Hey guys! One of my two incredible February 2023 interns, Shuhan, put this together by polishing a Google AI transcript of Episode 56, on Pai Hsien-yun’s Taipei People. I’ve also proofed and fiddled with it a little.
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// Intro //
[Music]
Is living in the past a kind of sickness? Is it something we all do, either all the time or from time to time? What can cause a person to start living in a nostalgic case or living in the past? That’s something that I’ll be talking about with my guest Nadia Ho on this episode, because the book that we are discussing is basically all about that, one could argue.
Anyway, it’s Taipei People by Pai Hsien-yung. That is of course Taibei Ren, not ‘Taipei’, but ‘Taibei 台北’ in Chinese, and the correct pronunciation of Pai Hsien-yung ‘s name should really be Bai Xianyong, but this is Taiwanese lit. So we’re using the strange way, I assume, and throughout the interview, I refer to this when the spelling’s in Wade-Giles. I could be totally wrong there, I didn’t verify that, and after all these years I really should have known but yeah, anyway… that’s what the show is going to be on, Taipei People! Quite excited to be doing this one. But before I can treat you listeners to the interview between Nadia and myself (I suppose it’s more of a conversation really these days) … Before we get to that, we’re going to have the TrChFic news, the Translated Chinese Fiction News.
Four items today, and they’re all interesting. First one: this is actually related to me because I have secured myself a job. You know ,a real grown-up full-time, not just freelancing job, just as the UK is coming out of lockdown. Perhaps there is a correlation between those two events. And because I’m shifting away from my freelance work, one of the companies I was working for Alain Charles Asia, whom you might know better as their fiction imprint, Sinoist Books. They’re looking for a replacement. Basically, they’re looking for a publishing production freelancer – or perhaps freelancers – to help them produce their books. So these are fiction and nonfiction books, mostly translated from Chinese, all related to China in some way or another. And they’re looking for someone who, you know, as you might expect, knows their way around the Adobe suite, is extremely fluent and capable of handling English and an English copy. And obviously, if you’re listening to the show, you probably have either language ability or general knowledge related to China, which would certainly make you a stronger applicant. If you can have an applicant for a freelance position… I suppose you can. If you’re interested, there’s an email in the show notes for the contact over at ACA, Alain Charles, whom you can reach out to if you’d like to know more about the company. I’ve worked for them. So you can also contact me through the old social media if you want to know more, but I’m sure Daniel from ACA could tell you more too.
Next news item. So, this is just kind of bearing in mind that June 4 has passed since the last episode. That’s the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Well, I suppose the end of the Tiananmen Square protests, the massacre there that happened on the square. The journal Asian Cha has been posting lots of related content. ‘Content’ is a horrible word to use to describe Tiananmen-, sorry about that, -related media posts, poems, literature, commentary, and so on. And they put up two poems by the misty poet Bei Dao. So it’s the post is called Two Poems and two of his poems are up there. They are named and I am clicking the link here because I didn’t have this committed to memory… so those are up there, bilingually in English and Chinese for you to check out. So thank you Asian Cha for that.
Next news item, this is also somewhat related. This was just something I found through Twitter. It’s not news per se, but it’s a link to something that is in an archive over at the University of Leiden. It’s the very first issue of the Chinese magazine Jintian from 1978, no less, which has had all sorts of amazing Chinese writers contribute to it. And according to the tweet, which was from Nick Atmos, and I believe in that first issue, you can see that there was an intended English name. Oh, I’m noticing that I should have investigated properly, you can browse this thing. It’s a digital archive that you can click through and see the entirety of Jintian and issue one but of course, it’s all in Chinese. So, my reading ability isn’t really going to help me much there. I won’t be able to read it properly myself you can see on the front cover. The English name is The Moment, which is funny because it later just sort of slid into being referred to as Jintian in English, but yeah, I think that’s pretty cool. Probably an interesting resource for those of you who are capable of reading Chinese is interested in modern China’s literature or post-Mao, China’s literary history – an amazing thing to be able to access via the internet.
Now last thing I was having trouble finding us actually this time around but I got something pretty good here. This is a short story that is up for reading online – it’s The Killer by Tibetan author Tsering Norbu – I’m assuming that’s how that’s pronounced. I really don’t know my Tibetan very well at all. And it’s just a full short story that you can read up on. I never know if this is a CAT translation or a CA translation. It’s the Two Lines Centre for the Art of Translation. there you go, who own Two Lines Press I believe… yeah, this is from their Two Lines journal. Pretty cool. So that’s up there too.
So that’s all the news. I guess it’s time for me to stop talking. You may be amazed to know this is my first take. Usually when I’m recording the news, it takes me something like 10, 12, 20 attempts and I’m usually pulling my hair out, but it’s gone completely smoothly today. First take. Must be must be something in the water. So I’ll stop talking now and I will leave you to the interview I had with Nadia Ho, all about Taipei people.
// Interview Begins //
Angus
Okay, so on the show, we have Nadia. Hello, Nadia. How are you doing? How’s it going? And what have you been up to?
Nadia
That’s a good question. I’ve been doing what most people on this planet have been doing. Staying home, cooking, and doing my things. It’s my second year in the pandemic; I switched countries from Brooklyn, New York to Taipei. Taipei just went into a new soft lockdown last month so my family members are a little panicked. But I’m cool because I’m a second-year experience student. Yeah, how’s it going? On your side?
Angus
Um, it’s okay. Just how, every episode begins with a summary of how everyone’s lockdown is going . My lock down in Scotland and the UK is getting… normality is on the horizon. Now, lockdown is being gradually eased in Scotland and England, Scotland and the wider UK. I’ve completely lost track of who’s ahead of whom, but basically, things are still a bit rubbish. But they do seem to be getting better. And in my own life, I have a move coming up. It looks like I’m going to be going down to a town called Knutsford, just outside Manchester, because I’ve been offered a job. So I don’t know if the listeners have been tracking my life story. I kind of keep the details… semi vague, and semi-coherent… but that’s what’s going on Planet Angus. Anyway, next question. Nadia, can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Nadia
A little bit about myself? I think that the most important quality of myself tonight is being a person born and raised in Taipei, because we’re going to talk about Taipei People. So I think speaking on Mr. Pai Hsien-yung’s work is a little risky for a lot of people, because he’s got so many fans. I don’t intend to analyse or comment on his work, because I’m not a literature major. I majored in Political Science and International Relations. But I think that plays a role in today’s conversation. Because when I was reading Taipei People, I couldn’t relate too much to these people, because none of the main characters in Taipei People was born in Taipei. I was a real Taipei native, so much younger than those people. So that’s basically the first thing about me when reading Taipei. I’ve published six books now – two nonfiction and four fiction books. I started writing very early because I was somehow born into this literary, artsy community of Taipei, in probably a good time. You know, Taiwan was undergoing the longest martial law era in history. With those 38 years of martial law where people couldn’t party, and they didn’t have the freedom to publish words. But when I was born, the restriction was just slowly lifted. And my mother’s generation, in their 20s & 30s, started doing a lot of creative work. So that’s the environment. I was growing up in Taipei. So that’s how I first read Mr. Pai Hsien-yung’s work. So that’s me, a Taipei girl born into an artsy community in Taipei in the 80s, still a long time ago, in the 80s, and I moved to New York in the early 2000s.
Angus
It’s interesting, you mentioned the lifting of martial law… I suppose this might… it might not be such a coincidence, given how important that is to Taiwan and literature. But I’m really quite a newbie both to Taiwan itself and Taiwanese lit. But the reason I say it’s interesting is because on this string of Taiwan episodes I’ve done on the podcast Taiwan season, as I’ve been calling it. I think the first two of the books I’ve done are books that are from that era. One, which has only just been brought out into English translation, is The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, and the other one is Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, which were both written around about that time. Are those literary works from that period significant to you as sort of being ‘from’ that period?
Nadia
I mean, I think we can look at that phenomenon from several perspectives. I think, first of all, why do books get translated in the first place? I think you asked this question in the last episode. Like how this Taiwanese writer’s works got attention. It’s usually one translator who loves the book so much, like Mike, who translated Sanmao. I saw the writers you’ve just mentioned. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but they all play a big part in LGBT literature. And that is something very… there’s something very special about Taiwanese literature from the 80s. How should I put it? What’s the question again?
Angus
You can take it any way you like. I was wondering if you were lucky enough to sort of be raised or have your formative years and that era where Taiwanese culture or society or literature was flourishing after the lifting off – I almost said lockdown! – after the lifting of martial law.
Nadia
Yeah, it was 38 years of lockdown.
Angus
Right. So I was going to ask… I’m struggling to find the words… I was going to ask if works from that period, like the two I’ve done on the show, have a special significance for you, as well as for the literature in general.
Nadia
I think the environment – more freedom – allowed people to represent and to express themselves. So I’ve seen a lot more diversity from the time on. And also, I think, in comparison to Chinese literature in general. I think because the publishing industry has grown so fast in Taiwan in the 80s and 90s, the publishers were just choosing writers’ work…the amount of works and diversity and the choices you have in terms of literature… I don’t think you find it anywhere in the short history of Taiwanese literature, before Pai Hsien-yung, and before I was born, right.
So now, rereading the story is actually my first time reading it in English – it’s a little odd. I have to reference the original. It’s amazing how I saw a lot of things this time that I didn’t see when I was younger. I just saw these people and thought “I know why they are sad”. But then I see someone with Mr Pai’s social status – he was so articulate and has so much affection for people who suffer from nostalgia, and their very ambiguous loss of identity. And I think that’s very, very special from his generation. Because he got to say what he wanted to say, because Taipei People was published during martial law. I don’t know how this happened – that somehow people in the university here, in National Taiwan University, had more freedom to express than people outside of the school. I think it’s part of our culture. Like if you are in a scholar, bureaucracy, culture, role, it means you’ve studied hard, you have higher social status, and you get to do what other people are not allowed to do. It’s just one way to explain it – that these stories are republished from a periodical called Modern Literature that was in the 60s?
