society, had previously been crude and superficial work that didn't stand up well over time, but Chu was able to break new ground in this genre, investing her characters with psychological complexity and giving people a fresh look at old themes.
This year she has come out with a new collection, Thinking of My Brothers of the Military Dependents' Village. Not unexpectedly, it has been greatly admired in literary circles and is thought possibly to surpass I Remember....
Sensitive observations about urban life: For subject matter, except for one story about an old political prisoner ("Long Ago There Was a Putao Tailang"), these stories focus on the problems of urban life, such as yuppies who have lost purpose in life, identity crisis in the second generation of military dependents' villages, housewives who have homes but no sense of who they are, people with nervous disorders that make them particularly sensitive about death, and lesbians who place emotion above all. These topics are sufficient to show that Chu Tien-hsin views urban life in Taiwan with a sensitive realism. At the same time, because she shows concern in this book for the daily, common problems of urban life and doesn't emphasize big political problems as she did in her last collection, the book has not surprisingly been able to attract Taiwan's intellectuals, who are gradually getting fed up with Taiwan's politics.
In addition to different topics, Chu has also used a vastly different writing style from the one she employed in I Remember ..., particularly so in the stories involving politics. In essence, she has adopted a traditional realistic style. The book's method of narration, however, has been drastically altered. Except for "Long Ago There Was a Putao Tailang," all of the stories use unusual forms of first-person narration. Take, for example, the beginnings of "Kangaroo People" and "The Matter of the Spring Wind Butterflies":
This story is written for the non-kangaroo people because the kangaroo people will almost certainly have neither the time nor the resolve to read it. Naturally, I should first explain who the kangaroo people are....
Dear friend, first off don't try to guess if my sex is male-male? or female-male? female-female? or male-female?
Commentary-fiction: In this collection Chu-largely employs the style of narration displayed in these two quotes, one that tends toward commentary and analysis. It's not so much that "I" am narrating "a story," but rather that "I" am focusing on "a matter" about which I offer "comment." We're mostly hearing the narrator speak about his or her views on something, and "the story" comes through just vaguely from what a reader can glean from the commentary. This is a method of narration characteristic of "postmodern" fiction. From the reader's perspective, the stories resemble essays. The relatively more lyrical, like "Thinking of My Brothers of the Military Dependents' Village," resemble lyric essays, whereas the more expository, like "The Kangaroo People," resemble expository essays.
Chu's adopting a postmodern method of narration is in line with a postmodern sensibility in the stories' content. This is to say that the stories are pervaded by doubt and a postmodern sense of emptiness. The story for which the collection is named. "Thinking of My Brothers of the Military Dependents' Village," sets the tone. The story hasa very lyrical style, discussing and describing recollections of life in a military dependents' village. From the eyes of an outsider to this society, these recollections are sugar coated and sentimental, moving but lacking in objectivity. The tone is similar to Pai Hsien-yung's in Taipei People, clearly subjective and indulgent. This indulgence, blended with the identity crisis that is revealed in the story, reflects an emotional response to Taiwan's sudden political change shared by many mainlanders of the second generation.
The loneliness of life? A certain emptiness combined with a sense of loneliness is the special kind of emotional response found in the other stories of this collection. In this respect, the book clearly differs from I Remember..., which, by taking a sneering tone about anti-government activists, rejected politics and hence excused an unwillingness to jump into the "political whirlpool." But in this book, Chu Tien-hsin turns this attitude toward observing urban life in Taiwan. As a result, such life is characterized by a special emptiness and loneliness. For example, in the story "My friend A-li-sa," Taipei's yuppies are portrayed as "headless flies," buzzing around without purpose and ignorant of where to find meaning in their lives. A-li-sa is thus driven to suicide, and A-li-sa's friend, the narrator of the story, has an attitude of resignation and sentimentality. Yet I think that what is best in this collection is what was best in I Remember...: Chu's descriptions of modern urban women.
Sympathizing women: Chu also writes of "a kangaroo people mother," a woman cut off from the world outside her home, who lives for her children and gets all meaning in life from them to the point where she is completely unconscious of her own loneliness. Chu's method of commentary is to write extremely lyrically of her sympathy for this kind of woman, conveying to the reader a sense of suffocating pressure.
As far as technique is concerned, "The Matter of the Spring Wind Butterflies" shines even more brilliantly. The narrator spends most of the story discussing male homosexuality and heterosexuality. He doesn't bring up lesbianism in which feeling is exalted above all else until the latter part of the story and doesn't mention that his wife is such a woman until virtually the very end. The story finishes when the narrator accidentally stumbles across a letter his wife wrote to a female college classmate:
I furtively (because I had never done anything similar before) took the return letter out of the unsealed envelope. There were just two or three lines of my wife's familiar handwriting: "During the last ten years I fell in love and became a wife and a mother. I have experienced all of life's emotions, but none have equaled those I shared with you during that period right after we met.
The self in married life: The narrator of the story had always believed that he was a normal heterosexual and that his marriage was fundamentally a happy one. By accidently discovering that his wife is one of those so-called homosexuals who place "feeling above all," he can't help but shout, "I have failed." In fact, though his wife feels lost in her marriage, we may conclude that her longing for her old girlfriend points only to her being unsettled in marriage. She may indeed be a heterosexual. Through this indirect portrayal, the wife's loneliness seems no less than the mother's in "Story of the Kangaroo People."
From the Chu Tien-hsin's excellent depictions of women's lives, we can't help but wonder if the empty postmodern mentality isn't a bit more complicated under the surface!
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Author: Chu Tien-hsin Publisher: Mai TienPrice: NT$140Pages: 223
(photo by Pu Hua-chih)
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