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(This article is a condensed version of one originally published at Readmoo: https://news.readmoo.com/2021/07/20/taipei-rights-workshop-2021/)

“Over the last few months, I think children’s books have been something of a survival tool for parents stuck at home and a major way for them to connect with their children,” says Gray Tan, founder of The Grayhawk Agency, in his welcome speech for the 2021 Taipei Rights Workshop, Summer Edition, co-hosted by The Grayhawk Agency and Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA).

This was the fourth session of the summer edition of Taipei Rights Workshop, but due to the pandemic the roundtable discussion was hosted online for the first time. The eight children’s publishers who were invited to participate had a wealth of industry experience and included: Supawee Supatit, foreign rights executive at Amarin (Thailand); Purichaya Asunee Na Ayuttaya, rights editor at B2S Co. (Thailand); Nguyen Thi Ha, rights executive at Thai Ha (Vitenam); Phan Thanh Lan, rights executive at Kim Dong (Vitenam); Yuliani Liputo, rights executive at Mizan (Indonesia); Shera Sihbudi, rights executive at Noura (Indonesia); Ally Bang, rights executive at Changbi (South Korea); and Su Shin, special assistant to the chairman of B.K. Agency (Taiwan). Together, their frank discussion focused on how the pandemic has impacted their respective book markets, as well as on the proportion of local or translated works in each market and what selling rights is like behind the scenes. Even though the pandemic prevented us from having the chance to get together in person, the children’s book publishers of the Milk Tea Alliance (an online democracy and human rights movement consisting of netizens from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia and South Korea among others) were still able to gather online and share their insight on fighting the pandemic.

Publishers Fighting the Pandemic: The Rise of Shopee, Using Pre-orders to Determine Print Runs, and Curated Livestreams to Interact with Readers

“As readers turned to purchasing books online, e-commerce site Shopee has started to become more important. Many of the book fairs have also been held online,” said Su Shin. This was a situation that a lot of countries’ book markets faced during the pandemic. Taiwan had the pandemic well under control during its early stages but in mid-May 2021 restrictions were escalated to Level 3 which was a hit to physical bookstores, especially independent bookstores who really bore the brunt of the new rules. Staying home long-term has led to an increase in book sales for certain genres: “Self-help books, books about exercise, and children’s books have responded particularly well, and recently we’ve also seen an increase in sales of colouring books and children’s study aids.”

“Ultimately, we always have to find something for the children to do.” The same situation occurred in Indonesia where a third wave of the pandemic broke out last month and physical channels for book sales halted business one after the other, forcing publishers to switch to online platforms and hold virtual storytelling workshops to reach readers. “Some publishers have official online stores on Shopee, and they’re finding that children’s board books, story books and picture books are all extremely popular.” However, inevitably most book sales are still suffering and the sales for new titles are so much lower that a lot of publishing houses in Indonesia are starting to offer the book as a pre-order one month before publication and then only print copies after confirming the number of pre-orders.

It’s a very similar situation in Vietnam. In response to the pandemic, there has been an increase in sales of health-related titles and children’s books. High school students have been particularly drawn to comic books that come with tasteful free gifts and the students are happy to buy the comics with their own money. Shopee plays an equally important role in both Vietnam and Thailand’s book markets. Thailand’s previous pandemic response meant that the book market remained relatively stable, but sales have declined since a new wave of infections broke out in March and publishers have needed to rely on more diverse forms of online marketing and livestreaming. However, the restriction of physical publicity events has led to reduced visibility for new writers. Literary works have been a favourite of Thai readers during the pandemic and they’ve been particularly keen on romance novels, perhaps as a source of comfort during this period of public anxiety. Children’s books have also been a saving grace and parents have been willing to order them online.

In South Korea, even though the scale of offline activities has been small, online book fairs have been extremely active. “Kobo, the largest publishing house in South Korea, increased its book fair activities by 17% and saw a 30% increase in online sales, but by contrast they only saw a 0.7% increase in sales from physical bookstores,” said Ally Bang. With children’s books, it can help sales immensely if a teacher includes a book in their recommended reading materials.

