The Eng-Lite Program Lecture Series: Talk No 1
Time：2022.11.11（Fri.）10:00-12:15
Topic：An Observation of Cross-field Taiwanese-American Literature: Exploring the Texts and Methods
Lecturer：Wei-Ting Liou, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Changhua University of Education
Host：Hsin-Chin Evelyn Hsieh, Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University
Venue: NTUGITL R324, Guo Qing Bldg.
By Chi-Yu Lin
The first lecture of the Eng-Lite Program Lecture Series, Dr. Wei-ting Liou’s “An Observation of Cross-field Taiwanese American Literature: Exploring the Texts and Methods,” sets out to describe and elucidate the field of Taiwanese American Literature—how it looks like, and what we researchers have made of it.
Taiwanese American Literature is a new category that previously has belonged to some general umbrella terms, such as Asian American Literature, Chinese American Literature, or Overseas Chinese Literature (海外華人文學). The first thing to do, Dr. Liou tells the audience, is to define “Taiwanese American (literature).” That is, to locate the identity with which who and what texts can be associated, and what differences which makes. Dr. Liou defines it with the help of some cases of Taiwanese American literature written in English. For example, Shawna Ryan Yang’s Green Island and Julie Wu’s Third Son provide substantial depiction of Taiwanese American immigrants and Taiwan’s traumatic history has been translated into these authors’ English writing. Among these works, Charles Yu’s The Interior Chinatown and K-ming Chang’s Bestiary vividly depict Taiwanese immigrants’ struggling lives in America. They all can be categorized as Taiwanese American literature.
There are a few scholarly ways to deal with these texts: postcolonial critique, nationalist discourse, translation studies, and posthumanist inquiry. In this lecture, Dr. Liou centers his discussion on three Taiwanese American fictional works, each with very distinctive narrative modes and strategies, and he showed how the four methods help readers understand the work and engage with scholarly discussions.
The first text is K-ming Chang’s Bestiary. It tells a story of three generations: an Atayal woman married with a waisheng (外省) veteran. Their daughter marries a Chinese businessman in the U.S. The granddaughter has a quasi-homosexual relationship with her classmate Ben, a Chinese immigrant from Ningxia. Closely tied to the history and the multi-layered ethnic politics of Taiwan, the novel writes back against the American, white, and male-dominant literary rules with a female-centered genealogy. The author also employs magical realist narrative strategies and different lexicons from different languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Southern-Ming Hokkien, Indigenous language) to “foreignize” the supposedly English text and provide a counter-narrative in the American literary market.
If Bestiary has entailed an oblique way to see the labor of translation, it comes to the front in Dr. Liou’s discussion of Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island. The novel speaks of a story of a Taiwanese family suffering from the aftermath of February 28 incident in 1947, and Dr. Liou focuses here on the fact that it has been translated back into Mandarin Chinese—and thus has involved different perspectives of translation. Mixing, different languages in narrative dialogues, similar to Chang’s Bestiary, Yang’s novel has been described as heteroglossic, but not in the carnivalisque, Bakhtinian way, as the history of postwar Taiwan goes. Dr. Liou shows that Green Island is a good case when researchers want to see how writers and translators correspond to their respective readerships and literary markets: their focuses, strategies, techniques, and significances change, and thus produce different effects.
The last case study for today’s lecture is Tao Lin’s Taipei. Titled the capital city of Taiwan, it in fact is the least “Taiwanese” one of the three works. Lin, though prolific and having started self-publishing literary works since the early 2000s, it is in Taipei that he started to set his narratives in a much clear “Taiwanese American” framework. Most of his works are based on his own experiences such as doing drugs, shoplifting, or being a Taiwanese American writer who relies havely on the internet (mainly Twitter). Taipei is no exception. What makes his works, especially Taipei, distinct is the way Lin weaves the experience and influence of drugs and internet together, making the narrative subjects (the protagonist Paul and his girlfriend Erin) less than fully human—that is, more robotic, or “digital;” and the protagonists like to associate real-life materials (like buildings) with digital symbols (typefaces, cursors). Dr. Liou proposes to understand the digitally surrounded and affected narrative subject in posthumanist terms.
As a preliminary exploration of an emerging phenomenon/genre, Dr. Liou does not provide a definitive conclusion of what he thinks about Taiwanese American literature. Rather, he is open to question, and listeners are eager to ask questions and share their thoughts. The first question concerns the historicity of “Taiwaneseness” in Taiwanese American literature. For example, we can surely say that Tao Lin or Shawna Yang Ryan are Taiwanese American while Nieh Hualing shall be counted as Chinese American, but what about Chinese/Taiwanese American writers in between? And what about those overseas students (in the 1960s and afterward) who lived in the U.S. but wrote in Chinese and published their works in Taiwan? Dr. Liou responds with specific case studies, proposing that we may have to think collectively about better ways to name-tag them. The second question concerns the translations of Taiwanese American literature and their receptions in Taiwan: how do translators render the multilingual text and how are these texts received in Taiwan? As Dr. Liou points out, most Taiwanese American novels have not yet been translated back into Mandarin Chinese (with exceptions, especially the notable Green Island, which received numerous critical attention), and the ideal way to deal with linguistic issues may be to provide bilingual versions of these novels to show the inventiveness of the original version.
The third question, from the host Professor Hsin-chin Hsieh, follows the issues on translation, asks about the translatability of multilingual dialogue in these novels. She provides a personal pedagogical experience, indicating that monolingual American audience of Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons do not “sense” the multilingual realities of the film just by looking at the English subtitle. Dr. Liou recommends that translators use thick translation (coined by Kwame Appiah), or adding footnotes, endnotes, glossary lists or appendices to inform readers of the texts’ different layers. The next question concerns the establishment of Taiwanese subjectivity; do the historical context and multilingual setting serve the purpose, with the price that they are hard to read? Would genre fiction be more friendly to the general public? That depends on the will of the author, says Dr. Liou, and the boundary of genre fiction and literary fiction is indeed anything but definitive.
The penultimate question is about Taiwanese American community and the Taiwanese Independent movement and DPP: are they related? There are not only cultural, generational heritage, Dr. Liou explains, but some personal choices as well, like the case of Shawna Yang Ryan. The last commentary comes from a reader of K-ming Chang’s Bestiary, on the trope of daughter’s tail, and the exchange between Dr. Liou and the audience shoes that it can be many things, from the female bildung to the establishment of cultural identity.
All in all, The genre of Taiwanese American Literature is now rising, with more and more self-identified Taiwanese American writers entering the conversation and a literary award for young Taiwanese American writers (sponsored by Charles Yu’s family), and it is also gaining more and more critical attention; the crowded lecture room and the heated Q&A session has shown it. And we could expect that the scholarly inquiry of the genre will also flourish in the near future.