The Power of Taiwan Literature: An Interview with Shuo-bin Su (Part 1)
“Taiwan literature can be conceived of as every single mode of literary expression that has left an existential trace on Taiwan,” said Dr. Shuo-bin Su (蘇碩斌), director of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. The research, preservation, and promotion of such modes of expression, however, either failed to receive organized institutional support or was subsumed under a China-centered historiographical perspective before the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. The establishment of Taiwan literature as a field of academic inquiry became possible thanks to the political liberalization of Taiwanese society and the emergence of a “Taiwan consciousness” since the 1980s. What might be the challenges and possibilities facing the field of Taiwan literature, then and now? What might be the new directions of the field?
The Taiwan Gazette is pleased to interview Dr. Shuo-bin Su to discuss the historical formation of the field of Taiwan literature and the role the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL) will play in introducing Taiwan literature to domestic and international visitors.
Dr. Shuo-bin Su is Director of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (October 2018 to the present) and Professor at the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from National Taiwan University. His research areas of specialization include sociology of literature, cultural studies, and book history. He is the author of the book The Invisible and Visible Taipei which explores the birth of modern Taipei City, and he has also translated several works of Japanese cultural studies scholarship into Chinese, including Invitation to Media Cultural Studies and Politics of Seeing: A Social History of the Expositions from 1851 to 1970. In recent years, he endeavors to promote “creative nonfiction writing” and is the chief editor of some award-winning publications about Taiwan’s historical stories including The Day When the War Ended: Stories of the War Generation in Taiwan and A Guide to the Lifestyle of Taipei Cultural Youths that Was Fashionable for One Hundred Years.
This interview will be published in two parts. Part 1 will focus on the formation of Taiwan literature as an academic field of study; Part 2 will concentrate on the founding of the NMTL and how the museum will establish its connections to a Taiwanese and international readership.
This interview was conducted online in Chinese on November 3, 2021. Its English translation has been edited for clarity. It features as part of our special issue: Encountering Everyday Life: Taiwan in Museums.
Interviewed by Matthew Mucha
Transcribed and translated by Sabrina Teng-io Chung
Edited by Yu-Han Huang, Sabrina Teng-io Chung, and Matthew Mucha
Cover Image: The National Museum of Taiwan Literature
Taiwan Gazette: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. Our first question concerns the role of Taiwan literature in your academic trajectory. Before joining the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Taiwan University, you were a professor of sociology. What prompted this shift in your academic career? And why did you turn to the field of Taiwan literature?
Shuo-bin Su: I began my career as a sociologist of culture, and I understand the subject of my academic inquiry in the following ways: As a phenomenon, culture is antithetical to nature—it is not naturally formed and yet displays certain qualities of the natural. An exceptional feature of culture is its power as a symbol or sign. And language plays a pivotal role in the signifying mechanism of culture. It is used in our everyday life as a means of expression, signifying everything in the world and crafting them into existence. It is also a very important concept in cultural studies and literary theory. Literature gives form to this means of expression. For example, fiction—or the fictional—offers us a way to map, organize, or remediate our positioning in modern societies. It is of unparalleled significance in our everyday life.
As a sociologist of culture, I consider it my responsibility to draw attention to the power of symbols and signs in changing and shaping the world. Literature then is an embodiment of such world-changing power. Oftentimes, the power of literature is reductively rendered as an ability to refresh or entertain the mind. I contend that literature can help us imagine a world beyond our world and the ways to bring it into existence.
I used to work at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Yang-Ming University. The university initially planned to set up an institute of arts and cultures. However, during its preparatory phase, the Ministry of Education advised the university to shift the institute’s research direction to visual studies—a field that is not my specialty. When the institute was founded, I left and began to look for another job position. By chance, the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Taiwan University had an opening. I was familiar with the field of Taiwan literature, that’s why I decided to give it a try. This basically encapsulates my academic journey from the field of sociology to that of literature.
Taiwan Gazette: Can you share with us your MA and PhD research? In what ways are they relevant to the field of Taiwan literature?