Angus
Well, you’ve led us really nicely into our next section, which is the first question I was gonna ask you: who’s this guy Pai Hsien-yung? And then who are the Taipei People? But I guess we could mention something. I think you sort of hinted at something I did not know about Mr Pai, even after I read the book, which would have been helpful for me to have researched a bit more diligently and know this, but he himself is, I guess, an LGBT figure. He’s a gay man. So that means I’ve got three – and it’s going to be four in the next episode – LGBT writers that I’ve covered in Taiwan Season, when I thought it would be less than half. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
Nadia
What’s interesting is that I did not know he was gay when I was little. Like everyone in my community, we’re good students. I started writing when I was 15. So everyone knows Mr. Pai, and we know he’s a very renowned figure, but who knows he’s gay? Like, no one. We didn’t have the context or have the concept of thinking that someone is not straight. So when I was reading Taipei People and even when I was reading Crystal Boys, I was just like, “Why are they so sad?” but I still did not know, I still did not think that Mr Pai is gay, because I didn’t care much. But I think openly self-identifying as gay was not a thing. You just don’t do it. But then later when I lived in New York, and my classmate – he’s Korean – was like:
“Oh, you know what, I love Pai Hsien-yung. I can give him a blow job.”
And I was like, “What? What? You don’t have to? Have you seen him? Like, seriously? Like I have. He’s a grandpa.”
“That’s how much I love Crystal Boys.”
“Yeah, but still you don’t have to!”
But this is how, you know… I had no idea that people outside Taiwan or China are loving him.
Angus
There’s something I mentioned before on the show… I don’t know if you could call it a guilty pleasure or weird pleasure, but when I was living in Shanghai – you know, a laowai in China, a Westerner – one of my favourite places in the city was Korea Town because as much as Shanghai was an amazing place to see the Haipai – the sort of hybrid or at least interacting Eastern Western or Chinese on Western cultures through time – if you knew where to go, you could see other interactions where it was Chinese culture and neighbouring cultures. And perhaps this was just me exoticising or getting excited about or fascinated in things that are commonplace, but I think this is a podcast all about Chinese lit being translated into English, and often the other translations that come up are stuff like Chinese to French, Chinese to German, but I think for me as a Westerner, I have to occasionally remind myself that just because the Chinese author is big or not big in English, they might be huge or they might be non-existent in Japan, Korean and so on. It’s just interesting to me to know that he’s a guy who’s famous in Korea.
Nadia
I believe my Korean friend read it in English. But his books have been translated into other Asian languages well, right? The first foreign edition is usually English. Usually, but not necessarily. Like my book. The first and the only foreign language version of my book is Korean. Right? So it really depends on one person, one book agent, one passionate translator. Now a book is a very, very slow trade. It takes a lot of time. I think that’s why it’s fascinating because it’s almost like a miracle when you have a good translated book, really? Like Sanmao’s books took 44 years.
Angus
Yeah, but that is an amazing addition, the Bloomsbury edition. For sure.
Nadia
So I actually have a background story for that… but then that’s not what we’re talking about today. But I think maybe… I don’t know if you covered this in the previous episode…. I think that a lot of people ask this question to me: that if this is Taiwanese literature, why is it in Chinese language? Is it Chinese language? Is it Chinese literature? And it could be an easy question. It is part of Chinese literature. But I don’t know if you know why it’s the language here.
Angus
I guess I know the history of Taiwan, I think I don’t know so much about it or have only really at least recently become properly aware of is the printing standards of books in Taiwan, if I understand correctly, all go traditional style of top to bottom, right to left, whereas in the mainland, it’s the in the ‘European style’, left to right. And horizontal, not vertical. But if someone was to ask me like, give me an argument for or against demarcating Taiwanese lit from Chinese, I just don’t have an answer. Because I haven’t studied it.
This is a very, very limited analogy, but as a Scottish person I have had people who don’t know so much about the UK ask me: “do you speak Scottish?” And then I have to explain to them why there’s no such language as Scottish. But there is Scots English, and then there’s Gaelic, and then the person will react one of two ways – they will become very interested in starting to grill me, or I will just slowly watch them switching off and losing interest because there’s no straightforward answer to the question. I don’t know if it’s a similar experience.
Nadia
Yeah, there’s no pure language. But my answer is, as a writer who is living in New York, there are questions like “why do you write in Chinese then, if you’re not Chinese?” I’m like “your American literature is in English. You’re not English, right?” But there’s a reason that this language is the dominant language here. It’s just since 1949, when the Republic of China, the Chiang Kai-shek government, retreated to Taiwan. They changed the official language to Mandarin Chinese.
So my family is a total native family, but my mother, my grandmother, and I have different native languages. So generations in my family had a different first language growing up. My grandmother was educated in Japanese. My mother’s first language is a dialect of Taiwanese, closer to Cantonese. And my first language is Mandarin. It’s a mandatory language – when I went to elementary school, we were not allowed to speak the dialect. And they take points out if you’re caught speaking the dialect. It worked pretty well. And now, we’re trying to get it back. It’s hard. It’s hard. Now I can only speak English. I speak English better than my Taiwanese.
Angus
You’ve done a great – a much better job than me – in bringing us to the next question, which was going to be on where the Taipei People diverge slightly. I’ll keep my rubbish Scotland analogy going… so… Gaelic was banned here, technically, by the London Government, hundreds of years ago. It’s gone. And now of course, the British Broadcasting Company, the BBC, has a BBC Gaelic channel, which is doing frantic life support of this basically dead language. I’m from a part of the country where it just wouldn’t be a thing to speak it, and as to whether someone speaks Scots today… I would say in my experience, that’s a question of class. That depends on how far you are from the ground level, so to speak. I don’t know if it’s similar in Taiwan. Is that something you can answer? Or should we just charge ahead?
Nadia
Actually, it’s related to what we’re about to say. So, based on many texts – and our history – that I read about how the Republican Chinese government moved to Taiwan. So I’m actually writing a script based on the history right now – a movie script. It’s a story that I believe many of you will be interested in, because it has something to do with moving all the gold from mainland China to Taiwan. So it was 1948 to ‘49 that the government of Chiang Kai-Shek was going to move to Taiwan. From our side on the island, what the Taiwanese people saw when they moved over? They saw an army of exhausted soldiers, tired people, poor, sick and lost. This strange mix of mainlanders was new to Taiwan. They didn’t have a home, they had to find a home – I think a lot of them were not higher officers. They lived in small villages; military villages. For the locals, the natives didn’t speak the right language.
So you know, I’ve experienced this in America: if you don’t speak English, well, they think you’re stupid. And this is so for a very long period of time. Taiwanese dialect, if you don’t speak Mandarin perfectly, they think you’re working class. You know, it’s a lower-class people. We have the image on TV or in movies. You know, all the criminals speak the dialect. So, in Taipei People, you will see all these very well-dressed classy people. They’re all from the mainland, they probably speak Mandarin with a slight Shanghainese accent. So that’s the language of the higher class, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have more money – a lot of them actually came here broke. So I think, getting back to what you just said, it really represents just social class – not the actual education level.
Angus
The social and cultural capital, but not the capital in our bank account. Right.
I was just going to bring it back to something you mentioned earlier: nostalgia and how Pai Hsien-yung was such a great writer, capturing nostalgia and how he feels for people who are suffering from it. I seem to recall I’ve seen on Facebook in a group called Nostalgic Memes for Hauntological Teens… or something. It’s a Mark Fisher appreciation group, who is a guy I’ve mentioned in the show, like the one intellectual writer I’ve read in the last year, who’s in many ways a thinker who can be highly concerned with nostalgia in lots of different forms. So it’s been a running theme on the show. In fact, you could argue my whole show is a nostalgia project, because I used to live in China. I went back: I started the show.
So we’re in great territory here covering Taipei People on this podcast in particular. So yes, we should probably address – before we talk about the specific stories – the specific characters. One thing that all these Taipei people have in common, as well as mostly being from a higher social standing back on the mainland, is the fact that they’re are a lot of them, and probably all of them are stricken by some kind of nostalgia or they’re living in the past, or they’re haunted by the past. I think we’ve already given the historical context for that. But is there anything else you’d like to say about that before we talk about the first story?
Nadia
Yeah, I just want to say nostalgia is a shared feeling, a shared emotion, that we all have. We tend to read the story of our childhood like everything that happened in childhood is better – or it usually just means that we’re not doing too well at the moment, if we’re being too nostalgic. So I think the reason that these stories have such heavy nostalgia, usually means that they didn’t achieve what they wanted to achieve.
Angus
Yeah. That should make sense, because they’ve just lost the war.
Nadia
Yeah, they’ve lost the war. And they just been through a war and a lot of trauma – and when they moved to Taiwan, actually, the government just kept telling them “we’re going back”. Even when I went to high school, we had this patriotism, education, saying that we’re gonna fight back one day, and we were like, “uh, yeah, okay. I don’t even know where it is….” We just say, “Okay, if that’s what you want to hear.”
Angus
Yeah. If you think of other countries that did that, I guess the one that we have in the world today, that’s North Korea. I guess there’s some kind of an overarching plan there to undo the past – not that I’m trying to make a cross-comparison here…!
Nadia
Oh, no, actually, we have a lot in common with South Korea. When I went to school in New York, the South Koreans and us were just referencing our textbooks together. They have a lot of words taken out from Chinese characters, right? They don’t use the Chinese characters a lot, but the sounds are very similar. How we call the communists, how we say patriotism, or all the slogans, are also similar. So it’s a little guilty pleasure shared by these Americanized communists in the East Asian economic miracles.
Angus
You can find fun in life wherever you can take it.
Nadia
Yeah, I gotta do it. And then we have a bunch of International Relations majors. This is our international relations.
Angus
I know all about me and my home country, but that reminded me of a time when I was a teacher in an international school. I was substitute teaching a primary, sorry, a first grade class and it was Parents Night. So the kid was from a mainland Chinese state school, but it was the international division. So we had kids and parents from all over, but mostly Han Chinese kids from somewhere or other. Plenty of them were Taiwanese parents, but of course on my class list they’re listed as being from ‘Chinese Taipei’ or something.
So the parents come in. Both of them, a mom and a dad. I think I knew that they were Taiwanese. So we’re just having a normal conversation about the kid and they said: “you have an interesting accent, are you English?”
And I said, “No, I’m from Britain. I’m from Scotland.”
You know, I sound fairly British. My accent is maybe more generally British, and we started to talk about that. And they’re like, yeah, we get it. We’re Taiwanese.
