Inside and Outside the Village Walls: Patriarchal Order and the "Deviant Son" in Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys

After 1949, large numbers of mainland Chinese migrants moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government. The Juancun, the residential communities where they gathered, thus became important social spaces that preserved migrant culture, family order, and identity. This study takes Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys as its research object and examines how patriarchal order within the social space of the Juancun contributes to the construction of homosexual identity. Employing a qualitative research methodology, this study is based on close readings of the father-son relationships of Li Qing, Wang Kuilong, and Fu Wei, while considering the intersection of Juancun culture, Confucian patriarchal order, and sexual modernity in Taiwan. The study finds that the underlying tensions of these different father-son relationships all arise from the challenge that homosexual identity poses to traditional patriarchal expectations of the "son", yielding the figure of the deviant son and thus revealing some social values embodied by a broader cultural context.