"Death in a Cornfield" and Other Stories from Contemporary Taiwan (review)

536 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 disciplinary range of texts, but only for a single cultural tradition. There are also multivolume anthologies, including the excellent and widely used Columbia University Press series, Sources ofIndian Tradition, Sources ofChinese Tradition, and Sources ofJapanese Tradition. But they are too specialized and contain too much material to be used in introductory general studies courses. Perhaps the indispensable guide to choice and use of classical Asian texts is A Guide to Oriental Classics, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Ainslie Embree, third edition, edited by Amy Vladeck Heinrich (Columbia University Press, 1989). John M. Koller Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Bi Ching-Hsi Perng and Chiu-kuei Wang, editors. "Death in a Cornfield" and Other Storiesfrom Contemporary Taiwan. Introduction by David Der-wei Wang. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994. xv, 236 pp. Paperback $12.95. Twelve of this anthology's thirteen stories date from the 1980s rather than the 1990s. This may be a blessing in disguise, for Hua-ling Nieh has recently noted her disappointment with the overall quality ofliterature from either side ofthe Taiwan Strait in the past few years, suggesting that these often whimsical writings tend to pale in comparison with their more promising forebears of the 1980s. Indeed , the haphazard diary narration of Huang Fan's "Tung-p'u Street" (1991) bogs down in minutiae, while his two earlier stories in the anthology conjure forth memorable social tableaux, especially the bittersweet portrait of a nouveau riche tycoon in "Everybody Needs Ch'in Te-fu" (1980). Whatever one may think about the 1990s in cultural terms, the relative prosperity and peace of this period contrast vividly with harrowing episodes ofmodern Chinese history such as the Cultural Revolution or the handling ofopposition to the early consolidation of Kuomintang rule in Taiwan. The severe human toll taken by past political crackdowns on both sides of the Taiwan Straits vividly emerges in two stories of 1984 with overtones of detective fiction, Liu Ta-jen's© 1995 by University "Azaleas Wept Blood" and Ch'en Ying-chen's "Mountain Path." In both stories, ofHawai'i Pressthe inquisitive protagonist sifts for clues to explain the present-day psychological and physical debility of an enigmatic old female relative who had been involved in the intense political struggles ofprevious years—the early 1950s in Ch'en's Tai- Reviews 537 wan and the 1930s and 1960s in Liu's southeastern mainland China. The air of secrecy long maintained by witnesses and government authorities alike gives way as the determined protagonist pieces together the puzzle ofthe woman's historically grounded suffering through a skillful evocation of social and familial pressures. The apparent futility ofthese engagements with revolution lends extra pathos not only to the women in question, but to the experiences of former political prisoners like the Marxist activist Ch'en Ying-chen, one ofwhose fictional characters seems to be addressing the author himselfwhen she writes, "In the 30 years you were not here, people married and banqueted and completely forgot about you and the other men spending their days on that distant and deserted island" (p. 21). Lu Fei-yi's "Life" (1985) and Pao-chen's "Between Two Generations" (1983) take a similar tack in exploring the lives ofrelatives caught up in the vicissitudes ofwar and political chaos during previous decades. Pao-chen's young narrator makes headway at bridging the generation gap separating him from his old Uncle Lai, an old immigrant soldier from Changchun, while Lu Fei-yi's narrator encounters a cavernous cultural divide when returning for the first time in three decades to visit his relatives on the mainland. Lu Fei-yi does a masterful job of mixing comical scenes ofshoddy service and impatience on all sides with touching if awkward re-encounters with long-lost sons and other relatives; they occasionally hint at expectations he cannot satisfy, for he has remarried and raised another family after leaving the mainland for Taiwan. His relatives and their neighbors recount past tribulations like the anti-rightist campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and imprisonment in labor camps with a wry humor that "fluctuates . . . between tears and laughter," which Lu Fei-yi sees as a...