… what was I going to say? Yes, I was going to say one more thing about nostalgia. The reason I brought it up, the point was, that I read in that Facebook group. People were bringing up screenshots of old, I think, Victorian textbooks referencing the fact that not that far back in the past in, I think, Anglo or European culture, whatever, nostalgia was defined as a mental illness or a problem – not just a sort of normal mental condition. Perhaps that’s a bit extreme, but what you said about feeling nostalgic when you’re in a bad place… I mean, during the middle of lockdown or first lockdown here in the UK, I was really interested in just sort of trying to recall places I’d been in years past because… I’d be staring at the same wall every day. And all felt good in the short term. But like a drug, it is not great in the long term, and it’s a sign of other problems.
The other thing I was going to say, when you mentioned childhood, this is really random, but this will give listeners somewhere fun to go. There’s a trend online. You can find Facebook groups about it or you can search YouTube for it. You might have seen it. It’s ‘liminal spaces’. Have you heard of this thing? liminal spaces?
Nadia
No.
Angus
Right. If you like sort of eerie creepy stuff, this is perfect. I might have talked a bit about this episode on Can Xue, because she’s definitely sort of in this wheelhouse. So it’s a trend of a certain kind of picture of an empty abandoned space which gives you a strange, uncanny but not entirely unpleasant feeling. And I wanted to know how people would analyse that, because I could see there were common themes. Water is a common theme, feeling like you’ve been to the place in a dream as a common thing. Dreams are important in Taipei People actually, in some of the stories… in one of them anyway. I found one or two quite young people who had compiled images, thought about it, and made video essays on YouTube. And the thing someone pointed out – which was so obvious once someone told me, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed – loads of the things were things that if you were born in anywhere from the late 80s through to maybe the mid 90s (and I’m from 93), it’s like kids play areas or pools or just aesthetics that would be from that period in your life when the first memories that you’ll keep are being formed, and places that have been replaced by more modern aesthetics. So places that only exist in memory or abandoned, which you can’t get back to, which would be, you know, a decent metaphor for Mainland China in this story.
Nadia
Yeah, visual memories are very interesting, but also – they can be modified unconsciously. Now, I remember, I was writing one of my books, I actually wrote about nostalgia. In Greek, it means the pain from an old wood, right? Even though it’s healed, they still use things to feel the pain.
I think the Taipei People kind of need this pain to know that they had that wound before. It was the evidence that they existed. The evidence that they once had home, they had a different life. Because… I know you’ve been in Taipei… it’s just the climate, the smell, the temperature. Everything’s different from China.
But if you’re in Taiwan, and you’re visiting Taiwan, the best place is Ximending. So Ximending was part of Japanese urban planning. It’s identical to Shinjuku in Tokyo. So if you see the old photos of these two places, they look the same. The streets are designed more similar to Japanese cities than Chinese cities. So when they move here, this is like a foreign country, and you see palm trees – because we’re semi-tropical. It’s like a foreign country for the men who first came here. I also heard that story multiple times – people say their grandpa, when they first arrived, ate bananas for the first time. Bananas, pineapples, mangoes…
Angus
Yeah, an island in the Pacific, I guess. My experience visiting Taipei was interesting because by that time, I had already been to Hong Kong. So I’d seen a sort of a place which is ‘Chinese’ and yet different. But that was a different experience, because by that time on those visits, my Mandarin was pretty decent. So like walking around hearing conversations, I could tune in and out of them. Whereas in Hong Kong, I could but only if it was in English – zero Cantonese.
I would say my experience of Taipei was… it felt closer to how I felt on the mainland, but I couldn’t tell if that was just because being in tune with the language more was giving me that ambient feeling, or if there was something closer than that.
But yeah, it’s funny. You mentioned Shinjuku and the Japanese elements because I noticed right away: wow, I thought Shanghai had lots of Japanese-style, convenience stores, but nothing close to Taipei and the amount of Japanese restaurants. That was just not something I would have seen coming either. I don’t think we can say anything very deep about that.
But yeah, the sorts of strangeness – strange but not entirely unpleasant, and the mostly pleasant feeling of being there. I could vibe with that. But I think I mentioned in our conversation before the show – that’s the only place in Taiwan I’ve been, so I have nothing much to compare it against apart from Hong Kong – which is not a very useful comparison.
Nadia
Yeah, but that’s, you know – in the stories, it’s a totally different era.
Angus
Exactly. Yeah.
Nadia
Do you want to? Should we move on to the story?
Angus
Yeah. I realised when you said ‘Taipan’, I goofed my question sheet says ‘Taipei Chin’
Nadia
Oh, you always auto check. It always autocorrects back to ‘Taipei’. It’s what Google does.
Angus
Right? Yeah. That might be it. Um, just the listeners will hear my computer chair’s wheels rolling here, as I go and get a pen and score out so that my brain doesn’t keep saying ‘Taipei’ instead of ‘Taipan’.
Nadia
Taipan.
Angus
Yeah. All right. That should stop me from making a fool of myself. I thought we could sort of zoom in on three of the stories from the book, and I’ll start by having a go at summarising it. I’ll try and cover all the bases. If my memory misses anything really egregious, Nadia, maybe…
Nadia
That’s fine. People should just go read the story themselves.
Angus
Exactly, yeah! These things are quite short. If you’ve got academic access, you can definitely get this like I did. These stories may also be available online one-by-one, I’m not sure.
Nadia
They are.
Angus
Fantastic. Okay, so this is our first story, The Last Night of Taipan Chin. Let’s do who, what, where, why, when – that should help me remember. So, who? Taipan Chin is who. I’m not finding the right noun here, but… she’s a lady from the old dancehalls of Shanghai who has continued her career in Taiwan. The what: it’s her last night on the job before she retires. She’s got herself a wealthy husband. And I think, from what I gleaned from the story, that the end-trajectory of a career like this is what you’re sort of trying to climb the ladder to get out. The where: we are in a dancehall in Taiwan. I don’t know a great deal more about it than that
Nadia
It’s Nuits de Paris – ‘Night of Paris’. The translators used French instead of English.
Angus
Right? Yes. I was curious. Whenever I see something that’s not English or Chinese in a piece of translated Chinese fiction, I’m always wondering: “how did this look in the original?” But I usually don’t go and check. Usually, it’s a mystery. I don’t investigate.
I don’t know what year we’re in. I just know it’s nighttime. Why? I guess the drama of the story. I guess there isn’t really a plot to this one. We just sort of follow her. She has interactions with the other girls and some of the male clientele and she ends up dancing with one of the dorkiest young men in the dance hall, and she has a flashback to a similar sort of more innocent or younger, male clientele. They have this memory and the young guy in the present stands out. Because it seems like a lot of the other men are kind of boorish, or pigs – especially the older ones – but she’s finding something to hold on to in these younger, more innocent guys. I don’t know. Is there anything really key there?
Nadia
Yeah, yeah. That’s basically the story. But I think the point here is that Taipan Chin – the title of this job – so if you’re not Chinese, you (should) know, it sounds so glamorous. “Chin” is gold…
Angus
Sorry if I’m interrupting you, but this is me being a mainland laowai, not a Taiwan laowai. When I see ‘chin’, I’m not so used to Wade-Giles so, so if I’d seen ‘jin’, I might have known this was gold.
Nadia
I agree with you. In Taiwan translations, Taiwan spelling is somehow confusing. It’s because in the system we created, we wanted to sound more American, right?
So taipan’s literal translation is like ‘the leader of a band’. She’s a leader, which usually means that she has a bigger clientele. She’s more popular, but also she’s older. So I think it’s very nice of Mr Pai here. He was so sensitive to notice that in every woman’s job, even a woman’s life, that there is an expiration date. So they’re always rushing, they’re always anxious about finding a husband, even for the ‘Chin’. She’s basically the main source of income for this nightclub ballroom. She’s leading, she’s getting all the cash for the place but then you know, she’s turned 40, she needs to retire, and this is her last night on the job.
Now she’s having flashbacks,thinking about how many men she’s known who are wealthier or richer or better than this one, but this one is okay. She’s done an investigation and found that he’s got a small factory and owns a few old houses. This man is fine, and he’s a nice man. He’s a decent person. But then she’s thinking about the men she could have got in Shanghai because she was too proud. She thought she’d get a better man. But it’s not just about her – it’s about the time in Shanghai; probably a much better time for the economy. And apparently, the nightclub – I don’t know if you have visited – it’s now a landmark building in Shanghai.
Angus
I’m sure I would know it if I saw it.
Nadia
It’s now a movie theatre on the Bund.
Angus
I might have been to that. I might have seen the Avengers Endgame in that one, and made a fool of myself there…
Nadia
It’s very likely. It’s now a movie theatre. But you know, according to Taipan Chin, even the john at the Paramount must have taken up more room than the dance floor in this place in Taipei. So Paramount was huge. Like the peak of her career, of anyone’s career. So I think I want to explain the job – the woman’s job. She’s similar, but not the same, to a Geisha. Her job is to be someone’s girlfriend, but it doesn’t have to involve sex, right? It’s more of a hostess, and how it works is that you enter the ballroom and the man has to show out his wealth. Then they take turns, they switch tables. If you want your beloved lady to stay longer, you have to order more drinks – you have to pay, you have just to impress her. It’s a competition of showing up. I guess in Shanghai before the war, it was a much better time. I actually heard a story about Paramount in Shanghai. They have a light tower, where you can see that light from a mile away. So when someone is leaving, the waiter will show the car plate number on the light tower and the driver will see it and then go pick it up.
Angus
Very futuristic. That’s really cool.
Nadia
That’s how it is. Taipan Chin spent her last night in Taipei, the Nuits de Paris. I have been there, a long time after it closed. They still use it occasionally as an event place, if anyone wants to rent it. It’s a movie theatre in Ximending, ‘Westgate Square’. It’s where I grew up, in this neighbourhood, so I know this area very well. It’s just full of entertainment – it’s a teenager’s favourite playground.
But that ballroom had been closed for a long time. The reason I visited is the owner of the movie theatre – he was upgrading their sound system, and he told me, “I have to place above me. I don’t know what to do with it.” It’s on the fifth floor as I remember. It’s probably about the size of a movie theatre. So I went up there. There were these sofas and this small dancefloor. It kind of had the smell of a few decades of customers’ cigarettes. We went to the attic, where there was a nightwatch room where I saw, for some reason, someone was still there, like they were waiting for the men to come back… I think it was one of the guards who still lived there.
