RICHARD WING TO NG

This essay addresses the problem of cultural rupture and the reconstruction of a "common language" in the late exile literature of Chinese writer Tao Jingsun. After fleeing the political terror of Taiwan for postwar Japan, Tao faced the collapse of the Sino-Japanese intellectual foundation and the complex legacy of his own historical entanglement with Japanese imperialism. This essay reads Tao’s final Japanese writings—specifically his posthumous collection Testament to Japan—by examining his literary practice as the "performance of an exile." This performance operates through a strict non-belonging stance, a fluid oscillation between solemn classical Chinese vocabulary and mundane everyday language, and a calculated use of humor and satire. By employing a strategic "nostalgia for the Meiji era" not as imperial regression but as a critical apparatus, Tao attempts to revive the dialogic openness that preceded Japan's imperial expansion. By showing how Tao shifts the focus from macro-political grand narratives to the micro-ethics of daily life and interpersonal communication in his final fiction, this essay aims to shed light on the tactics of literary intervention by individuals who exist between rigid national identities, thereby providing insight into how a shared cultural vocabulary can be recreated in the aftermath of historical trauma.

This article utilizes the distinction of orality and literacy in order to explore notions concerning the uses of language and identity formation in Three Times (2005), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien and screenwritten by Chu Tʽien-wen. In dialogue with the concepts of Sinophone cinema and Western theories about phone and orality, the article proposes that Three Times can be read as a representation of Taiwan history that challenges the historiography of formal or official written records. Drawing on historical events in Taiwan and how they show difference and distance from those in mainland China, the article further demonstrates how the cultural identities of Taiwanese can be shown through their uses of different oral languages and voices in specific occasions. Finally, the present article argues that Three Time demonstrates a process of manifestation of cultural identities in different personal situations, thereby constructing what Yi-Fu Tuan calls a “sense of place.” It shows the importance of focusing on the changes, however trivial and personal, when studying both cultural texts and contexts, because only in so doing can we locate the cultural identities of individuals without falling into the trap by different sorts of essentialism.

This paper examines Xiao Qian (1910-1999)’s novel “Shen Shang” (1935), which was considered as an “anti-Christian fiction” in most of the previous studies, by focusing on the elements related to self, particularly love elements. “Shen Shang” is a story about the love of a Christian and a non-believer that dooms to fail. The article revisits the historical background concerning the influences of the concept of unity of body and spirit on China in the 1930s, Xiao Qian’s reviews on novels written by Zhang Jinyi (1909-1959), editor of important literary journals including Literary Quarterly, and Xiao’s past love experience at university. It provides an in-depth understanding of Xiao Qian’s vision of love and its relation to “Shen Shang.” The narrative of “Shen Shang” is not meant to function as merely an “anti-Christian fiction,” but more a reflection on the star-crossed lovers with focus on their convicting personal characters and living environments. More important, in Xiao’s fiction, the attitude toward the Christian Church should be distinguished from that toward Christian belief. The paper then reads “Shen Shang” as an attempt to take a balance of novel’s social functions and lyrical representation of self, with the background how Xiao Qian was trying to step in the literary field of Shanghai and how he was inherited from and tried to overcome the writing subjects of his Beijing School predecessors such as Yang Zhensheng (1890-1956).

This essay addresses the problem of memory and forgetting in Chu Tien-hsin’s novella “The Old Capital.” In “The Old Capital,” the heroine called “you” is a second-generation mainlander in Taiwan. With the transition of power from mainlander government to inlander government, the heroine has to face the problem of erasure of memory due to the political manipulation in the name of “localization” by the inlander government. This essay reads the heroine's status of existence illustrated in “The Old Capital” by using the critique of place-basedness, a key concept in Sinophone studies. Place-basedness refers to the complex but unique history of Taiwan as a place that allows pluralistic imagination of its inhabitants. By showing both the cultural and political sides of the heroine's peculiar status of existence in Taipei, which is as a minor within the periphery of the greater China, this essay aims to shed light on the tactics of historical narrative of individuals who cannot be identified by relatively stable concepts based on the discourse of “Chineseness,” such as nationalism and languages, thereby providing insight, namely tactics of political intervention of memory and identity formation, into understanding of minor Sinophone literatures.