Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan

Introduction. TAIWAN’S LITERATURE OF TRANSGRESSIVE SEXUALITY

introduction TAIWAN’S LITER ATURE OF TR ANSGRESSIVE SEXUALITY 8 fran martin On the first damp, gray day of 1999, an unsuspecting passerby en route to the vegetable market in Taipei’s Gongguan neighborhood, near National Taiwan University, might have been startled to stumble on a street-side drag show in full swing, aswirl with all the fabulous frocks and stellar talents of some of the city’s better-known drag artists. The inquiring pedestrian might then have peered through the window of the adjacent bookstore to see stacks of Chinese paperbacks and lifestyle magazines crammed into a tiny retail area, jostling for space with rainbow flags, buttons, and posters. It was the opening party for Gin Gin’s, Taiwan’s first dedicated gay and lesbian bookstore. Gin Gin’s opening in the final year of the 1990s stands as a fitting culmination of a remarkable decade in which lesbian, gay, and queer sexualities became a major focus of public attention and anxiety in Taiwan’s public sphere.1 It would not be an exaggeration to say that 1 the 1990s marked a radical shift in the way sexuality was thought and spoken about in Taiwan, suggesting the stirrings of a new, public sexual culture unprecedented not only in Taiwan but in any of the Chinese societies of the Asia-Pacific region. The decade witnessed an extraordinary efflorescence of sexual subcultures and of discussion —both hostile and amicable—about homosexuality in public fora such as newspapers, television, radio, and Internet chat rooms, as well as at universities and academic conferences. Over this tenyear period, lesbian and gay social groups emerged in the major cities of Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung and on university campuses island wide; lesbian and gay political activists lobbied the government on issues including HIV/AIDS, sexuality and urban space, and discrimination on the basis of sexual preference; heated opinions on homosexual marriage and gay rights flew back and forth in the local papers and on talk-back radio; and vibrant commercial lesbian and gay cultures emerged around bars, dance clubs, and glossy lifestyle publications. The Mandarin neologisms tongzhi (often used in ways comparable to “lesbian and gay”) and ku’er (a common rendition of “queer”) came into widespread circulation, and tongzhi art exhibitions and film festivals began to appear regularly. At the same time—and as an integral part of the new tongzhi culture—the decade saw the rise to prominence of the literary movement of tongzhi literature (tongzhi wenxue) and its subgenre ku’er literature (ku’er wenxue). This collection presents ten key texts of 1990s tongzhi wenxue for the first time in English translation.2 Like the commentaries that accompany the translations, this Introduction attempts to position tongzhi wenxue in relation to its role within the broader transformation in public discourse on sexualities in 1990s Taiwan. The island of Taiwan, lying off the east coast of southern China, has undergone several successive waves of colonization, and its colonial history has profoundly shaped the contemporary culture that is the background to the stories collected here. Populated by a majority of Han Chinese, who settled on the island from the thirteenth century, joining the island’s Indigenous inhabitants, Taiwan was ceded to introduction 2 Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement at the end of the SinoJapanese War.3 The Japanese administration enforced the use of the Japanese language, the teaching of Japanese culture and history , and Japanese law upon the colonized population, and Taiwanese culture today retains notable vestiges of its Japanese colonial history. In this volume, Wu Jiwen’s story, “Rose Is the Past Tense of Rise,” tells of a family profoundly influenced by its elder members, who grew up under the Japanese administration: Each member of this family, for example, is called by a Japanese rather than a Chinese given name. Taiwan was handed over to Nationalist China in 1945 after Japan’s defeat at the end of the Second World War. Four years later the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist) party fled with the KMT army and its allies to the island after defeat by the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. The KMT governed the Republic of China on Taiwan until 2000. Following its move to Taiwan in 1949, the KMT enforced the use of Mandarin in place of both the local Minnan language (a dialect of Hokkien) and Japanese, taught mainland Chinese culture and history in schools, and...