Angus
Right.
Nadia
That’s the ballroom. I think it’s being renovated now. But I went there about 10 years ago.
Angus
It’s one of those books where you could maybe do a walking tour through the city and had to hit the landmarks, I guess, for a lot of these places.
Nadia
It was still a culture. I wouldn’t say it was a popular culture, but I do think small, hidden ballrooms have been open until recently, and only older people go there. The performers are also older, and they have something they call ‘envelope performances’. The customers go with envelopes, and when the singer comes around you and just give her money. The more they like you, the more money they’re gonna give you and you don’t know how much it is, until after…
Angus
After all the mentions of Shanghai I was racking my brain trying to think of equivalent places I’ve been. Just a couple spring to mind. I don’t know if this place is particularly ancient, but it was a relatively famous jazz bar in Shanghai. I think it was called The Cotton Club. I think that’s named after a more famous jazz club somewhere else. It really wasn’t a very mainstream attraction. It felt like it was somewhere that needed a bit more love, even in Shanghai. Strangely, but another place when you mentioned geishas, I remembered a rather strange experience. I had gone to see a ballet. It is centred in Shanghai, which is in Hongkou, again, near the sort of Korea Town, Hongqiao area, which isn’t just the Korea Town. It’s actually got a lot of Asian expats – so other East Asian people who come to Shanghai. So the woman I was dating at the time we went on a wander out from the venue to find just a bar to go to. And we wandered into what appeared to be a Japanese sort of bar area where I guess a lot of the customers would have been Japanese too. And we found one that would serve as a normal-ish place to go. It was quite nice, I think it was mostly a whiskey bar. We sat down there, and there was a man and a woman working the bar. One looked like the owner, one like the bar staff, but during our time there both offered to sit with us for a fee, and chat in – presumably – Mandarin, but we said no, no, we weren’t here for that. But it was like a very, very, I guess… very innocent version of, you know, something in the same wheelhouse as Taipan Chin. Just paying a little bit of money for a nice conversation with an interesting person. I would say… presumably interesting. It could have been really boring.
Nadia
Yeah, I think that’s the category of ‘companion’.
Angus
Companion, right.
Nadia
Paid companionship is a much bigger industry in Japan. So I think what you went to is something they call a girls’ bar. It’s much cheaper than Taipan Chin’s club. That’s the higher place to go. And in Japan, the modern-day equivalent would be Ginza, which has the hottest club and you can easily spend nearly. That’s where the millionaires compete with each other during good times in the economy. Now it’s probably not the time.
Actually, I didn’t see the author this way when I was reading it when I was much younger. This time, I actually never thought he’d be a feminist, but he does have empathy for the females’ situation, because he’s so articulate on how Taipan Chin does her job. Mr Pai happens to be, I mean – at least he knows people who can afford the services so he knows very well about the industry. Taipan has to be the customer relations retention manager, and she had to recruit other ladies from other places, and she was also the friend and the ambassador of this business. So it’s such an important figure in the business. But then, you know, some time she has to retire. But the manager, who is an older man, gets to stay there forever. So I think I actually didn’t see this much when I was younger, but now I see.
Angus
Sure I saw things on my reread of this story. My first read was quite a while ago now. I did a fair bit of prep – I read the intro material, read a bit about the significance of the book, then read the thing, then went away and had a bit of time to digest it. But I think, perhaps crucially, I learned that Mr Pai is a gay man. I’d had this initial little suspicion in my mind like, what is he doing when he’s describing both the beauty and the ageing of Taipan? Quite a long time is spent on her appearance, her dress, how she’s dressed – I think it’s a qipao – and how other hostesses are dressed. Why are we spending so much work on this here? Is this just the guy kind of creating his ideal version of a beautiful woman and in words, because, you know, perhaps, why wouldn’t you when you’re the creator? You can create whatever you like!
But learning he’s a gay man, that little box is perhaps negated, or perhaps he is choosing to make them beautiful in his own particular way. It’s not there might be other more literary particular reasons for it, and yet on the reread, I felt he really did do a great job of handling both the nuances of her appearance, but also her role in the company and how she’s got a heart of gold in some of the things she does. And you see that in the past where she helped a young woman and then in the present, where she’s chosen to give attention to the shy, nerdy guy – no, not nerdy, but dorky guy. But you see she’s got a bit of an iron fist as well. When a new arrival was giving her cheek, she uses violence.
Maybe I shouldn’t be laughing. I find that at least blackly funny. And she also rants about the girl she helped kind of squandered the opportunity or misused it by getting involved with a skeevy guy and getting pregnant. I left on my second reading, not really knowing if she’s a good or bad person but liking her – which is how I feel about some of my friends and some of my favourite people. So to be honest, it’s very true to life. You don’t need to make a definitive judgement on whether someone’s a saint or a sinner. But he makes me feel like for Taipan Chin, I could go either way.
Nadia
He has a lot of empathy and compassion towards these people. The people have desires, but then they’re also naive to the environment which they cannot change much in the political situation. But I also think he knows very well about styles and clothes and what kind of people wears what. I think part of the reason is that he’s from a wealthy family, his mother and his sisters in the family all have really nice clothes, and decorations, and jewellery – all those things, so he knows what’s good.
And also, the dress that he depicts here – these are the clothes that only women in the show business will wear. If you see someone wearing a black qipao, you know she’s not normal. She does something for a living. But Qipao, in the original version, it’s Manchurian traditional clothing. Before 1920, it was always worn with pants on and, beginning in Shanghai in the 1920s or 30s, because of the western cultural influences – that people had started reading Vogue magazine, I guess – that they know you can use it to show your curves. It’s a way to be attractive. That’s how qipao has transformed.
Angus
Globalisation.
Nadia
Globalisation. No, evil western culture.
Angus
Listeners can choose the one they prefer.
The last thing I was going to ask or say about Taipan Chin is – I don’t entirely remember whatever deep thoughts I was having when I was writing this question – but I noticed in the book there are quite a lot of sort of beauties or fading beauties, or just important women, often clad in qipao or what have you, in similar situations to Taipan. But for me, she was the one who’s the most memorable one.
I was gonna say, closing the book… I read the thing on a tablet… so I can’t say closing the book… but upon shutting down the tablet…
I noticed that she has a lot of contradictions, but she thinks about them. She’s aware of them. Whereas other characters seem more naive or caught in their dreams. They’re not doing as much self-reflection, and I actually think I preferred this character maybe because I’m a lazy reader, and I like having the contradictions pointed out to me, but…
Nadia
You are not alone. Taipan Chin is the most adapted character. The story is the most adapted into TV and films. There are a couple of versions of it. I think one thing is what you said – she’s very relatable and she’s aware of all the other choices and all the transformations. But also I think she plays a role as a storyteller in the story. As opposed to in other stories, where maybe the woman is just one of the characters in the story. The structure is so tight, but also it tells the landscape of the era they’re in. I think this is an all-in-one character.
Angus
I can think of a few reasons why this story would make a good visual or TV movie adaptation because there’s a lot of visual, and what’s the word…? You could do a lot of exciting visual things with the set and the costumes. There is a word I’m looking for. I’m not grasping it, but you can make use of carnivalesque and visually, from the shadow and colour, there are all sorts of things you could do.
But aside from that, it’s maybe not a classical story, in the sense there’s not a clear plot. But it’s a short story, so there’s not too much need for that. But there’s a proactive character who is strongly drawn, doesn’t just passively float, and there’s a cast, but it’s not a sort of an ensemble collective, distanced – we’re up close over her shoulder.
And thinking about some of the other stories in the collection, they’re more breezy, dreamy, distanced, more passive, less conscious character – this sounds really mean – but less focused characters, more hazy stories, whereas this one, like you’re saying, has sort of a laser focus to it that just sort of naturally makes it more readable, if not necessarily better and more beautiful. An easy one to follow. Shall we go on to the next one?
Nadia
Let’s do it.
Angus
All right. Okay. The next one is Winter Nights. We’ve got two characters this time. I’ll try and summarise it again. If there’s anything really glaring that I’ve missed just feel free to correct me. So we have two guys, Wu Zhu-guo and Yu Qin-lei.
Nadia
We could call them by their last name. Professor Yu and what’s the other one?
Angus
Professor Yu and Professor Wu. Okay, that works. And I’m now going to embarrass myself because I don’t recall which is which, but I should check that, actually. So which guy stayed in Taiwan?
Nadia
It’s very confusing for me too…
Angus
I guess Professor Yu is the one still in Taipei…
Nadia
Yeah. A pair of wooden clogs on his feet. He must have stayed in Taiwan.
Angus
I’m glad there’s someone who can spot these clues. I wouldn’t have got that.
Nadia
But I was surprised. When I read the first paragraph. If he was holding an oil paper umbrella. I was like, wait, really? But I realised maybe that they did in the 60s.
Angus
Right. Just umbrellas in general. I don’t know if this is something that’s ever popped into your head. And I guess you’ve never been in Britain, your version of the West that you’ve lived in is the USA. But the way people deal with rain is quite different in Scotland. People do use umbrellas, but you see way less of them. You get much more people wearing just the raincoat with their hood up, rather than an umbrella. And the lazy take is what it’s a more individualist culture. So you just need one hood for yourself and no one shares it with you. Whereas over in China you can share an umbrella… but I don’t know… a probably more realistic explanation would be that you can have rain in hot weather in most of China, whereas here if it’s raining, it’s also freezing. So it makes sense to me.
Nadia
I was gonna start this rain conversation with you. Because you know, me, as someone growing up in Taipei, we are very experienced with all kinds of rain. So in Taipei…, maybe you have heard of this famous popular song in China. ‘Wintertime, you’d go to Taipei and watch the rain…’
Angus
I never learned Chinese pop music.
Nadia
Yeah, so it’s like a famous song. When people see me, and I say I’m a Taibeiren from Taiwan, they’d be like, “oh, wintertime, we go to Taipei see the rain”. So we have rain every season. I had a British teacher, and he told me that it can be raining every day in London, and you don’t need an umbrella. That’s just the way tBritish people do it. But I guess it varies by region.
