By Angus Stewart
Modern Taiwanese literature is flush with homegrown genres and movements, many of which bloomed amid the dying days of a Kuomintang Party dictatorship that had taken hold in mainland China from 1927-1949. All tallies taken, the most prominent of these in English translation is queer literature, boasting gems like Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile. But what else is out there? Taiwanese nature writing is another rich vein, straddling mountains and ocean; fiction and non-fiction. Adjacent to nature writing is Indigenous writing. Adjacent to both is “ecoliterature.”
For English language readers, there is now a convenient route into this microenvironment or at least an intriguing bag of samples. Its title is as direct as it is academic: A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader. The collection was published by Columbia University Press, with government backing from Literature from Taiwan, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, and National Taiwan Normal University, so one can understandably expect some academic jargon and hints of nation-building in the Reader’s paratexts.
The term “ecoliterature” derives from the academic heartlands. Harry Liao—a master’s student in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University—explained to me that while the term is used internationally by scholars dealing in ecocriticism and environmental humanities, its inclusivity and flexibility can serve the ordinary reader by binding together disparate niches. Any genre, say, cyberpunk, can verge into ecolit. In the Reader, sometimes this verging is natural, and at other points, it derives from the likely academic desire to engineer concepts and draw fruitful connections.
When I spoke to literary translator Jenna Tang about a definition of Taiwanese ecoliterature, she cast the net wider, starting in childhood:
Back in high school, we were often asked to read narratives centered on observations of the environment and animals. Works by Indigenous writers, such as Sakinu Ahronglong’s Hunter School, were required reading. Writers and readers who engage with literature in this style may come from a place of wanting to understand our islands—what is it like living in such a climate and how does the environment shape the way our cities develop? How do people situate themselves emotionally within these landscapes? I like that ecoliterature is not only limited to writing about environmental or ecological crises, but that the concept can also be expanded—each habitat in each work can bring us into a new world, and perhaps even an alternative universe, where other kinds of lore might unfold.
The human aspect—anthropos in its environment—in the Reader’s stories is at points an excellent fit for ecoliterature. But again, at certain points one can feel the editors bending the concept into shape. Said editors are three academics: Ian Rowen (Kyushu University), Ti-Han Chang (SOAS), and Darryl Sterk (Lingnan University). Elsewhere, Chang has proposed bringing the term Artificial Indigeneity (provocatively styled as “AI”) into academic discourse, to describe cross-pollination between Taiwan’s speculative fiction and Indigenous writing. She pursues this in the Reader. The latter five of its nine stories draw on sci-fi, fantasy, horror, all marked as worthy of intellectual attention by the umbrella term “speculative fiction” and its highbrow connotations. And it’s fair: these pieces are rich in meaning. In the case of the final two, there is also a touch of the uncanny that one might associate with an M. R. James ghost story or one of Pu Songling’s “tales of the strange.”
In their introduction (and not in the table of contents), the editors posit four rough groupings for Reader’s stories: “Indigenous ecowriting,” “oceanic relationships,” “ecological sci-fi,” and “speculative Indigenous fiction.” Interrogating how the stories sit in each category reveals much about the Reader.
First key point on Indigenous writing: Taiwan’s original inhabitants are various tribes of Austronesian people, a linguistic group spread across the Indo-Pacific. Second key point, so obvious that you might overlook it: Taiwan is an island (more accurately: one large island arrayed with numerous smaller islands). Third point: in the Reader, points one and two matter to those who value Taiwanese identity, or identities.
Speaking to me about this book’s connection with national consciousness and indigeneity, both Liao and literary translator Jenny Caitlyn Lee mentioned the “Out of Taiwan” theory, which draws upon linguistic and archaeological evidence to posit that Taiwan is the origin point of all Austronesian people. Lee offered this satisfyingly sun-drenched summation: “This seafarer origin theory really bakes in the cultural significance of the ocean for many Indigenous Taiwanese tribes.”
Liao also highlighted the ongoing Austronesian Culture Translation Project, in which the Council of Indigenous Peoples has been systematically translating and publishing works on Oceania.
In the Reader, Taiwan’s Indigenous, oceanic, landscape, and animal perspectives blend and blur. For example, the excerpted chapter of Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of the Sky would also fit under “oceanic relationships.” The author is of a tribe who hail from Orchid Island, located off Taiwan’s southeast coast, and the narrator is a fish (of a native species, the giant trevally, no less). Picture a Venn diagram or an archipelago of ink and paper. In a way, that’s the book.
The relevance of the Reader’s “ecological sci-fi” stories to the theme of “ecoliterature” is somewhat uneven, hinging on how broadly one defines “ecological.”