Read On: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/latest_info.php?id=175

Read Previous Part: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/latest_info.php?id=172

3. The Endless Possibilities of Comics

This year’s shortlist revealed once again just how unlimited the possibilities are for comics. New opportunities are brought about by changes in the media landscape, for example San Ri Juan Zi’s self-published comic Hi, Grandpa! Being Together and Then Saying Goodbye has a lot of traits that are common in today’s web comics, such as the way it uses sincere feelings that are true to life, like those stories you read on the internet that suddenly leave you teary-eyed and heartbroken. This multimedia approach is also reflected in the nominees for Best Cross-media Application: Tong Li Publishing Co’s work on The Monster of Memory: Destiny; and Secret Whispers which was a joint venture between Chimney Animation and Fish Wang, an illustrator, animator and director who won Best Animated Short Film at the 2019 Golden Horse Awards for Gold Fish.

The Monster of Memory was originally a comic by author-illustrator Mae and featured an ingeniously designed setting as well as a truly mind-blowing plot that was filled with metaphors of real-world relationships. It’s the sort of story that is perfectly suited to being adapted into a game as a more immersive way for readers to experience the world of the book. Fish Wang meanwhile, is known as a great all-rounder in Taiwanese comics and Secret Whispers can be seen as an “original multimedia work” because from the outset he uses different types of media to portray the teenagers’ “secrets” through different perspectives as the tension rises between them. In the future, the work might be seen as an important reference point in the development of Taiwanese comics, not just because it was set up as a cross-media project from the beginning but also because of the way it was a joint creative venture in the studio.

In addition to the possibilities brought about by other media, a lot of graphic novels have emerged among Taiwanese comics in recent years. The term “graphic novel” has been adopted from the West and encompasses works that are deeply experimental and avant-garde. A lot of readers who have been familiar with Japanese manga from a young age can’t help but flip through graphic novels and wonder uncertainly “Is this book really a comic?” This completely new experience and the excitement it provokes are precisely what makes graphic novels so fascinating.

A Trip to the Asylum by Pam Pam Liu was the most provocative, nerve-wracking book of the year. A fictional story about mental illness and a psychiatric hospital, the comic is an all-out sprint that thrusts you straight into the darkness of the subconscious where you have no defences and there are no taboos. Reading it is like being in a comic book version of a Lou Reed song.

A Trip to the Asylum by Pam Pam Liu

It is hard to think of a comic more different from A Trip to the Asylum than the nonfiction series Son of Formosa. The series is based on the life of Tsai Kun-lin, a political victim of the White Terror who published comics despite the authoritarian environment in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987. He won the Special Contribution Award at the 2018 Golden Comic Awards for his courage and perseverance in fostering the development of Taiwan’s publishing sector. For the Son of Formosa series, author Yu Peiyun conducted extensive research when writing the text and illustrator Zhou Jianxin used a range of visual methods to convey the myriad of twists and turns that Tsai Kun-lin experienced over the course of his life. It doesn’t just relay the facts but the images invite the reader to extend their imagination and in doing so the comic conveys a level of empathy that goes beyond the words of the text. Son of Formosa is a graphic novel that can be cherished as a classic both in Taiwan and internationally.  

Son of Formosa by Yu Peiyun and Zhou Jianxin

In this new era of comics, even the older forms of comics that followed a reliable, clear-cut path are no longer restrained by the same rigid set of standards as they once were. In addition to graphic novels, works like Illustrated Taiwan Keywords: A Hand-Drawn History of 1940-2020 by Chiou Hsien-Hsin which look like picture books or nonfiction books centred around infographics will also have an impact on what are stereotypically considered to be “comics” in the future. There is an almost unlimited number of paths an image can take, so rather than holding onto outdated beliefs of what a comic should be, both comic creators and readers alike should adopt a more open-minded approach and embrace the endless possibilities comics have to offer.