Shuo-bin Su: My master’s thesis is about Taiwanese opera (歌仔戲; kua-á-hì). During Japanese colonial rule, Taiwanese opera was deemed a vulgar form of theatrical expression, with contents revolving around romantic, grotesque, or supernatural affairs. Despite its negative perceptions, Taiwanese opera is emblematic of Taiwan’s theatrical practice and expression—it only exists in Taiwan and nothing quite similar could be found in other cities or provinces in mainland China. This distinctiveness, however, had not prevented Taiwanese opera from being dismissed as a lowly form of theater in the past. During my M.A. studies, I was intrigued by this question: what had been the underlying factors ameliorating the social standing of Taiwanese opera? In the 1990s, the ruling party in Taiwan changed after half a century of KMT governance. When the Chen Shui-bian administration (2000-2008) came to power, it began to implement and reinforce Taiwan’s “nativization” processes and policies. The social standing of Taiwanese opera was elevated as a result of these efforts. What I was trying to argue is that sociopolitical changes and cultural transformations are oftentimes entangled with one another. The crude and obscene quality of Taiwanese opera could one day reach the status of high art. Such shifts in positioning however were not intrinsic to Taiwanese opera as a form of art per se. They were the result of the shifting changes in politics and society.
My doctoral dissertation tackles the question of urbanism, and my major research concern lies in the transition of a society from the premodern to the modern. In Taiwan, such a transition took place during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945). This is why I studied the urbanism of Taihoku-shi (present-day Taipei City). Taihoku-shi was built upon three settlements which used to have no interaction among one another—people in each settlement lived their own lives. Yet, Japanese colonial urban planning reconfigured the three settlements—artificially, culturally, and symbolically—into the administrative unit of a city. Under the force of urban planning, the social patterns and practices of each locality were reorganized and came to be a target of intervention for power. Such modes of intervention, however, were not coercive in its entirety. Japanese colonial urban planners gathered, organized, and produced knowledge about the things and people they governed. Meticulous details about the lives of ordinary people were exposed and entered the field of intervention. I was trying to understand the historical emergence of a very particular art of government through the case study of Taihoku-shi. This art of government could be known as “modern governmentality.” It is completely different from the Qing’s governance of Taiwan.
Taiwan Gazette: Our next question concerns the definition of Taiwan literature. How can we possibly trace its genealogy?
Shuo-bin Su: This is a very complicated question whose answer requires different levels of discussion. To begin, we should decide whether Taiwan literature could be understood in terms of the written tradition alone. If this is the case, the earliest development of Taiwan literature could be attributed to Shen Guangwen (沈光文), a scholar and poet from mainland China who introduced the writing of poetry and classical prose to Taiwan more than 300 years ago. Since then, Chinese classical poetry and prose had been adopted as the mainstream literary expression in Taiwan. Later, informed by events including the Taishō Democracy Movement in Japan, the May Fourth Movement in China, and more, Taiwan’s New Literature Movement slowly came into being. It was around the 1920s that modern novels began to appear in Taiwan. In the postwar era, literati fleeing mainland China further reinforced the influence of the May Fourth tradition in Taiwan. Hence, we could discern a convergence of two literary traditions—one from Japan, another from mainland China—in postwar Taiwan. The 1950s witnessed a period of White Terror during which literary pursuits were subdued under the banner of anti-communism. After that, a diverse array of writing techniques from across the world was incorporated into the writing of Taiwan literature. From this perspective, Taiwan literature could be seen as a plethora of written traditions from various ethnicities.
But aside from the written tradition, are there other modes of expression in Taiwan literature? This would be the second level of discussion. Should we take into account literary expressions including the epic tradition, we could definitely trace the historical emergence of Taiwan literature to more than a thousand years ago when the Indigenous peoples in Taiwan expressed their creativity in the oral tradition. I also want to add that the oral tradition is also an indispensable element of Taiwan literature. The National Museum of Taiwan Literature has been working on the preservation of festival myths, legends, and folktales of Taiwan’s Indigenous populations. We understand that these oral cultures might wither away one day.
