Vain Miss Hippopotamus
Lin Mei-yin says that Huang has always worked too hard, but she was resigned to this fact because, she says, he wants to do everything. Besides writing fiction, he has long been involved with his children’s theater group, running a magazine, adapting Taiwanese Opera, and doing torn-paper collages. And everything he has done, he has done with panache and commitment.
In our interview, Huang animatedly declares that now that his chemotherapy is over, he plans to direct a new script for the children’s theater troupe in August. In the play, to be called Vain Miss Hippopotamus, Miss Hippopotamus feels that she is overweight, that her waist is too fat, that her legs are too thick, that her eyes are puffy and unattractive. Feeling ugly, she decides to go for cosmetic surgery. But in the end she turns into a freakish creature with a snake-like narrow waist, ostrich-like legs, and the long-lashed eyes of a camel. “Miss Hippopotamus doesn’t recognize herself at all!” What has happened to her? This is the topic that Huang wants his audience of kids to think about.
Talking about the theater seems to fill him with energy. He continues, “I want to use shadow puppetry for the cosmetic surgery parts, so it won’t be so gory.” But suddenly he makes a mental U-turn. No, he says, he’ll have to turn over the theater and the magazine to younger people to manage. Whereas in the past he even made the theater props himself, Huang now says: “These days I can’t be so overambitious. I just don’t have the stamina. Except for writing fiction, which naturally I have to do myself, for the other stuff I’ll simply have to learn to ‘let go.’ Anyway, the children’s theater is well established and running smoothly, so I might as well turn it over to someone else and concentrate exclusively on writing.”
Forty-some years ago, Huang Chun-ming told everyone that he planned to write a long novel, to be called Longan Season. The book has never come out, and it has become kind of a running joke called Waiting for Longan Season. But Huang insists that he still intends to write that story. The problem is that it is a difficult one to set down in words, because it is about his own life.
Longan season is the time of the year when Huang’s mother died. He was only eight, still a small child, so he doesn’t remember the precise date, but he remembers very clearly that it was the season when longan fruit is ripe for eating. On the day his mother died, he and his younger brother were out on the street scooping up longan pits that people had spat out, because in those days, longan pits were washed up and used to play marbles. But just as the two brothers were enjoying their little scheme, someone came to the street and told them to hurry home: “Your mother’s dying.”
Writing Longan Season would mean a return to the things he felt as a child when his mother passed away. That’s emotionally wrenching, so it’s no wonder that Huang just stored the idea away in his mind, and now, 40 years later, it’s still on the shelf. His mother’s death of course was a tremendously painful blow to Huang. But one of his relatives told him that after his mother passed away, there would be an extra star in the sky, and if he looked up into the night sky, the star into which his mother had been transformed would shine especially brightly for him. Now that Huang himself has been through a near-fatal illness, he has a different understanding of life, and perhaps the time has come when he can take up his pen and write this, the most painful novel of his life.
Huang originally hails from Yilan County, a place that he loves dearly and which has been the source of inspiration for much of his creative work. (courtesy of Big Fish Children’s Theater Troupe)