Summary

These three points are just my suggested highlights for anyone looking at the online exhibition of this year’s Golden Comic Awards. As with any exhibition, each visitor should use their personal interests and preferences to unearth their own understanding and appreciation of the exhibits. It is also important to acknowledge the work done by editors to help bring these visual adaptations of literature and history to life. Lin Yi-Chun (Managing Editor at Locus Publishing Company) won this year’s Best Editor Award for her work on The Ren Zheng-hua Collection: Drawn to Life + The Human Bun and on Secret Whispers; while the shortlisted editors included Huang Pei-Shan and Ho Szu-Ying (Editor-in-Chief and Editor at Slowork Publishing respectively) for their work on Son of Formosa, and Tan Shun-Hsin (Editor) for her work on Fantastic Tales of Splendid Blossoms. These exhibits are all undoubtedly great works of art which deserve to be poured over by visitors. However, there are physical limitations with all exhibitions and this was no exception. With a total of 226 works registered this year it was inevitable that some talent would go unrecognised, so this exhibition should only be seen as a starting point and readers should take their initial interest a step further because there are just too many beautiful Taiwanese comics out there waiting to be read.

Comics are a medium where stories are told through images and by using different themes or illustration styles what you are ultimately trying to achieve is a great story. Over the last few years, Taiwanese comics have produced countless great stories regardless of whether they are shortlisted for the Golden Comic Awards or not. These are stories that will make you laugh, make you cry, and at some point they might even accidentally become something that saves your life, and this, more than anything, is what I want you to know about the Golden Comic Awards and the corresponding exhibition, not just this year but in all the years to come.

(This article is a condensed version of one originally published at opnion.udn: https://opinion.udn.com/opinion/story/10124/5846196)

The 12th Golden Comic Awards were held on the 28 October 2021 in an annual prize ceremony that was one of the biggest events of the year in the world of Taiwanese comics. It wasn’t just about celebrating this year’s successes and highlighting everything that the industry has achieved over the previous 12 years, but it also served as a call to arms with a loose outline of how Taiwanese comics can continue to build on their existing momentum. After watching this year’s Golden Comic Awards, here are a few of what I think are the most important points to be aware of:

1. The Triumphant Return of Several Veterans from Taiwan’s “1990s Gold Age of Comics”

For many experienced supporters of Taiwanese comics, the glory of the golden age in the 1990s has always been something of a legend. It was an era where Taiwanese comics were besieged on all sides by a combination of piracy and long-term government suppression. A whole generation of creators used their unique skills to forge their own paths, drawing extensively on the success of Japanese manga and western comics but transforming these influences into their own distinctive styles with impervious momentum as they tried to pave a way out their oppressive environment. Even though the movement eventually dwindled due to a mix of complicated internal and external factors, that era still revealed the unlimited potential of Taiwanese comics.

Two names that are always mentioned from that era are Ren Zheng-hua, who won this year’s Special Contribution Award, and Richard Metson, whose new title Iron Boy: Pirate Town 1 was nominated for the 2021 Comic of the Year Award. Ren Zheng-hua’s sensitive and meticulous portrayal of human nature, especially when she depicts the subtle and often imperceptible space between likes and dislikes, has always been the subject of enthusiastic discussion among her supporters. The Special Contribution Award and the republication of her comics Drawn to Life and The Human Bun have introduced a new generation of readers to Ren Zheng-hua’s writing, where she has been exploring the desires and prejudices at the core of human nature since her debut comic Sea of Devil in 1990. Known as “Uncle Mai”, Richard Metson uses his naturally eccentric talent and unique western illustration style to roam between all kinds of different subject matters and build spectacularly immersive worlds one after the other. This time around, he was here with an entirely new book which still featured his usual trademarks but also seemed to contain slightly more references to the highs and lows of reality, a reflection of his own experiences over the years.

