Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan: Becoming Sinophone

What can literature tell us about the ways “mainlander” (waishengren) writers articulated their changing relationships to both KMT ideology and Taiwanese nationalism? This is one of the fascinating questions posed by Phyllis Yu-ting Huang's Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan. Huang's book is a chronological study of selected works by second-generation mainlander writers, tracing their gradual, but rarely complete, disengagement from pro-unification KMT discourse after the end of martial law and the rise of “Taiwan consciousness” (Taiwan yishi). These political and cultural movements, which shifted the center of Taiwanese politics and culture to the nonmainlander populations of Taiwan, including the Hoklo, Hakka, and Indigenous peoples, radically shifted the ways mainlanders understood their relationships to nation and culture in the PRC and Taiwan. The increasing complexity of the relationship between “mainlanders” and the mainland as portrayed in literature is a process Huang characterizes in her subtitle as “becoming Sinophone.”Many of the chapters discuss texts situated in juancun, or the military dependents’ villages that mainlanders moved to and in which many continued to live until the juancun were largely demolished beginning in the 1990s. Chapter 1 examines Chu Tian-hsin's Everlasting (1982) and Yuan Chiung-chiung's This Love, This Life (1988), novels set in juancun that both “replicate and reflect” KMT ideology (37). At the same time, Huang writes, the tensions between mainlanders and Taiwanese in these narratives are “part of Taiwan's history” and thus should be considered a form of xiangtu, or native literature. Chapter 2 examines two works published after the lifting of martial law in 1987—Su Wei-chen's Leaving Tongfang (1990) and Chu Tien-hsin's “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (1992)—that illustrate the displacement of mainlander's “affective cultural belonging” (78) from China to the juancun themselves. Chapter 3 explores works published in the year 2000 that take “postmodern” approaches to the depiction of mainlander life: Hao Yu-hsiang's The Inn and Lo Yi-chin's The Moon Clan. These works depart from the juancun as the seat of mainlander identity and, in Huang's reading, attempt to position mainlander narratives within a broader Taiwanese framework. Chapter 4 focuses entirely on Wang Wei-chung's popular 2008 play The Village, which was a critical failure but a popular success and which attempted to situated the juancun itself as an explicitly Taiwanese (rather than purely mainlander) phenomenon. The book concludes with chapter 5 and a reading of Chiang Hsiao-yun's Peach Blossom Well (2011).This book's strict adherence to chronology underscores its commitment to reading these texts as reflections of lived circumstances which coincide with an ever-thinning thread connecting mainlanders—at least those discussed in this book—to the mainland. In this sense, although the book's title references representations of mainlanders, it would be just as accurate to refer to it as addressing literature by mainlanders. Despite referring to mainlander identity as a “literary construct,” Huang frequently refers to the autobiographical nature of the works discussed, even when those works resort to techniques that seem designed to frustrate a transparent realist reading. For example, in Hao Yu-hsiang's The Inn, the narrator describes her attempts to get to know her estranged father, both through memory and also through the act of creation: “Therefore, I deliberately misrecognized my father. . . . His identity and his existence are meaningful only through my language” (92). Huang takes the father figure in The Inn to be a “symbolic representation of ‘China’” that the narrator experiences as a kind of “ambivalent longing” (93). But clearly, at stake in these works is not merely literature as a reflection of or analogy to lived experience, but rather the role of the form and language of literature in such processes as signification and (mis)recognition. For instance, what does Huang make of the many fascinating instances of intertextuality that appear in these works? Why does Chu Tien-hsin begin “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” with a reference to Zhang Ailing, considered one of the most prominent writers of Sinophone literature? And should we understand the “magical realism” (70) of Leaving Tongfang in relation to the Latin American tradition, and thus as an attempt by the author to articulate a relationship to the mainland through an alternative literary discourse? These questions point to a broader issue: What is the role of mainland literature in the writing of mainlander literature? Huang cites many references to so-called Classical Chinese texts in the works discussed, but she does not explain how we should understand them in the context of the story she tells. Attention to these questions and others like them would have given readers a better sense of the function of literature itself in Huang's narrative. But given its focus on identity, Huang's book should be relevant not just to literary scholars but to historians, sociologists, and political scientists interested in mainlanders’ articulations of their complex relationships to Taiwan and the PRC since 1949.