To return to your question concerning the definition of Taiwan literature, it can be conceived of as every single mode of literary expression that has left an existential trace on Taiwan. Literature is a means of expressing lived experiences. From a thousand years ago when the Indigenous populations recorded their experiences in the oral tradition, to the earlier days when the illiterate Han Chinese populations in Taiwan expressed their experiences through the vehicle of Taiwanese opera, to the introduction of the written tradition from ethnic groups with diverse backgrounds, Taiwan literature has been an amalgamation of expressions of everyday life.
Taiwan Gazette: We understand that there are several ways of naming the modes of literary expression that could be found in Taiwan. Take, for instance, ‘Taiwan’ literature and ‘Taiwanese’ literature. Could you explain to us the nuances between these different practices of naming?
Shuo-bin Su: We can draw a boundary between Taiwan literature and Taiwanese literature by considering their use of language. Hailing from southern Fujian, the earlier Han Chinese settler population in Taiwan spoke Hokkien (also known as Minnan). After a hundred years of development and adaptation, this dialect had undergone changes in Taiwan that marked it distinguishable from that in southern Fujian. This spoken language is now commonly referred to as Taiwanese. Taiwanese as a language does not have a full-fledged writing system, or at least its development was an invention rather than a tradition.
The dominant and official language in Taiwan is Mandarin Chinese, widely used among various ethnic groups including Holo Taiwanese, Hakka Taiwanese, mainlanders, Indigenous peoples, and others. Yet the adoption of Mandarin Chinese as the official language in Taiwan reveals a process of oppression. For unification purposes, the KMT government had enforced a strict Mandarin language policy to discourage linguistic diversity among the multi-ethnic constituents of Taiwanese society. Since the democratization period in the 1980s, however, there has been a surge of interest in the writing of Taiwanese literature using Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字), the romanization or vernacular writing system of the Taiwanese language. This trend of literary expression could be known as Taiwanese literature.
As for Taiwan literature, it generally refers to literary works written in Mandarin Chinese and other languages commonly used in Taiwan. It encompasses the body of work produced by the aforementioned ethnic groups in Taiwan. In recent years, the descendants of “new immigrant” families also add new meanings to Taiwan literature from their distinctive perspectives.
Taiwan Gazette: Can you further discuss the issue of naming with a focus on the institutionalization of Taiwan literature as a field of research? We know that the first Taiwan literature programs were established at Providence University in 1996 and Aletheia University in 1997. How did these programs distinguish themselves from the long tradition of Chinese literature departments at colleges in Taiwan?
Shuo-bin Su: The issue of institutionalization needs to be discussed from various perspectives. The story begins with the establishment of Taiwan literature programs in Providence University (靜宜大學) and Aletheia University (真理大學) in the mid 1990s, a few years after the lifting of martial law in 1987. Prior to this, the ruling KMT government discouraged the categorization of literary production under the rubric of “Taiwan literature”. To consolidate its position as the sole legitimate government of China, the KMT promoted the adoption of the term “Chinese literature” among literature departments. However, such attempts to sinicize literary productions in Taiwan became more difficult to perpetuate in the post-martial law period. In fact, we could understand the nativist literature movement in the 1970s and 1980s as a call to social realism––a return to reality––precisely because of the infeasibility of the KMT’s “dream” to regain control over mainland China.
After the lifting of martial law in 1987, a large number of Chinese literature departments in Taiwan endorsed curriculum revisions to accommodate the teaching of Taiwan literature. Such revisions included the increase of course offerings on Taiwan literature within Chinese literature departments. A more proactive approach is to establish Taiwan literature programs at the undergraduate and graduate level in colleges. Since Aletheia University established the very first Department of Taiwan Literature in 1997, we have seen the establishment of relevant programs in a total of sixteen colleges. The research focus of these programs is drastically different from Chinese literature departments whose curriculum is organized around the literary historiography of Chinese literature spanning across three to five thousand years. Taiwan literature programs direct attention to the body of works I mentioned earlier—the literary production of various ethnic groups in Taiwan. Students these days are more interested in the works of contemporary literature. Going back to your question concerning the institutionalization of Taiwan literature, indeed, the process began in the 1990s; yet this process could not have happened without the political liberalization of Taiwanese society. It was the post-martial law socio-political environment that facilitated the establishment of Taiwan literature programs.