Angus
A funny thing that I think Britain and Ireland have in common with Taiwan is the pros and cons of being an island. Lots of rain. I always thought growing up that as you go further north, it gets colder and it gets rainier. But actually it’s not quite so simple. It does get colder if you go further north, obviously, but the rain and bad weather comes in off the Atlantic so the west coast and Ireland is much rainier than the east. So I’m from Dundee, that’s where I am now, on the east coast. We are the sunniest city in Scotland – but of course that doesn’t mean there’s much sun… just more than everywhere else. We’re relatively dry. I used to live inManchester, in the west and much further south, but it’s quite a lot wetter because we were closer to the Atlantic.
But yeah, umbrella culture… I guess people in London, there’s the famous image of the bureaucrat with his black umbrella. But that’s probably more like a modernism image. I think it’s all raincoats these days, now we’re all atomized individuals.
Nadia
But I wanted to mention umbrellas because this was before Taiwan’s economic growth. Large economic growth is because of the export of plastic umbrellas. That’s what I want to say. So I think he may or may not have mentioned this on purpose.
Angus
Got it. Good to know. Right. So in the story, back in the story, we have Professor Yu, who’s being visited by Professor Wu, and they’re both literary professors. They went to university together in the early 21st century, and they’ve got a lot of…
Nadia
They went to university in mainland China, in Beijing.
Angus
In Beijing, right? It’s Peking University.
Nadia
Yeah, they went to Peking University.
Angus
…Which has definitely come up on the show before. So they’re both from Chinese lit at Peking University. I believe they both left China for Taiwan at the end of the Civil War. Professor Yu stayed there, Professor Wu went off to teach Chinese in the States, and now they’re being reunited.
Most of the story, they’re just reminiscing… reminiscing their past and comparing their fate. Reminiscing their youth, their more distant past and then comparing their more recent pasts and presents as academics. And then there’s a funny sense that the other grass is always greener. By the end, Professor Yu is thinking about upping sticks for the States and Professor Wu is thinking about settling in Taipei. I think that’s the main thrust of it. Is there anything I’ve missed out?
Nadia
Yeah, basically, this is actually a long story. Two old people met up, and it does tend to talk about their old days. This is one of those stories, but I think that a lot of details are given here. about how scholars and college professors were treated. I believe Professor Yu was teaching in National Taiwan University. That’s where I went to school, supposedly the best university in Taiwan. It was called the Imperial University of Taipei, because the Japanese founded the school. So we had a lot of Japanese houses on campus and he was given a very old, shaky Japanese house as his dormitory. Residents say the floor was still covered with tatami. So that’s his life. I think you probably asked this question in the last episode – on the images of foreigners in Taiwanese culture. They’re kind of uniform – kind of vague and uniform, not sure which culture they are from.
Angus
Yeah, I was comparing the foreigners who appeared in mainland lit and then in Taiwanese lit, and for me it was a favourable comparison to Taiwanese lit. I felt they tended to be less stock types and more like real people. That was my feeling anyway.
Nadia
For Taiwanese, I think we have this excitement every time someone comes from outside the island, right, and this professor was teaching in the United States. When you visit and he will go on, he would see pictures in the newspaper, and people tend to feel that those who are in the United States tend to have a better life. But you know, as the conversation gets deeper, he mentions how American students responded to his experience during the May Fourth movement. Did you cover the May Fourth movement in your previous episodes?
Angus
Good question. Very early on, and then it hasn’t popped up much since. Episode one was Diary of a Madman, by Lu Xun. After that, in episodes 2 and 3, iIt was stuff from the late 20th century and now, but we went right back to May Fourth with another diary: The Diary of Miss Sophie by Ding Ling. It’s about a young woman in Beijing, who’s going through the motions of trying to be a modern woman in a modern but also traditional world. And then Lu Xun pops up again, I think, in episode 11. Matt Turner had retranslated his Weeds. He translated it as a collection called Weeds because the previous English tradition was called Wild Grass. So we went back to Lu Xun when he was feeling kind of down and out, a little bit later on.
But apart from that, May Fourth in the show has just been references. I haven’t done any other… I did Lin Yutang with Paul French, but he’s sort of adjacent to May Fourth rather than part of it? We could reintroduce it for some listeners. I’m sure.
Nadia
May Fourth for us is like the French Revolution. We mentioned a lot. Like everything starts from there. But then eventually, if we’re being asked “what is May Fourth” … we don’t know! Really? Yeah. What is it? It’s just like a big concept, and a series of movements that we all think we have learned somewhere.
I believe that over time, it’s been interpreted by the convenience of each political leader. I believe Chiang Kai-shek, took May Fourth as part of the beginning of their big civil movements. But what I wanted to say is that a few years before the May Fourth Movement there was the New Culture movement that was started at Peking University by a group of students. It was a more elite-oriented movement – it was basically the promotion of independent thinking. It’s considered one of the first movements that encourages democracy.
Angus
Mr Science and Mr Democracy…
Nadia
But then I think four years later, May Fourth was so big because it actually involved other people, like people outside of the scholars’ world. It looks like it’s for everybody. That’s why the Communist Party claimed that May Fourth was the beginning of the workers’ movement. It’s true.
Angus
You might disagree with their reasons for emphasising it, but at that basic factual level that they do have their roots there. For listeners who are scratching their heads, if you’re not quite grasping what we’re talking about – this movement, like Nadia is saying, is when the first scholars, intellectual literary figures, and then more widely…
…Around May the 4th at the end of World War I, China had helped out on the side of the allies. So had Japan. There was a hope that as recognition, Qingdao – which was at the time a German colony in mainland China, in Shandong Province – would be taken away from Germany and given back to the Chinese nation, or the Chinese people, or what have you.
Britain and Japan led a joint effort to take it off Germany, but Japan did a much better job, and got there faster. At the end of World War I, at the Versailles Conference. The Japanese Empire was given Qingdao. So this did not make these young patriotic lefty-leaning intellectuals in China happy. So, this protest movement started and it, like we’re seeing, became for the idea of becoming modernised, saving the country, casting off traditions, and bringing in Mr Science and Mr Democracy.
If one was to critique May Fourth for being too ready to reject Chinese traditions – which you could argue had consequences further down the line, things like the Cultural Revolution where all culture has to be destroyed – something like this critique pops up in the story. One of the professors is talking about a time when he was giving a talk, and he was followed by this young intellectual. I’m just going to quote the text here. I’m going to read about half or two thirds of a page, because this will suit listeners who are looking for the big name drops in their podcasts.
These young Chinese, ignorant of the current conditions in China, blindly worshipped Western culture and had a superstitious belief in Western democracy and science. This gave rise to unprecedented confusion in the Chinese intellectual world. But this generation, which had grown up in a patriarchal society and which had neither a
system of independent thought nor persistence of willpower, suddenly found itself bereft of its spiritual sustenance once the Confucian tradition crumbled; then, like a tribe of parricidal sons, they began to waver in panic; they became lost — they had overthrown Confucius, their spiritual father — carrying the heavy burden of their guilt, they set out on their spiritual self-exile. Some hurled themselves into the arms of totalitarianism; some turned back and embraced the remnants of their long-since-shattered tradition; some fled abroad and became wise hermits taking refuge in their isolation. Their movement disintegrated, deteriorated. He ended by saying: ‘Some Chinese scholars have called the May Fourth Movement a Chinese Renaissance, but I consider it at best an aborted Renaissance.’
As I was reading this, I felt very intellectually tickled because this is stuff I began to learn about a couple of years ago now on this podcast, and there is a link here. Here’s my reference… So this reminded me of – admittedly something I only know through secondary texts – a part of Freud’s work Totem and Taboo, where he describes – it’s hard to know if he’s speaking metaphorically or if he’s trying to tell us how early humans really lived – but he’s got this idea where in the original patriarchal kind of ape-like society, the leader was this tyrannical father figure who hoarded all the power and – of course, because it’s Freud – the women for himself. The sons, in his version of this pseudo-history, the sons band together and murder him. But then he haunts them because he’s gone from the physical world, and they can’t really erase their father figure from their psyches. So he becomes the superego – the guilt that haunts and polices them. So they internalise the Father. Just like how as children become adults, we learn to discipline ourselves. That was the point he was trying to make in a strange Freudian way.
And I think I can apply that cleverly to Chinese history or culture or literature, but I just really enjoy the experience of reading a story, which is a dialogue between two intellectuals talking about intellectual concerns which are relevant both to Chinese history and to deeper psychological ideas about casting off tradition – or is it even possible to do that without being haunted?
So yeah, I don’t have a point to make here. Just to say, I really liked this story, partly for that reason, partly because the characters, although they’re not really strong personalities, are pretty likeable. There’s not much conflict in this story. It’s maybe a bit like listening to a decent podcast. There’s an interesting conversation going on that you enjoy sort of sitting in on.
Nadia
I think, in many ways, I can relate. Any young person growing up in such a heavy culture can relate, though in different ways. I was born and raised on this little island, and we were required to learn the geography and history of the entire of China. So, somehow, I feel this is need for detachment. Sometimes, it’s a strong estimate for looking for attachments. This is such an attractive and fascinating, deep culture, but at the same time, isn’t it too heavy to carry? So I think that many young people felt that way. And that was part of the reason the young university students at Peking University started the May Fourth Movement. If we continue to carry this 5000 years of historical tradition, maybe we will never change. That’s why they promote science and new thinking. Yeah, because they just kept losing everywhere.
Angus
I know I keep doing this to the point it’s ridiculous… but being Scottish from a country of just 5 million people, we have our national sports. Football is the best sport everyone wants us to win. But the Scottish National team sucks. We got into the World Cup this time, the first time in decades. But… when you are in a country of 5 million people, if you’re not stupid then you know, you’re a small, relatively insignificant place and maybe that helps. Although we do have, certainly, quite a long history, there’s nothing like those multiple 1000 years that there are for China. So yeah, it is a fairly concrete example of just some inherent differences.
Nadia
Yeah. So now, we have this dilemma. They’re arguing on how do we change the textbook. One side says it’s too long. It’s 5000 years of history. And then, if you’re just studying the writing history of Taiwan, that’d be too short – that’d be like nothing to say. You’ll be like, “Yeah, who are we? What are we doing here?” And then it gets more complicated. If you’re a Taiwanese-American and you’re teaching, like Professor Yu, Byron in Taiwan, whereas Professor Wu was teaching Chinese history in America – how weird that is!
