Q. Pinocha the Plover has received a lot of attention since publication, and it was selected by the China Times to be published as one of the ten top books. Some critics have compared it to Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, while others say it is a novel about environmental consciousness. You yourself once said that it was actually written based on certain stage of your own life. What were you trying to express?

An autobiographical novel

A. Pinocha is in fact a very uninteresting little bird. When I wrote about him, my son had only been born about two or three months before. I would spend all day at home looking after him, with nothing to do but feel very serious and tense, even rather pained. It was writing with such feelings that made the end of the book so unhappy. Now things are different. When I see a little life growing up, I feel that there is still hope; if I was to write the book today, the conditions would make it very different. The whole book was actually written in just one month, but I spent six or seven years observing birds. What is interesting is that people who are really interested in birds very rarely talk to me about the reasoning in my novel but just talk to me about where the places in the book are.

Some people think this is an autobiographical novel set against the background of a traditional upbringing. The main character is a bird and there is a lot of ecology thrown in. As for the implications lying behind it, I have no way of answering that clearly. Some critics say there is an element in the book that is environmentalist or political, or exactly the opposite that it is like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is not seeking after perfection, but is actually anti-authority and tradition, and negative all round. I think that different people will have different interpretations when they read the same book. Actually, I do not really like to think about works that I have already completed. Once a book is published, I am already thinking about a new problem.

My next subject is a whale. With Pinocha I took the world of the small bird and placed it in the larger world for observation. Now I am looking to the whale for a small world to deal with.

Studying the thoughts of the whale

Q. Why did you think of writing about a whale? What is different about this subject and your handling of Pinocha the Plover?

A. Speaking for myself, the biggest challenge is how to handle a new theme. I am looking at whales because they are animals with great intelligence, equivalent to that of a six-year-old child. During the Japanese occupation, more than 200 Humpback Whales were caught; every month one would be stranded in the seas near the coast of Taiwan. I also looked up two items of news: in January of this year a whale was stranded at the mouth of the Tanshui River, and six months earlier there was another one. Such stories got me thinking about a novel. The whale is very large, and to put such a large animal up front would give a feeling of the power and great vitality of nature. I collected a lot of materials and even studied diving so I could think under the water, and I watched videos of whales and listened to recordings of their songs. What is different from Pinocha is that this time I put in a human role.

Writing a long novel for me is a kind of protest against society and an attainment of the kind of happiness society has failed to give me. What I like is to play at what other people have never played at and to collect material that nobody else has ever collected.

Q. From the weak environmental consciousness of our society ten years ago today, there are now many non-professionals who have a great deal of knowledge about conservation and even use it for creative purposes. How do you explain such a change?

A. I have recently been looking at a book published in 1979 with a conservationist theme and which raises the cases of a number of species. At that time the conservationist movement had just begun and a lot of people started bird watching. Of course, this was all related to conservationism, but the knowledge that enabled it to come about was from that period of enlightenment of which Ma I-kung's We Only Have One World is representative. I always see the 1980s as the grassroots period, with things then really exploding in the 1990s. The people of the grassroots period include Lin Huai-min and Ma I-kung. They were all groping about and did not know what the future held, but they courageously forged ahead nevertheless.

Hopes for the next generation

That youthful period gave us all a lot of vitality and creative power. Looking at it from the angle of literary development, the appearance of the ecological novel is the necessary conclusion of the ten years from Ma I-kung to the present. If ecological articles were still in the form of reports, people would have got bored of them. Novels are more multi-faceted and have more life.

When Jaw Shao-kong, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Administration came back from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, he said something that might have been very conventional, but was serious and came from the heart. He said that the protection of our environment depends on the next generation. To give an example, the result of our newspaper appeal to save the Black-faced Spoonbill was that we received 20,000 letters, two-thirds of which came from junior high school students and below.

The impressions of our generation when growing up were all of the countryside and wilderness; it seems that the next generation will not have any of that. Their demand for conservation is even more strident and active, so we still have time to educate them. At the age of sixteen or seventeen there appears a natural ecological consciousness which is unlike that of adults which has to be motivated. When I was in Kuantu I saw children reprimand other children, telling them not to catch crabs. They would even go and pick up plastic bottles themselves. For children this way of doing things is quite natural.

Exploring nature's unknown bounty

Q. Might not having such an understanding of nature restrict your imaginative space when writing fiction?

A. That is why I do my best to avoid being doctrinaire. Such is the case with Pinocha, who is not talking to other birds but to the reader. I do not like it that way at all, but there is no other way. When writing this novel, I keep telling myself that I am talking with a whale and not with the readers. Some birds often do incredible things, such as practicing aerobatics; look at whales, when one has been beached in a certain place, six months later another will get stranded there; owls live in trees and every year they will return to the same tree to nest. These might not actually be conscious activities, but animals like chimpanzees and whales are certainly capable of thought. To give an example, if you let a whale listen to classical music it will prefer it to heavy metal. It is extremely interesting, and people have no way of understanding such phenomena. Exploring the unknown is always a great attraction for people.

My appreciation of birds is more intellectual than emotional, reading about the history of ornithology and the evolution of birds in Taiwan and examining scientific discoveries. I have read about them and probably understand about half the natural history of Taiwan. Because bird watchers also come across butterflies, fossils and geological research, most of them also have a broad base of knowledge when they first start out.

Why such a sad ending?

Q. What kind of reactions did you get following the publication of Pinocha the Plover?

A. I received a lot of letters from children. Actually, my original objective was to write a book for children, but with a serious tone. So this was the reaction that made me most happy of all. When I was writing I would always think of my son. However, the book has a sad ending, which is not right for children.

When I was lecturing in a high school, one pupil asked why I gave Pinocha such a heavy burden to carry. If he was grown up, then why did the book end like that? Well, I felt that we cannot always achieve what we set out to do.