Iron Boy: Pirate Town by Richard Metson

The return of several veterans to the spotlight isn’t unique to this year’s awards but is part of a recent trend that’s still developing and can perhaps be traced back to the deaths of Chen Hongyao and Chen Uen. In addition to Ren Zheng-hua and Richard Metson, many of the comic creators who were precursors to the 1990s golden age have not only republished old works but also launched new ones. It is only through this kind of cross-generational reconnection that Taiwanese comics can build a robust, long-lasting system to give future generations the strength and support to grow.

The Human Bun by Ren Zheng-hua

2. Increasingly Diverse Illustration Styles and Storyline Subject Matters

When you line up all the comics selected for this year’s nominations it’s a treasure trove of work encompassing a myriad of different ideas, regardless of whether you’re looking at it in terms of source material or image composition. While it was possible to place each of these works in a certain category or genre, each comic broke new ground either through its storyline or illustration style to transcend the restrictions of the existing framework.

Chang Sheng has diligently created science fiction for a long time. After his standalone work Nine Lives Man: Time’s Wheel made the shortlist last year, he created Yan 1, an all-new series about a female superhero where he used his distinctive brush stroke style to explore the sense of remorse which is often present in superhero stories and has been a subtle theme running through his comics since Oldman in 2013. Dutchman in Formosa (Vol. 2) by Kinono was a sequel that readers had been eagerly anticipating for five years. Kinono didn’t just take the illustrations to the next level but also replaced the previous volume’s liveliness with a more melancholy tone as the narrative focus shifted from international trade disputes to the experience of indigenous Taiwanese people under colonialism.

Yan by Chang Sheng 

Yuusharyaku 10 by BIGUN, Scrunchy by TaaRO, and Fantastic Tales of Splendid Blossoms by Monday Recover and Yang Shuang-Tzu all had very clear-cut attributes of genre fiction but if you looked closely at their content, you could see that each work deftly applied established components of genres in a way that made new ideas flourish within them. The techniques they used to express images and plot points meant that these works could all confidently hold their own among their respective genres both at home and abroad.

Netherwarrant by Yuzu, The Invisibles 1 by Shin Yan, Hell Parade by Buke and The Lion in the Manga Library by Xiaodao all used awe-inspiring illustration styles to tell stories in a way that didn’t just demonstrate their incredible skills but also captured the cohesion and explosiveness of their personal styles. In every frame of every page, these four comics proved that you don’t necessarily need highbrow illustration styles to tell a great story that moves readers. Similarly, people who were fans of comics during the 1990s golden era always emphasised the diverse stories and individual styles of the illustrators at the time, so perhaps we might be unknowingly experiencing another peak in Taiwanese comics.

Netherwarrant by Yuzu

The Lion in the Manga Library by Xiaodao

Read On: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/latest_info.php?id=173

How did Taiwan come to be home to the world’s only rival to Sequoiadendron giganteum, the giant sequoia of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California? Why does the closest living relative to Taiwan’s only extant endemic genus Sinopanax, a small evergreen tree, live in tropical Central America? How did the South American herb genus Chaerophyllum cross the equator and the Pacific to end up thriving in alpine Taiwan? And how could Leontopodium species have a distant cousin on Yushan, the tallest mountain in Taiwan?

In answering questions like these, the author Yu Chih Chieh, who holds a doctorate in biogeography from National Taiwan University and is now doing a post-doc in Xishuangbanna, China, offers more than just a natural history of Taiwan’s montane plants in this book. Each high mountain herb or tree he discusses is both a crystallization of a unique transnational history and a microcosm of global biogeography. Adapting the first two lines of William Blake’s poem “Songs of Innocence”, The Odyssey of Taiwan’s Montane Plants gives you a view of the World in a Wild Flower.

In the book, Taiwan’s mountains are a Noah’s Ark of biodiversity and a meeting place of montane plants. These plants are the main characters in an international epic of biogeography, the branch of the natural sciences that explains the distribution of life on Earth historically. By relating the backstories of each of these characters, this book takes you on a journey of exploration into the distant past and around the world.