Angus
Yeah.
Nadia
I remember Professor Wu was teaching Chinese literature or Chinese history in America. He avoids modern history because this is something that we still do like. “I don’t want to start this fight right now. So let’s just not talk about the modern history of China.” And so he would just say teach extreme detail history in the Tang Dynasty, thousands of years ago, and then about this theatre system. Small things, a long time ago.
He knew that he published a few books and he had a PhD to do. One or two PhD students read each year. They had big dreams because it’s true for their generation. You have this tradition of the the civil examination system – that if you’re a booksmart you get to lead the country. All these bureaucratic officials were chosen by a series of exams. Such a vision was still true for their generation. If you go to university, you are the leader. You have the duty to lead the country and then do something big. They truly believed in this. But then they couldn’t. One of their friends couldn’t even afford his own funeral. So this is the very second comparison to what they want.
There’s a funny bit here, because talk about this ideal woman: their beautiful, talented classmate that they didn’t get to marry.Professor Wu’s wife was busy playing my job next door, but she actually was funny. I was like, “this is a much better wife. I wish everybody would offer this way. She actually wins.”
Angus
Yeah, that’s an interesting kind of B plot going on, not beneath the surface, but it’s like perhaps that’s the most important thing that you should be paying attention to. Not their big, fuzzy nostalgia or big philosophical ideas, but the real thing to measure the trajectory of their life. It’s their marriage. I guess there’s lots of ways of measuring it.
My next question was going to be about the ‘grass is greener’ thing. We’ve touched on that a bit. So I’ll skip to the second part of that question. Can you relate to these guys as a Taiwanese person? The question was originally written ‘as a Taiwanese person currently living in the USA’, but even better, you’ve since gone back to Taiwan. So you’ve done both directions. So can you relate to either man’s nostalgia here?
Nadia
The short answer is no. A longer answer is a very different generation or a person in disguise. I believe that Taiwanese people in my generation are living more diverse – growing up in a more diverse lifestyle. I know particularly I don’t really identify myself as a Chinese person. I’m not very academic either. So it’s a lot of things.
I think I know one or two or like 10 people who are like that, but they’re usually older. What’s interesting about that generation is that he mentioned the grant offered by Harvard University. I think that for this generation, no one could really afford going to study abroad, and the only way is to compete for the grant. American universities offered few opportunities for Taiwanese scholars during the 60s and 70s. It was highly selective. So if you’re selected and you get to teach in an American university that’s something to be very proud of.
But you know, in my generation thousands of people are studying in America. I’m not very special. I live in New York just because it’s fun. Because I want to be cool. It’s something I think the whole value has changed so much, that I think that this American influence is still here. I grew up watching MTV culture. I wasn’t aware of it, but you know, if you ask me: why didn’t I go to study in the UK? I have no idea. I had no idea that was an option.
Angus
This reminds me of living in Shanghai. During my time there, I noticed quite a lot of parallels between the Chinese people I met and the American people I met. They were much more similar than I would have ever first have expected, and one thing I felt they have in common was the tendency to think that the Western world and America are synonyms, and that if you’re going to go from your country to the west, that you are, by default, going to the States. I was often puzzled as to why – there are certainly lots of other options. It’s not the only developed country in the west by any means.
But the more time I spent living there and Shanghai High School, where a lot of the time I was helping the students prepare their American University statement applications, I realised maybe one big reason – I think that the number that are going as cool kids like you who want to go hang out with the hipsters in Brooklyn or whatever are a minority. The biggest reason I was seeing for wanting to go to the States was the prestige of the universities, Harvard and Yale and so on. Rightly so, those are great universities. But that was the big motivation I saw for going to the States – either that or just cultural hegemony, which makes it the default because it’s the most present in people’s minds.
Nadia
All these are under one huge umbrella of American diplomatic strategy. They put out lots for this – the prevailing of American culture is their full-time job. So, you know, part of that is the prestige university rankings – I mean, they create rankings!. How do you know if a school is good? You check US news. It’s US News. Then we see the ‘best schools’ among the top 100 best universities in the world and 99 of them are American schools. So how’s that possible? It’s just the whole world… the whole planet is just a huge capitalist germ that we’re in.
Angus
It’s not usually this point of an episode where I go “oh god…” and then we go to the next question…
Nadia
Oh, capitalism. Capitalism.
Angus
Yep.. I’ve heard it’s a thing that exists…!
Nadia
I know.
Angus
Next section. So it’s the rest of Taipei people. I think I said stupidly earlier, we’re doing three stories. And no, we’re not. We did those two and now we’re going to do a third section which sort of tries to hit the other types of characters, because I noticed there are a couple ones that we really can’t ignore. One mentioned them early on is the army men. In this case, it’s mostly ranking officers – big guys from the army. There are quite a few of them.
If you were to break the characters into some main types, you’d have ladies like Taipan Chin, and then you’d have army guys – and they’re often quite sad figures. I suppose you could attribute that to losing a war and wanting to go back even though you know that’s just sort of a fantasy, if you’re being honest with yourself. I wanted to ask you, have you met such people? Have you met these ex-military figures as older men, by proxy…?
Nadia
Their children. Honestly, I wasn’t aware when I was younger, but then I realised they’re high-ranking officers. They’re usually up on the hills in a nice house. They have cars. So when I was in my teenage years I hung out with very cool people – record producers, they actually produced the best-selling records. We don’t say that because any more, we say CDs or music albums…
Angus
“Records” is good. Timeless.
Nadia
They actually produced records. So when I was a teenager, I hung out with a person who had music labels a lot and those producers, they like to show off how many records they have. He was my godfather, actually. He used to say he had 20,000 records at home. So I was aware that means money – I just didn’t know how much. I couldn’t afford any of them. But then, years later, I realised how wealthy his family was
Angus
Even just to have that much space, never mind the money…
Nadia
And then the access to it because it wasn’t that easy to buy all those records. So then I realised all their parents are all somehow related to higher ranking officers’ families. And they spoke Mandarin – they’re mainlanders. So actually, a lot of important artwork or creative works are done by the second generation of high-ranking officers, because they had more access to culture and education.
Then there are lower-ranking soldiers who may or may not be educated before. Some of my elementary school teachers seemed incredibly old to us. I will be like, “how could he still be teaching?” He usually had an accent I no-one understood.. So we mark these old teachers a lot. They were veterans. They knew how to read and write or they had a degree before they got a teaching job. Being surrounded by kids like us, we just say, “who are these guys?” and then we couldn’t understand what he said, and the word phrases or words are different. There are even lower ranking officers who couldn’t even read, and they have this military don’t like villages to put the value. They’re usually here without their wives and family, and if they’re here long enough they marry someone much younger and don’t talk to each other for their entire lives. So those are the typical stories.
Angus
Tragic, disjointed lives, I guess.
Nadia
You know, somehow it became interesting. The ‘military village culture’ also became part of the nostalgic scene that people will miss, because they’re all gone. So this old type of village has become a political and cultural landscape where people have coffee and take Instagram photos.
Angus
Interesting. I can’t think of an equivalent anywhere in here. No, the closest equivalent I can think of anywhere near where I am is… this is maybe something to do with being an island nation… so just on the other side of the river that my hometown Dundee is on, there are large blocks of concrete on the beach, and they’ve probably been left there because of their historical mark on the landscape. They’re anti-tank defences from World War II, when we thought that there might be a Nazi German landing somewhere on the east coast. But there’s not really a sad figure attached with them and there’s nothing hip about them. They’re more just sort of geology now.
Nadia
They can look good if you use the right filter.
Angus
Totally. Sit my girlfriend on the right one and get the right angle. Definitely.
Nadia
A girl and the filter and everything will look Instagrammable.
Angus
Absolutely. Glad we agree. Okay, so we’ve talked about the army man. Next one, the lower classes. So we have actually talked about them a lot in the episode, but as I did mention earlier, the majority of the Taipei people that Mr Pai chooses to zoom in on are either wealthy in the present or they’ve just got sort of the after effects of being wealthy. They’ve got the social skills and symbols and so on. But there are some less wealthy figures in the book – people who were just not so wealthy on the mainland. They are there, they’re just outnumbered. Is there anything we can say we haven’t said already about class and wealth and hierarchy in the book?
Nadia
They might not be outnumbered but they are just in the background. They’re just not visible.
Angus
Right. They’re not the main characters in the stories.
Nadia
So if you pay attention, usually the driver, the worker, the maid, they are the lower class people. I’m trying to think about how they came here. Usually when mainlanders came here, they brought their own maids. Sometimes, if they’re higher ranking officers, it is usually their subordinates who don’t have a family, and they just offer him a place to sleep. It’s usually the driver.
Angus
Yeah, there was a Chinese word which is preserved in the English translation, which I hadn’t come across before living in China, but it’s all over this book. I need to remind myself what it was. It’s like a sort of a military underling, sort of, just like what you were describing. Fukuan?
Nadia
Fuguan. Vice officer.
Angus
Yeah, the translators preserved that one. A K-word. Maybe it should begin with a G.
Nadia
Yeah, that’s weird. I don’t know why. It’s usually his second – how do you call it?
Angus
Second in command? I think if I was a translator, I would make the decision to go for those spellings because it’s Taiwanese – it marks it as Taiwanese literature and translation. A little bit like if you’re reading Chinese and Taiwanese names in English, the Wade-Giles spellings will be a big clue, or the little hyphen between the names, those are the clues the person is from Taiwan. So it’s got an advantage in that sense, but the disadvantage is the spellings don’t match.
Nadia
The hyphen.. I lost the hyphen in my name in New York. They don’t accept hyphens.
Angus
All right, the computer system.
Nadia
But I’ll say it’s okay. Take it away. It’s really not part of my name, the hyphen.
Angus
And the other one is the apostrophe. So I’m looking… I’m on page 290, which has a T’ang. I guess it’s in ‘Tang Dynasty’. In fact, I remember this as a kid coming across things describing China, and I go, what’s that ‘T’ang’? T’ang? Why is there a gap there between the T and the A? I still don’t understand why.
