Associate Professor, East Asian Studies
School of Humanities

Chinese cultural and literary discourses, narrative theory

My research stems from an interest in close reading and literary genealogy. While studying the experiences of Chinese May Fourth writers and intellectuals in Japan as a graduate student I began to wonder about the different experiences and challenges faced by Taiwanese and Chinese students in Japan in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, the Taiwanese students who went to Japan to study could already speak and read the language, because the island had been a Japanese colony since 1895 and the colonial government had implemented vigorous educational programs, but on the other hand, students from China who had studied Chinese needed to learn Japanese in order to study in Japan. I hypothesized that the Japanese language was more transparent for Taiwanese students and that therefore they more quickly and accurately picked up new ideas and literary modes in Japan than their Chinese classmates did. However, though students from Taiwan were literate in Japanese, it would be wrong to suggest that they were native speakers, because most of them spoke either Southern Min or Hakka Chinese with family and community members. Consequently, when they wrote in Japanese they became translingual authors: they wrote in a language that was not their native or primary tongue. My curiosity eventually led to my first book, Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film, which examines identity in the fiction written in Japanese by Taiwanese writers during the island’s colonization by Japan (1895-1945) and films made about and during the era by both Japanese and Taiwanese filmmakers. It also explains the political censorship that delayed the translation of Taiwanese texts written in Japanese into Chinese for decades and argues that such texts ought not to be read as Japanese or Chinese literature, but as inherently Taiwanese.

While researching colonial Taiwanese fiction I studied Taiwanese literary circles in Taiwan and Japan as well as the journals that they produced during the era from which I surprisingly learned that during the 1930s there had been a theoretical debate on local literature and authenticity in Taiwan known as the xiangtu* literature debate. It was surprising, because until then I had only been familiar with the 1970s xiangtu literature debate in Taiwan. However, whereas the 1930s movement seemed centered on creating a local, vernacular literature to counterbalance the growth of Japanese literature, the 1970s movement seemed centered on creating a local, vernacular literature to counterbalance the growth of Euro-American modernism and nostalgia for China by recently arrived Chinese emigres. Furthermore, in China there had also been a xiangtu literature movement in the 1930s; however, differing from Taiwan, the xiangtu literature movement in China that focused on the countryside and country folk often is seen as counterbalancing urban literature and culture rather than foreign influences. Complicating matters more, some authors of xiangtu literature in 1970s Taiwan claimed that they were inspired to write about the countryside by 1930s Chinese xiangtu texts that emigre teachers had brought from China and shared with them and seemed unaware of the 1930s xiangtu movement on the island. What is more, although there was no xiangtu literature debate in 1970s China, there was a root seeking literary movement in the 1980s that at times strongly resonates with xiangtu literature. Nonetheless, in both China and Taiwan a drive to represent an authentic countryside and country folk appeared and oftentimes this included both describing local characters and traditions as well as transcribing local dialects. These similar efforts by authors in Taiwan and China inspired by different motivations and circumstances during the twentieth century led me to further investigate and begin to trace xiangtu genealogies in both places, which constitutes much of my current research agenda.

* Xiangtu is often translated as native-soil or nativist, and indeed some xiangtu writers evince nativist tendencies; however, because xiangtu also strongly connotes the rural (both bucolic pastorals and backwards squalor), I prefer to transliterate rather than translate the term.

(2020) “The Crises of Representation in Taiwan in Ruins and Ground Zero” National Taiwan University Studies in Taiwan Literature. No. 24, 83-112.

(2019) “It All Starts in Hualien: Pangcah Woman; Rose, Rose, I Love You; and The Man with the Compound Eyes.” Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming, B. Chang and P. Lin (Eds.). London: Routledge, 45-60.

(2015) Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

(2014) “Landscapes and Sublime Memories: Revisiting Liang Xiaosheng's ‘A Land of Wonder and Mystery.’” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 8.4, 513-531.

(2013) “The Postcolonial Appearance of Colonial Taiwan: Film and Memory.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 7.2, 194-213.

(2012) “Cultivating Taiwanese: Yen Lan-chuan and Juang Yi-tseng's Let It Be (Wumile).” Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries, S. Lin and T. Sang. (Eds.). London: Routledge, 150-185.

(2006) “Narratives of Discomfort and Ideology: Yang Kui’s Short Fiction and Postcolonial Taiwan Orthodox Boundaries.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 14.2, 427-447.

(2004) “Identity and Free Will in Colonial Taiwan Fiction: Wu Zhuoliu’s ‘The Doctor’s Mother’ and Wang Changxiong’s ‘Torrent.’” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 16.2, 160-183.

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5582

Last updated
05/14/2022