by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Book Cover
ONLINE CHINESE NATIONALISTS, a number of whom see themselves as on the left, are having a moment about Taiwan Travelogue. Taiwan Travelogue recently made history as the first Mandarin-language novel, as well as the first Taiwanese novel, to win the International Booker Prize.
Much of the anger at Taiwan Travelogue, unsurprisingly, comes from those who have never read the book or engaged with it. Instead, the book is lashed out at on the basis of its subject matter—that the novel is set during the Japanese colonial period and is about the complex relationship between a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese guide, which has romantic undertones.
Taiwan Travelogue never presents this as a relationship between equals, which is in fact the book’s central problematic—this is a relationship between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, this is clearly too much subtlety and nuance for online Chinese nationalists, who have quickly sought to depict the book as whitewashing the Japanese colonial period and being a sexual fantasy by Taiwanese longing for their former colonial oppressors. In this, there is a great deal of misogyny and homophobia directed at the main characters of the book, as well as at author Yang Shuang-zi and translator Lin King.
From this, one can draw several conclusions. For one, online Chinese nationalists are not capable of understanding that the relationship between colonized and colonizer is often one marked with ambiguity, even as there is a clear power dynamic of subjugation. Nor do they understand that Taiwan’s historical trajectory is not the same as that of the Chinese mainland, such that Taiwan has a very different historical relationship to the Japanese colonial past or to other former Japanese colonies, such as Korea.
Indeed, the arrival of the KMT after the Japanese, understood as another set of colonizers, led the Japanese colonial past to be idealized in juxtaposition to KMT rule. One has seen a similar phenomenon in Hong Kong with the idealization of British colonial rule in comparison to the present, even if the British were also not democratic rulers. Author Yang has spoken of her attempt to communicate this colonial nostalgia—it is not for nothing, then, that her text is a deliberately anachronistic one, which the many layers of translation and interpretation present in the Mandarin original and in its English translation by King framing the text a fictive invention that purports to be a historical authentic. To this extent, Yang has spoken of how she hopes the book is able to communicate this differing historical relationship, as well as how it has shaped the worldview of contemporary Taiwanese, to any Chinese readers.
It is not at all surprising, however, that this is too much for online Chinese nationalists, who probably would have reacted strongly to any win by a Taiwanese novel. That the book was about the Japanese colonial period and its ambiguous historical legacies, rather than a wholehearted condemnation, done through a lesbian yuri novel, simply adds salt to the wound. But this reflects the fundamentally Manichaean worldview of such nationalists, for whom history is only seen in black-and-white terms. Insofar as the novel explores lesbian desire and alternative histories, one observes how Chinese nationalism today coagulates around the notion of “One China” with a uniform history, as well as centered in patriarchal blood-and-soil nationalism. It proves remarkable that a significant number of these Chinese nationalists somehow consider themselves to be leftists, even as leftism is for them clearly a cipher for Chinese nationalism.