Nadia
I don’t either. Actually, I wouldn’t be able to pronounce it if I hadn’t known the actual words. So I think the translation here is quite academic. They follow this very strict rule of academic translation.
Angus
Yep. The English edition is by Columbia University Press. It’s an Academic Press. There are some really good opening and end matter essays or commentaries, but you can kind of tell the intended reader is someone with some foreknowledge, some action, some grounding, and not just like someone who knows Taiwan, but someone who knows literary studies as well. It’s for that sort of reader, which is probably fine for our listeners of the show, because they’re all very educated, erudite individuals.
Nadia
I just realised it’s published by Columbia. I’m gonna start making comments now because it’s my alma mater.
Angus
I was upset. It was the episode with Paul French and I, and we were talking about the Lin Yutang story in old saints and sinners colonial Shanghai, and I was making jokes because my girlfriend had just finished her PhD in St Andrews, which is a weird place in Scotland because it’s mostly populated by wealthy English and American and international students. So I was making poking fun at it, calling it, you know, the local treaty port, colonial holding, English holding in Scotland, and he said, “you can’t make fun of St. Andrews, they’ve got a Chinese department in the university that we need to be…”
Yes, that’s true. But you can’t stop me. Right?
Nadia
Yeah. I made so many jokes when I was on campus. Once we were talking shit in Chinese and I saw a smiling white guy walking by, and you know, and he’s wearing a Peking University t-shirt. It’s a very dangerous place to be.
Angus
I was gonna say the guy who’s in charge of that department, Gregory Lee, I wouldn’t want to rub him the wrong way. I just assume because he’s over a certain age he can’t possibly be listening, but yeah, a little bit like with the beida t-shirt, sometimes these are bad choices.
Nadia
Right? Yeah.
Did you read any other stories in Taipei People or any of his words?
Angus
I read the whole book once. I reread Winter Nights and Taipan Chin for this episode, and I believe I reread at least one of the essays, but other Pai Hsien-yung… no. I did, in my episode on Qiu Miaojin, get a bit of an education on Crystal Boys from my guest Conor Stuart. For whatever reason, it arose in conversation, and because I think Crystal Boys has a sort of a parallel story in Taipei People. Yes, it came up because we were talking about the park by chance. I visited the park Crystal Boys’ is set in when I was visiting Taipei, and we talked a little.
Nadia
Is it 新公园?
Angus
I think so. I think it has a name, in numbers.
Nadia
Yeah, 228. I’m the old Taipei person because I still call it ‘New Park’. That was the old name. Yeah, so there are a couple of famous gay sites in and around this neighbourhood that the park – 228, a memorial park – is in. The red building, the Honglou, and Ximending. There used to be a McDonald’s. They were always dating younger boys. So I think this place has become iconic because of his writing, especially Crystal Boys.
Angus
Yeah, it’s a city that has a writer who writes about real places you can visit. Not every writer does that.
Nadia
It’s surprising that they’re still here.
Angus
The places are still here. Mr Pai is still with us as well. Right?
Nadia
He’s still here. Yeah. I want to ask you, because some of the stories are very… heavy on references to ancient Chinese text. What’s your reading experience?
Angus
Yeah. Well, you’ve read the English translation and the original. Those references you’re referring to – have a lot of them been preserved or have any of them just been glossed over?
Nadia
I think they did the best job to preserve the references but some of what I am curious about is – how did you read Waking from a Dream?
Angus
So to answer your original question about ancient and medieval Chinese text, it’s pretty slim. I’ve read two of the classics and a little bit of Journey to the West, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Outlaws of the Marsh, and Three Kingdoms. I’ve read one of the translations of The Dream of the Red Chamber and I could feel some of that energy in some of the stories, maybe Wandering in the Garden. There’s things there that reminded me of The Dream of the Red Chamber, but yeah, I know there’s a song from a quite old Chinese opera.
Friend of the podcast Dylan Levi King sent me a message about it on Twitter, telling me a few things, because I did a bonus episode of the show, which is up on Patreon – listeners take note! He pointed out where I was not talking knowledgeably about the context of the use of that song in the story, because I know nothing. The short answer is I’m pretty ignorant of this stuff!
But the recurring theme – in not just Chinese literature in general, but I think it’s strong and Chinese lit – the confusion or blurring of dreams and reality: what is life, this life that we’re walking through? I felt that strongly in her story, and obviously it’s not hard to feel it, because she’s flicking between the past and the present. So specific references not so much, but allusions to those other literary themes… Sure, yeah.
As for allusions to things in history, I think I caught quite a lot. But the problem with asking someone “what references did you catch” is that they can only tell you the ones they caught. If they didn’t see it, they can’t measure it. You know?
Nadia
Sometimes if you miss the reference, you don’t know what the story is about. I think that’s especially true for Wandering the Garden, Waking from a Dream. You know, this is a reference taken from a Chinese opera, but there are different types of Chinese opera. ‘Kun’ is considered a higher art – it’s more difficult and fewer people have access to it. It’s an art as opposed to street art. Some of the opera in history is very plain language and the stories are very easy to understand, but Kun is for someone like Mr. Pai, only he can understand and appreciate it. Most people just doze off for the whole show. So he is known for being a Kun opera lover, and that differentiates him. So he used a lot of Kun references and I was forced to learn some of them. Which is very… for me, it’s very ‘sleeping beauty’. Very slow, super slow. But people who love it, love it.
Angus
Yes. Got it.
Nadia
I think the references of Kun opera repeatedly appear in his stories, and it really represents his class – I shouldn’t say class, but the status that he represents. Because they go into a theatre watching an opera that’s only accessible for like 200 people – it is a privilege. So understanding such references as a reader also means something like: you’re not even educated, but you have the luxury to know and understand such a dedicated performing art. For me, you know, I’m just watching MTV.
Angus
Yeah, something that is adjacent to that thing you were describing. So me, a foreigner, not grounded in the nuances of Chinese culture, missing these things, despite the translation of the work.
I think there’s another thing a reader of translated lit – and I think I’m definitely one of those these days – can miss out on: our recurring themes in an author’s work, like you were just describing. So I’ll give you an example that’s close to my interest as a reader.
I love Chinese sci-fi and I’ve read not close to all of it yet, because there’s some Liu Cixin books in English that I’ve not read yet, but I’m really quite well versed in not Chinese sci-fi per se, but Chinese science fiction in English translation – which means there’s a lot of pieces that I missed because it’s not available for me because my Chinese is not good enough to read a page of a book, nevermind the book. So there’s lots of authors who’ve only got one novel or zero novels and only short stories available in English.
So just picking one easy example, Hao Jingfang is most famous for Folding Beijing, which is like a ‘novelette’ – not even really long enough to be a novella. It’s like a quite long-form short story. I read that, translated by Ken Liu, and then one of her sci-fi novels, which is available in English, Vagabonds. But she has a lot of other – or at least some other – books out there which have not been translated to English yet. There’s one which you can get in Japanese – linking back to what we were saying earlier – and possibly other languages, but certainly not English, which is a literary fiction novel. So I guess it’s realist, or at least not clearly in any genre. It is called Born in 1984. That’s the Chinese name. That’s her literary part of her persona, as a literary writer.
Some writers are like that. Famously, there’s a guy, a Scottish author, funnily enough, who I always bring up: Iain Banks, who had a split personality as a writer. He had these literary realist works, which were maybe a third of his output, or half, and then the rest was really nerdy space operas. If you were reading both, you might see common themes or not, but I’m sure in Hao Jingfang you’d see common themes because her science fiction writing doesn’t feel like it’s strictly for a genre. It has a sort of literary grounding, but you’re not going to see what those common themes are, if you’re me, because you’re only reading a tiny snippet.
Just like with Mr. Pai here. Even if I was a master of Chinese authors, I couldn’t know from reading this one book the full significance of this author here because I don’t have access to a fuller picture of his books, depending on whether they are available in English and whether they’re on bookshelves here.
Nadia
I think this is leading to our next question.
Remember, I mentioned the debate between the native Taiwanese culture and the classy Chinese culture. So Kun opera is considered a very refined culture, and it was generally believed that how we use opera was a more vulgar or street art style. So if you know, you’d go to a more expensive or higher-end theatre to watch Kun, which is considered more refined, higher class.
There was, I believe in the 80s, a debate between the nativist Taiwanese literature and that ‘high culture’. They’ve been debating since the 70s, and still have no answer to it. We don’t have to rush to have a conclusion tonight. But I just wanted to bring this up, if anyone springs up asking “what is Taiwanese literature” again, you’ll be like, “Yo, I don’t know. No one does.”
They’ve been talking about this. So the nativists, they criticise outsiders. They say “they colonised us; they’re the people with privilege. They use a colonial language that’s Chinese.” But what’s interesting and probably sad is that the people who are debating, even if they represent native literature, they couldn’t speak it. They couldn’t do this debate in full Taiwanese language. I couldn’t.
We’ve all lost the original dialects. So did I. I was being criticised for using mixed languages, because I have basic native language and my Chinese writing is not Chinese enough. I am trilingual – I use a lot of not-English words, but some grammatically Western language, and I use a lot of Japanese and Chinese words, which I think I shouldn’t be wrong because language is a living thing, and this is how we speak.
Now, if I am writing about myself, it should be okay to mix languages. You can see in Taipei People that the mixed use of languages is also happening there, and of course you have to read the original to know. I don’t know if any translator is able to present that in the translated version. But I think he captured that. He does capture that, even if they’re all from the mainland. But you know, China is a huge country, and these people are coming from different social classes of different provinces and villages. So they speak different languages.
Angus
Right. I noticed there were some characters who were signalled in the translation as maybe being provincial or less wealthy. There was a folksy style to the English, and I kind of got the sense it was because if you end up a folksy style, it has to be pinned to some geographic place. Among most translators, and as a reader, I’ve heard it said and generally agreed, that’s just a huge nono. If you try and represent I don’t know, a Beijinger by having him speaking like cockney style English it is just going to be cringe-worthy and awful, but I thought actually in this translation, it wasn’t too bad – a little weird here and there, but maybe the only good example I’ve seen it.
