Red Infant to The Ends of the Earth
Chien dedicated Red Infant (1999), which concerns a woman and her newborn child, to her mother and paternal grandmother. “They taught me everything: to put salt in the soup, and to temper love with responsibility.” Now a mother herself, Chien burned with exhaustion, bubbled with joy, and oozed humor.
Having a child strengthened her connection to the workaday world and heightened her interest in society at large. She sought to always see the good in the world and in people, but found greed, deceit, and evil everywhere. Having long judged society from a distance, she now found it broaching her walls. She was frightened, she says, “because great love always brings with it great fear.”
She chose to go digging through Taiwanese history at the library, an endeavor that led to The Ends of the Earth (2002). The book, a history of the Chien clan, Yilan, and by extension all of Taiwan, was a necessary personal exercise for this daughter of Taiwan, one that happened to come out during the standoff between the blue and green camps in Taiwanese politics when tribalist sentiments were running very high. In the book, Chien expresses dismay at the simmering opposition permeating all of society, writing, “This foul climate is depressing me.”
As Chien got older, she became more aware of “life’s dead ends,” which made her more empathetic and fed new angers.
The Chien of A Floating Island takes on educational policy and parents who don’t read, while also sympathizing with the travails of Taiwan’s foreign brides.
Her Teacher’s 12 Greeting Gifts (2007) is a bit of an outlier with its origins in the six months Chien, her husband, and their 10-year-old son spent in the US. While her husband did research, her son attended school, where he served as his mother’s eye on American elementary-school education. The stay in the US essentially handed her the subject matter on a plate.
Chien had had a reliable audience throughout her decades-long writing career, but it expanded enormously with the release of Teacher’s 12 Greeting Gifts. Loosely a book on childrearing, its publication propelled her into the ranks of bestselling authors. In fact, nearly every elementary and middle-school teacher in Taiwan bought a copy, making “Chien Chen the childcare writer” bigger than “Chien Chen the essayist” for a time.
But Chien didn’t remain in the field for long. She is an author who views essays as “transforming the dust of the everyday into the ephemera of thought,” and her river of words had to bear its burden of sediment onward. With Who’ll Be Waiting for You When You’re Gray?, that river reached the sea.
Author Chien Chen recently turned her literary talents to the problem of aging and the aged. The result, Who’ll Be Waiting for You When You’re Gray?, delves into the issue from a sociological perspective. Chien hopes it will encourage Taiwan to face what she sees as a looming crisis.