Relocating the Multilingual New Taiwanese Literature

Introduction: Relocating the Multilingual New Taiwanese Literature

In December 1974, residents of Indonesia’s Morotai Island reported that there was a naked man who had been living alone in the jungle. After searching for nearly three days, the Indonesian government finally found him. His original name, Suniuo, revealed him to be a Taiwanese aborigine of the Amis tribe re- cruited by the Japanese colonizers as a soldier and sent to Morotai in 1942. He had been lost in the jungle in November 1943, and was considered dead. From then until his rescue in December 1974, Suniuo led a self-reliant hunt- er-gatherer life with no knowledge of the Japanese surrender in 1945. He re- turned to Taiwan in January 1975 and died four years later. Suniuo’s story not only surprised the world but also rekindled the Taiwanese people’s memory of its colonial past. Even today, many Taiwanese who lived through the colonial period still struggle to make sense of the Japanese surrender in 1945 and the period afterward, and to understand the difference between Taiwan’s two interrelated kōfuku experiences either as a “surrender” (降服), because of Taiwan’s colony status, or as a “recovery or retrocession” (光復) of Taiwan, because of Taiwan’s pre-1895 ties with China.1 Concurrent with public attention to Suniuo’s extraordinary story was a surge in public interest in literature from Taiwan’s colonial period. In 1976, just one year after Suniuo’s “home-returning” journey, two stories and one poem by Lai He (1894–1943), who is hailed as “the father of Taiwan’s New Literature,” appeared in Xiachao (China Tide), a dang- wai (outside the Kuomintang) socialist-leaning magazine. Liang Jingfeng’s ar- ticle “Lai He shishei?” (Who is Lai He?), which addresses Lai He’s significance for the making of modern Taiwanese literature, was published there as well.2 In addition, that same year, Zhang Wenhuan’s (1909–1978) Japanese autobio- graphic novel Chi ni hau mono (Those Crawling on the Ground) became avail- able in Chinese,3 and Yang Kui’s (1906–85) work “The Spring Light That Can’t

1 The two terms, “xiangfu” (surrender) and “guangfu” (recovery/retrocession), paradoxically have the same pronunciation in Japanese. 2 See Liang Demin (penname of Liang Jingfeng). “Lai He shishei?” (Who is Lai He?). Xiachao (China Tide) 1.6 (September 1, 1976): 56–59. 3 The novel, originally written in Japanese, was published in Tokyo in 1975. The Chinese ver- sion entitled Gundi lang (Those Crawling on the Ground) was translated by Liao Qingxiu and published in 1976.

Be Shut Out,” re-named “The Uncrushable Rose,” was included in Taiwan’s ju- nior high-school textbooks. This initial wave of rediscovery of Taiwan’s long-forgotten literary heri- tage became possible due to the continued rise of the power outside the Kuomintang that drove the quest for a Taiwanese identity. It was further facili- tated by the publication of Chen Shaoting’s Taiwan xin wenxue yundong jianshi (A Short History of the Modern Taiwanese Literary Movement) in 1977 and the release of two anthologies in 1979—the Riju xia Taiwan xin wenxue (Taiwanese New Literature during the Japanese Occupation Period) in March and the Guangfu qian Taiwan wenxue quanji (The Complete Collection of Taiwanese Literature before the Retrocession) in July. Despite this budding interest in 1976 and some compilation efforts made in 1979, works by Taiwanese authors of colonial Taiwan were not widely read by Taiwan’s general population.4 High school textbooks consisted largely of classical Chinese literary pieces or non- political modern vernacular pieces from the Chinese Republican period. This suggests that Taiwan’s colonial period had long been considered a shameful interlude in modern “Chinese” history and thus was not worthy of inclusion in the Nationalist Party’s general postwar “re-Sinifying” policies. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, cultural indigenization became in- creasingly important. Colonial Taiwan was retrospectively deemed a signifi- cant repository of the island’s unique historical trajectory, and scholars began to delve into colonial-era literature. Proponents of Taiwan’s nativism hailed colonial literature as an essential component of a Taiwan-centric literary histori- ography. In other words, Taiwan’s burgeoning cultural nationalism in the 1980s provided an environment conducive to the research of Taiwanese literature.5 By the end of the late 1980s, the term “Taiwanese literature” had become broadly recognized, replacing its earlier definition as a regional or provincial literature

4 The term “Taiwanese authors” refers to those born in Taiwan and those migrant writers who remained in Taiwan for a long period of time (such as Wu Mansha). The term is used not to downplay their colonized status, but to differentiate them from the Japanese authors who were born or resided in Taiwan during the colonial period. It also includes aboriginal authors. Although the Siraya tribe was able to write their own language through the Romanization system introduced by Dutch missionaries in Taiwan, and scholar Pu Zhongcheng [Pasuya Poiconü] claims that Taiwan’s aborigines began to express themselves in written form during the Japanese colonial period, most aboriginal “literature” under Japanese rule is oral literature. It consists of myths, ancestral legends, folk tales, and ritual performances. See Pu’s Taiwan yuanzhu minzu wenxue shigang (shang) (Literary History of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples—Volume I) (Taipei: Liren, 2009) for details. 5 For a thorough discussion on Taiwanese cultural nationalism, see A-chin Hsiau’s Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2000).