For a couple of characters who were servants, I got the feeling that their version of English being used was like African Americans from the American South. There are a million ways you could say pick apart that and call it politically incorrect, but at least in terms of pure literary aesthetics, it didn’t read too weirdly. It worked. Surprisingly.
I thought I was itching to launch into another screen about Scotland and not being able to speak one’s home tongue… I’d like to.. but we’ve been going for a while now and know I should be having my dinner. So maybe we can save that for another time. Yeah, let’s get on to the miscellaneous section.
Now. First miscellaneous question, if you can suggest a Chinese or Taiwanese word of the day, for this book, or for any of the stories in this book, is there any you would go for?
Nadia
I will go for ‘dream’. Dream in Mandarin Chinese is 夢 (meng). In Taiwanese, it’s the same word, pronounced as ‘mang’.
Angus
We might have done that word for another episode, but it’s one of my favourite characters… possibly because it was drilled into my brain, by all the 中国梦posters in Zhejiang where I was living.
Nadia
Ohh, shit!
Angus
…But that doesn’t stop it from being a nice character.
Nadia
But you can write it in traditional character.
Angus
There we go. That’s how we’ll do it. Stick it to the man.
[Ed: or perhaps, stick it to the mang]
Nadia
So your next question is “if Taipei People was a drink”?
Angus
Yes, that’s exactly right.
Nadia
How did you come up with this question!?
Angus
Uh, laziness!
Nadia
So it’s the green plum season in May in Taiwan. All my hipster friends just started Instagramming their homemade plum wine photos. Basically, if you have an excessive amount of fresh green plums, you wash them and soak them in vodka or gin. Then you wait until you can’t wait. It’s already alcohol so you can actually drink it anytime, but it’s better to soak it for three months. You should add sugar so it won’t go bad. You know, in three months, you can enjoy green plum wine. I just learned about this from my sister. Now she’s working from home, and she has a plot of a jar of plum wine next to her where the cameras cannot see. She’s working from home with a bottle of wine.
Angus
I have a little sister who’s 14. So I’m kind of planning ahead… in six years, when I’m 34, when I need an insight on what all the hipsters are doing. Presumably ‘hipsters’ will have been replaced by something else by then, but that’s going to be my source of insight to know what I should be doing to stay young.
Nadia
I’m sure if the hipster culture in the future belongs to the old people – because there are just so so many of us, right? The future is old.
Angus
Yeah, I’ll be like one of the Taipei People. In 2040 I’ll be looking back and doing whatever people were doing in 2010.
Last miscellaneous question: are you working on anything just now? Are there any works, websites, or creations to which we should point the listeners?
Nadia
Websites that we post on the page?
Angus
Yeah, I’ll put it in the show notes for listeners like the episodes.
Nadia
I’m writing movie scripts. I mentioned before, a movie script of how the Republican Chinese government secretly moved millions of kilos of gold to Taiwan in 1949. This year I’m doing an experiment with an independent publisher by publishing my novels in an electronic first edition. I have this inspiration from the music industry, where the release digital singles just to try out the electronic release itself is the advertisement. So I thought, “you know, we should do this and just publish a book”, and since now people are stuck where they are, it’s not very easy to buy a physical book, so let’s go to electronic books first.
I serialised stories on different subjects. So, so far, I am working on this third one. The first one is Freezing Eggs, you know, like women, female. The second one is Polyamorous, a story about a polyamorous community which I know in New York. Oh, they’re in San Francisco and New York. And the third one, which is due in a few days – I hope I can get it – it’s about ‘difference’. It’s about a man marrying a woman he met on a social dating app, with a 40 year age difference. These are all true stories. Right. So these are my stuff.
Angus
Just for the listeners who are not going to check the show notes: what is the web address? We should direct them to?
Nadia
The web address is office-sola.com.
[Note from Angus: This site was down when I edited this transcript in late March 2023]
Angus
That is all my miscellaneous questions, but it’s a cheat because there is actually one more miscellaneous question. Two more actually. If listeners want more like Taipei People, where would you direct them?
I know that I might be throwing a spanner in your works here just to mention – it doesn’t have to be anything from Taiwanese lit, China, Chinese lit… this could be anything really.
Nadia
Actually, I have a favourite Taiwanese author, who is usually considered a counterpart of Mr Pai – Huang Chun-ming. He has many famous works but one of the most famous stories, which also made into movies, is called The Taste of an Apple. So I think he represents the natives – the native side at the same period of time as Taipei People.
The Taste of an Apple is a story of a guy who got hit by American men. But you know, eventually the American men send apples to apologise, and that was the first time he tasted an apple, so he felt like he’d been hit by a car.
So his stories always have very dark humour, and he’s very warm and funny. He has many, many stories like that. Like it’s sad, but it’s the same time you feel a lot of warmth. His stories are full of lower-class people. You can be a nice counterpart, like after reading Taipei People, maybe the Taste of an Apple. That’s my recommendation. And so it can sort of like you know, another piece of a puzzle, you can have probably a better fuller image of what Taiwan looked like in the 70s.
Angus
It’s just occurred to me what my recommendation would be here. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this. It’s a possible influence on this book, if you like little snapshot stories…
Nadia
Oh, Dubliners.
Angus
– Dubliners – you got it before I could say it. Yeah. If listeners don’t know what Dubliners is, they might recall the episode I had with Conor Stewart, our first Irish guest, I think (if you don’t count Yan Ge, who lived in Ireland for a while and I think possibly has an Irish husband), then he would be our first Irish guest. He mentioned the influence of James Joyce on Taiwanese lit, and I was not sure how one would measure that, but this book is one example… if listeners don’t know… of lots of short stories about various individual characters, and what links them is they’re all in Dublin. And I can’t say more than that, because I haven’t read it.
Nadia
No one finishes it. I mean, I started and I don’t know why I stopped, but it’s ok.
Angus
Yeah, I wish I could say more, but I can’t. Next question. What are you reading just now? If anything?
Nadia
I was reading something called the European Union law.
Angus
Oh, that’s fun. Doesn’t apply to me anymore!
Nadia
I know. I had to finish all the prerequisites before school starts. My life is miserable right now. I just realised that there are 27 member states. They all have different law!. And the UK is not one of them!
Angus
Not anymore!
Nadia
Not anymore, no.
Angus
Something I almost mentioned… when we’re talking about the burden of being from a country with a lot of history, a lot of people, a lot of land…
As a European, you know… most European countries are small, but there is perhaps the burden of some kind of collective identity. But you know, you could do what the English electorate did and drag the UK out of that collective identity… but yet you’re haunted by it. There’s no escape, because you can’t build a big rocket on the island and move it somewhere else. Anyway, I will stop whining. This is a Chinese lit podcast, not a British podcast.
Nadia
I didn’t expect this. I didn’t know you were Scottish, but the Scottish identity is something that we can probably explore a little more. This comparative identity crisis.
Angus
My next guest is Daryl Sterk. I don’t know if he’s Canadian, or American. But yeah, I’ll bombard the poor guy with my Scottishness even more.
Nadia
Maybe he is French-Canadian. I mean, we all have another side…
Angus
If he’s Canadian… a lot of the white Canadians who aren’t French in their roots are often Scottish. So he might want to hear it.
What was I gonna say? Yeah, not spotting ny name is Scottish…
So we’re talking about recognizing Taiwanese-ness in the hyphens and stuff and the Wade-Giles spelling and missing certain things just by virtue of your background. I’m not trying to be mean and nasty here, but if someone was from the Anglosphere, and they saw the name ‘Angus’, they’d say “your name must be fake”. It’s cartoonishly Scottish. Angus is like the most Scottish male name. Just about the only way you could make me more Scottish is if you put a ‘Mc’ or a ‘Mac’ in front of my surname. ‘McStewart’!
I would assume – wrongly – that anyone who sees the name Angus would know, but of course that’s completely false. Most – or a lot – Chinese friends, when they type my name, it becomes ‘Augus’, because they associate my name with ‘August’, not ancient Celtic traditions.
Nadia
Isn’t Scottishness too much for Chinese people?
Angus
Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s a tiny country. It’s stupid for me to expect everyone in the world to know it.
Nadia
But a lot of the Scottish law system is very special – one of a kind. It makes common law and civil law so much trouble. I don’t know why you want to do it!
Angus
Because it’s a little bit like the Wade-Giles in Taiwan – it makes us different from the English! That’s got to be it. I remember being introduced to that doing… I think it was in debating club in school. There was a debate as to whether Scotland should keep having a different jury system from England. And the debate begins with the principles of the different systems and then ends up in ‘why did we do this’? ‘What’s the point of being different?’ But we all know it’s because we don’t want to be English, even though we’re not as different as we think we are.
Nadia
We don’t exist the second we stop fighting.
Angus
There you go. Good metaphor for life.
Nadia
It serves as a good closing line.
Angus
I think so. Yeah. So let’s keep on fighting listeners. You guys keep on fighting too, lest you blink out of existence.
Nadia
You too. Must be starving.
Angus
I am yeah, I probably will blink out of existence if I don’t say thank you and farewell.
// Interview Ends //
[music plays]
Angus
All right, we’ve reached the end of the show. Now, there’s no particularly different plugs for me to do this time around compared to the previous past few times, so I’ll try and keep it quick. Although don’t I always say that?
So, social media. Let’s do that first. So Twitter is @anguslikeswords. That’s just my own personal one. But I tweet mostly about Chinese lit on the show, and the show has an Instagram, @trchfic. Good place to stay up-to-date, or to get in touch with feedback. A great place to talk to other fans of the show is Discord. There’s a link to that in the show notes.
To support the show tangibly, which means with your hard-earned renminbi or USD or GBP or to dole DD. You can go to patreon.com/trchfic. There’s some absolutely marvellous delights waiting there for you, including a bonus episode on this book, which I alluded to during my conversation with Nadia. That’s up there, so you can hear my very uninformed ramblings about Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream and the other stories in the book. You can see just how much my thoughts changed between then and this episode. Hopefully you’ll see an improvement.
But yeah, that’s all I have to say. So of course, there’s one thing left and that is the best thing you can do for the show – and that is to spread the word. So tell your teacher, tell your friends, tell your fukuan, or should it be fuguan? Who knows!? I do. It should be fuguan. But you know, Wade-Giles still has powerful influence in certain parts of the world. So there you go. Until we can deal with that. 再见!
The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast 