The Prototype of Idealized Taiwanese Americans and Assemblage of Technological Prostheses—An Example in Julie Wu’s The Third Son

Julie Wu's The Third Son (2013) embodies elements of postcolonial technoscience, in which a specific prototype of idealized Taiwanese Americans is mainly associated with a linear vision of modernist progress.The Taiwanese protagonist, Saburo, struggles to become a Taiwanese American immigrant.Yet, some Taiwanese elements with Japanese legacy, intermediated through long-distance Taiwanese cultural nationalism in the postwar era, remain untamed and even strengthened in this transnational journey of biopolitics.Technological prostheses are assembled in his mindset and body.Different kinds of capital acquired by Saburo in the American field are internalized into his habitus and serve as his guidelines, such as technological rationality, criteria of being a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and experiences in a space exploration project and a geophysical research team.Saburo successfully transforms into a Taiwanese American with a modern scientific temperament.However, elements of Southern Min songs, romanizations of Southern Min, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese, the overseas version of the February 28th Incident, Taiwan nativeness, and the Japanese cultural layer are tenaciously appropriated and strategically deployed by Julie Wu, a second-generation Taiwanese American English-language writer, as ways to demonstrate the distinction of Taiwaneseness.As such, Julie Wu manages to write back against the rules of art in the English literary field and distances herself and her work from the genre of Chinese American or Asian American writing.Through this position-taking, Julie Wu and The Third Son have constructed a distinction of the Taiwanese American literary genre in the American literary field.This essay deals with the following questions.Regarding the technological prostheses assembled in Saburo, what kind of idealized Taiwanese American identification and ethnic distinction is embedded in The Third Son?In terms of long-distance cultural nationalism, how are Taiwan's nativist literary elements and historical elements appropriated in this work?Considering the translated Chinese version Sanlang (2015) in terms of cultural translation, how could Taiwanese elements in this English work be deployed as a postcolonial writing back strategy in the English-language literary field in the US?