Taiwan Gazette: In contrast to Chinese literature, Taiwan literature encompasses the usage of a wide range of languages including Hokklein, Hakka, Japanese, Austronesian languages, and more. In what ways is literary theory, for example, postcolonial theory or Indigenous critique, useful for our understanding of Taiwan literature?
Shuo-bin Su: Let me start with an overview of Pe̍h-ōe-jī, the vernacular writing system in Taiwan. Pe̍h-ōe-jī is a system that renders the Taiwanese language accessible in romanticized characters, and it was first introduced by the Presbyterian Church to promote missionary affairs in Taiwan. In 1925, Chhòa Pôe-hóe (蔡培火; Cai Pei-huo), Lîm Hiàn-tông (林獻堂; Lin Xian-tang), and other figures noticed that this writing system can help increase the literacy rate among ordinary Taiwanese people, most of whom could neither speak nor write Mandarin Chinese. Later, during the postwar period, the KMT government banned this writing system as an effort to discourage vernacular language usage among the Taiwanese people. Research on this writing system was mostly conducted by scholars hailing from the United States and Japan, including Robert Liang-wei Cheng (鄭良偉) and Ông Io̍k-tek (王育德). These scholars had advocated for the promotion of Pe̍h-ōe-jī to help Taiwanese people find expression in the language they are most familiar with. This constitutes an important part of the literary historiography of Taiwan literature and has garnered increasing scholarly attention in recent years.
And now I’ll return to your question concerning the applicability of western literary theory in the research on Taiwan literature. For instance, let’s focus on the question of postcoloniality. How did colonial writers crave out a space for their literary expression under various ideological constraints—from Japanese colonization to KMT governance? What forms of writing were possible under the terms of colonialism? In fact, during Japanese colonial rule, there was no lack of Taiwanese writers who used the Japanese language as a vehicle to depict Taiwan’s colonial situation. Likewise, in the postwar period, Taiwanese-speaking writers had not abandoned their writing practices simply because of the KMT’s suppression of the vernacular writing system. Their writings in Mandarin Chinese offer us a glimpse of Taiwanese history, society, and culture at the time. From the vantage point of postcolonial theory, we could reevaluate these writers’ negotiation with colonial power structures by means of their writing practices. Their use of colonial languages—be it Japanese or Mandarin Chinese—as a means of expression does not signal their wholesale denunciation of their local culture, language, and knowledge systems. On the contrary, certain segments of past experiences are still accessible to us precisely because of their tactics of negotiation. Imperial subject writers including Tiunn Bûn-khuân (張文環; Zhang Wen-huan) and Tsiu Kim-pho (周金波; Zhou Jin-bo) are not merely docile subjects of the empire. At the same time, the postwar Chinese-language writings of Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政) and Li Qiao (李喬) should not be read as the author’s adherence to KMT governance. Their body of work is a rich repository of hidden messages going along or against the grains of colonialism. A post-colonial perspective can shed new lights to their literary productions.
On the other hand, Indigenous critique offers us another crucial lens from which to approach Taiwan literature. Before we delve into the specificities of our discussion, we first need to call into question the notion of “ownership.” In the past, there had been attempts to contest the KMT’s sovereign claims over Taiwan, advocating for the return of the land to its original owner—the people of Taiwan. While some might consider the Han Chinese settler population from southern Fujian as the “original owner” of Taiwan, the meaning of “ownership” becomes highly contentious once we take the land claims of Taiwan’s Indigenous populations into consideration.
The literary production of Taiwan’s Indigenous populations presents a rich account of some of the earliest lived experiences on the land that we call ‘Taiwan’ today. The significance of their work however lies in the fact that it embodies an entirely different worldview—a different set of relationality between the human and the land. For example, the Han Chinese communities in Taiwan—be they descendants of immigrants from southern Fujian or other parts of mainland China—organize their relationships to the land around the notion of “developmentalism”: value is extracted from the land they own and cultivate. In Indigenous epistemologies, the relationship between the human and the land is one of convivial reciprocity rather than extractive proprietorship. The legends and stories of Indigenous populations offer us an entirely different way to understand human-land relationships, a new roadmap to reconsider Han settler notions of ownership and human relationships.