The excerpted chapter of Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes is pure exposition, describing a world where climate change triggered by ozone depletion has forced humanity to live beneath the ocean. It’s a description of the setting used for the remainder of the novel, which is a sensitive cyberpunk exploration of gender and consciousness that accrues some posthuman zing from its undersea setting but ultimately does not depend on or indulge in it. This excerpt could be described fairly as ecoliterature, but to apply the term to The Membranes as a whole would be a reach.
As far as ecology goes, the excerpt from Kao Yi-feng’s Bubble War is concerned with extreme weather and issues around drinking water and sanitation in (sub)urban environments. It is a slice of a novel where the children of a residential community have overthrown the adults, to then find themselves in competition with stray dogs for scarce drinking water. If there is a clear “eco” element to explore here, it is how worryingly frequent extreme weather has destabilised and transformed the human environment, and revealed the authorities’ inability to “weather” the proverbial and literal storm. Disasters, my literary informants reminded me, are a part of Taiwanese life and literature. Lee mentioned that in Taiwan: “extreme phenomena like typhoons, landslides, earthquakes, etc., aren’t so much exceptional disasters as they are normal recurring features of everyday life. When nature regularly reshapes your routines and infrastructures, it can be harder to think of it as any sort of distinct separate force.”
So, in the excerpt from Bubble War, we see the power of speculative fiction—soft sci-fi, in this case—to crank up the crisis or wind the clock forward to explore the human angle of ecology. It’s an aspect generalizable to all of us living through a global climate crisis that will get worse before it gets better, but it’s also specific to conditions on Taiwan.
The Lin Hsin-hui’s short story “Tech Wife” is more human still, despite pointing toward the end of what we might call “human.” It is barely, if at all, ecoliterature. It is set in a future where, under a new reproductive order aimed at countering overpopulation, most adults are assigned a (seemingly lifeless) machine “spouse” that can be used for (highly masturbatory) sex, which produces cuddly toys instead of living children. Here, the link with ecology is the “overpopulation” in the premise, but overpopulation is a notion the story does not really engage with. “Tech Wife” is an effective, unsettling piece. But in this Reader it feels like an intruder, concerned more with man’s alienation from man (and woman) than man’s alienation from ecology.
In the introduction, the editors claim that their chosen trio of “ecological sci-fi” stories “bridge ecowriting with science fiction.” But the bridge is … wobbly: dependent on the humanities’ traditional leeway for stretching the definitions of words into virtuous connections. “Ecological sci-fi” is simply not a viable organising category for these three stories. A pulpier term like “dystopian sci-fi” could bind them, but it still would not align them to the Reader’s stated purpose.
Upon reaching the editors’ category of “speculative Indigenous fiction,” we turn back to questions of identity. Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland” and Chiou Charng-ting’s “Raining Zebra Finches” are arguably the strongest two stories in the book. But are they “Indigenous”? Neither Wu nor Chiou are themselves Indigenous: they are both from Taiwan’s ethnic majority, drawing on Indigenous culture, concerns, and characters in their work. Turning back to the Contents page, one can also notice how ethnicity is structured alongside genre in the Reader.
The first stories are realist, almost documentary, and pay close attention to the lives and habits of real animals in Taiwan’s land and ocean ecosystems. Two are by Indigenous writers, followed by two broadly similar pieces by Han Taiwanese writers, though “I Am a Little Whale” verges into more magical realist territory. Then, in its latter half, the Reader accelerates into genre, proceeding with five pieces of speculative fiction from Han writers.
The translators’ identities deepen the tension. Of the first four Indigenous/realist/nature stories, every translator is a white North American. Of the five latter speculative stories, three were translated by Asian women (the remaining two were both translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich).
This male/American/nature–female/Asian/speculative split may have been shaped by the academic or literary specialisms of each translator, in part because the Reader collated rather than commissioned translations. The longstanding U. S. influence over Taiwan and its institutions may be an atmospheric factor. Ordinary coincidence and chance may also have played a hand. Whether the split exists outside the covers of the Reader is beyond the scope of this review, but it’s worth pondering.
Further to her hopes for expanding diversity in translation, Jenna Tang had thoughts on where more wider-ranging translation and publication might take bring Taiwan’s less-exported writers, exemplifying Kao Yi-feng (the Bubble War author) as worth a closer look, being “an iconic writer who has been able to incorporate sci-fi and cyberpunk into a new novel written in Hakka.”
Identities and binaries aside, what else links and demarcates these stories? What depths can be plumbed?
We can begin by setting aside the human entirely. “Other minds” and “other ways of seeing” haunt and stalk the Reader. Animals, whether wild, stray, extinct, netted, or trapped in laboratories, populate its pages. Some stories consider their perspective, others plunge within. For Harry Liao, this exploration of different epistemologies is “one of the critical concepts to challenge the longstanding Western hegemonic understanding of the world.” One can make the challenge by finding means of “knowledge production” outside scientific empiricism and examination.
Returning to the human, we can look to the multiple presentations of Indigenous perspectives. The editors’ introduction spotlights their significance using grand academic terms like “Indigenous cosmologies.” Grandiose as it may be, the term points to a reality: that generations who have lived in close synthesis with nature can accrue and pass down knowledge across millennia. The knowledge concerns nature or, more to the point, the nature of existing as an organism (and a collective species) on a living planet. The relevant stories in the Reader do explore this.
Stranger minds yet populate the Reader. Alongside the animals and the tribespeople who know them well are machines, gods, spirits: certain things that can take the shapes and languages of humanity but are not, strictly, us. Even the uncanny, “lost,” confused, wise, brutal, innocent worldview of the child factors in at multiple points. Biodiversity isn’t a strictly physical, empirical affair: Taiwanese ecoliterature in the Reader reaches toward this strange, slippery truth. Far from Taiwan and long ago, Heraclitus wrote: “Nature loves to hide.” From the struggle to navigate and survive over and beneath the waves in the early stories to the strange witches’ brew of microbes and fertilizer in “Raining Zebra Finches,” from the intricacies of squirrel home-making to treetop camping in the highland cloud-oceans, the Reader succeeds in conveying the multifarious plenitude of biomass and “biomystery” gestating and proliferating in the landscapes and deep cultural memory of Taiwan, exceeding what science can chart. The Reader is a reminder that in Taiwan, not to mention everywhere, there is much more to reality than surfaces of leaf, skin, and fur might suggest, and that paying close attention to nature is one way to penetrate into a hidden plane, no matter whether one’s attentiveness is cultivated by scientific, ancestral, anthropomorphic or immersive and adventurous means.
On the topic of unstated presences, there is the question of nationhood in relation to landscape and ecology. One can trace in the Reader the literary formulation of a national identity specific to Taiwan as island(s), not dependent on historical connections with China (or, indeed, with Taiwan’s former colonizer, Imperial Japan). This is never simple. As Jenny Caitlyn Lee notes:
Taiwan’s layered colonial history and changing linguistic hierarchies have produced a very fractured sense of cultural identity, which is reflected in the island’s literary landscape—a particular strength of which, in my opinion, is that it’s able to hold multiple competing perspectives simultaneously, coexisting and unresolved tensions … I think there’s probably more value in this kind of literary cacophony than a united front.
Taiwan is a site of high biodiversity and many endemic species, granting its people and government a national asset not entangled with the Chinese mainland; simultaneously ancient and unburdened by history. Harry Liao described to me how native species have been picked up by the state as symbols, such as the use of the Formosan Black Bear as the mascot for the Tourism Administration of Taiwan. He also explained how geography has entered Taiwan’s political lexicon:
Phrases such as “where the Tropic of Cancer, Kuroshio, and the monsoon meet,” and “my little, mountainous country” (我那小小多山的國家) are among the geo-political rhetoric that people have been picking up for activism as well as in memory of the 228 Incident and the ensuing White Terror.
In the case of Taiwan’s Austronesian people, they made the island their home long before the Chinese began to settle during the (relatively recent) later years of the Ming Dynasty. Though they make up roughly three percent of the population, their long ties with the land and its ecosystems lend resonance to the formation of a “native” national identity cohering under the shadow of the One China policy. It is a resonance that, for those whom it inspires, points not to the East Asian mainland but to the ocean. Yet it sits in some tension with more traditional notions of “the nation.” Regarding identification with a greater Austronesian network, Liao noted that the official titles of government initiatives such as the Austronesian Forum (南島民族論壇, nándǎo mínzú lùntán) use the term 民族 (mínzú) rather than 語族 (yǔzú). In essence, 民族 (mínzú) refers to a nationality while 語族 (yǔzú) refers to a linguistic group. It’s a case of validating indigenous identity within the nation’s framework but without ceding concrete or symbolic sovereignty.
Hence again the need for “Venn diagram thinking” when considering land, sea, nature, and people in the ecoliterature of Taiwan.
Ultimately, the selections in the Reader should be read as stories. Yes, they are “resources” made accessible through literary translation and publishing, but should be valued for their own sake: as works of art. Readers of the Reader may find themselves entranced by Wu Ming-yi’s metatextual mountain mission for the extinct(?) clouded leopard, while others may be keen to follow Sakinu Ahronglong beyond the treeline to attend his quiet lesson on how to flush a flying squirrel from its hiding-trunk, and others still might relish the 90s throwback as Chi Ta-wei describes how the hole in the ozone layer pushed our species into a “bubbledome” society. As stated in the opening: Taiwanese literature is diverse. At the close, remember that there are treasures, emotions, contradictions, and strange nonhuman potentials folded within that diversity.