In Taiwan, we can see the rise of ecological literature as a response to the contested notions of human-land relationships. The settler notions of territory, ownership, and proprietorship that I mentioned earlier are all organized around the idea of anthropocentrism. Even calls for environmental protection still center the human subject as a figure of action. Underlying these conceptualizations and ways of thinking is the notion of the world as a manageable land mass devoid of its own agency. In Indigenous epistemologies, however, the notion of hunters, hunting, and attitudes towards living beings and the land are at odds with the settler notions of land ownership. For example, such differences are manifest in the Puyuma tribal legends of the gift, totem, human–animal continuum, mountain and sea, and more. Indigenous epistemologies of the land not only give inspiration to the genre of ecological literature in Taiwan. More importantly, they offer us an entirely different worldview, an exhortation to amend our settler practices of land expropriation.
Taiwan Gazette: Thank you very much for your detailed account on how the interplay of language, power, and knowledge systems contributed to the shifting landscape of Taiwan literature and Taiwan literary studies. We know that Taiwan is the host country of a significant number of migrant workers from Southeast Asia. In recent years, we have also seen the rise of new immigrant families and communities in Taiwanese society. In what ways has the population of migrant workers and new immigrants brought new changes to the writing of Taiwan literature? In other words, how should Taiwan literature be redefined vis-à-vis the broadening of Taiwan’s ethnic constituency?
Shuo-bin Su: There are two channels by which migrant workers and new immigrants gain representational space in Taiwan literary production. The first channel is the body of work written by migrant workers and new immigrants themselves. An independent bookstore called “Brilliant Times” had been organizing literature awards for them. Established in 2014, the [now-defunct] “Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants” encourages migrant workers and new immigrants to produce literary works—including fiction, prose, and poetry—using their native languages. For review purposes, their work would be translated into the Chinese language, making it broadly accessible to the Taiwanese readership. Yet, the process of translation might also obscure certain features of the original text.
The other channel is the writing of Taiwanese authors about migrant workers from Southeast Asia. There have been quite a lot of literary works on this topic. In Taiwan, migrant workers constitute 1/40 of the population. There are about 600,000 migrant workers, including their descendants, in Taiwan.
We can see a gradual integration of Southeast Asian migrant workers and new immigrants into Taiwanese society. In addition to the four existing ethnic groups—Holo, Hakka, mainlanders, and Indigenous peoples—making up Taiwanese society, migrant workers and new immigrants have been increasingly recognized as a new ethnic group in and of itself. Children growing up in multilingual immigrant families might begin to produce literary works that capture their distinctive lived experiences. In addition to Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese, they might also incorporate cultural or linguistic elements of their mothers’ native languages into their works. Taiwanese society has slowly transitioned from a Han-dominant society to one that embraces ethnic diversity. I believe this will bring new changes to Taiwan literature.
Taiwan Gazette: The 2000’s decade is known as the golden age of Taiwan literature. At the same time, Taiwan literature programs were faced with tremendous social pressure to enhance students’ preparedness for the job market. How have scholars and students of Taiwan literature responded to the challenges facing their field’s academic integrity?
Shuo-bin Su: I believe this is a global phenomenon facing humanities departments alike. What is specific about students of Taiwan literature is their historical sensitivity of Taiwanese politics, society, and culture past and present. This sensitivity allows them to create literary productions that give narrative gravity to the cultural and historical phenomena of Taiwan. A lot of historical novels emerged around the 2000s, retelling the historical traumas and social taboos of the past through new literary expressions.
Students of Taiwan literature will mobilize their skills of storytelling to create a space of their own in the job market. In addition to literary production, they can apply their knowledge in exhibit curations, screenwriting, archival research, and more. It is my hope that these students can ignite the power of Taiwan literature in creating and disseminating stories that can shape and reshape our world.