The natural history of Taiwan’s montane plants can be traced back tens of millions of years to far-flung realms: to the Hengduan Mountains in China in the east, to Chile in the west, to Siberia in the north, and to Tasmania in the south. Taiwan is a particularly interesting setting in the story of botanical evolution for two reasons. First, it happens to be the eastern edge of the range of Himalayan plants and the southern extreme of temperate zone flora. It is also a way station for a number of antipodean plants. Second, Taiwan is an island, a place where one would expect endemic species to evolve. The Odyssey of Taiwan’s Montane Plants also explains the diversity of Taiwan’s flora in terms of a different kind of island: each of Taiwan’s high mountains – there are two hundred and sixty mountains over three thousand meters in the Central Mountain Range – is an evolutionary island. Orogeny – mountain formation – in Taiwan has isolated plant travelers and forced them to settle down in a variety of microhabitats. In the six million years since the isolation of the island, they have evolved into numerous new species. The spiky barberry, for instance, boasts the greatest genetic variation of any of the plants that grow on Taiwan’s mountains, with thirteen endemic species. Little loved by mountain climbers, it fascinates botanists.

Taiwan’s montane plants have inspired admiration in natural scientists for over a century, starting with the Japanese father of Taiwanese plant taxonomy, Hayata Bunzō. In his Materials For a Flora of Formosa, published in 1911, Hayata wrote that a little herb called Chaerophyllum involucratum took his breath away, because it reminded him of a plant in Australia that turned out to be its closest living relative. In 1916, out of a similar appreciation, Ernest Henry Wilson, who is known to posterity as the Chinese Wilson because of his famous travels in China but who also paid a visit to Taiwan, wrote: “Formosa is indeed the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ and her crowning glory are the magnificent forests of ever-green Lauraceae and Fagaceae, the gigantic Chamaecyparis and the lofty Taiwanias which clothe her steep and rugged mountains.” Taiwania is the tallest tree in East Asia, while the “gigantic” Taiwan red cypress, known locally as a “god tree”, is the stoutest, and the world’s only rival for size to California’s giant sequoia. Wherever they originated, and however large they are, the montane plants that have gathered in Taiwan have borne witness to the sprawling epic of evolution. Each of them is a living memorial of an epochal biogeographical journey.

This book puts Taiwan’s montane plants in biogeographical, not national, context. Plant scientists cannot respect national borders any more than plants do. Naturalists like Hayata and Wilson have been amazed to encounter plants that bear an uncanny resemblance to those they grew up appreciating. By appreciating the origins of Taiwan’s montane plants, we, too, can understand the natural history of plants not in terms of national borders but in terms of biogeographical boundaries and the ways in which plants have crossed them, spinning the endless web of life.

With the author’s photographs and dozens of botanical illustrations by Huang Han-Yau and Ong Jin Yao, which are sampled on the cover of the Chinese edition, The Odyssey of Taiwan’s Montane Plants could be marketed as a coffee or tea table book. It should appeal to the kind of popular natural science audience for which E. O. Wilson wrote his 1992 bestseller The Diversity of Life, for two reasons. First, because of a shared interest in evolutionary islands. The Diversity of Life reprised results from The Theory of Island Biogeography, a technical monograph that Wilson co-authored for publication in 1967. Another landmark is science writer David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. Yu Chih Chieh updates the theory of island biogeography for a popular audience by focusing on “evolutionary islands” – the individual peaks of the Alps, the Andes, the Hengduan Mountains. Second, because, like E. O. Wilson, Yu Chih Chieh puts a personal stamp on the material. In every chapter, he supplies part of his own backstory, the story of his transformation from hiker into biogeographer, and recounts his travels around the world, as he retraces the odysseys of plants he first discovered as a boy on family trips to some of the soaring peaks in Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range.

Read more:
- Yu Chih Chieh: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/authors_info.php?id=382
- The Odyssey of Taiwan’s Montane Plants: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/books_info.php?id=421

Growing Up in a Tree Hollow is a collection of literary essays by a gay Truku Indigenous farmer-intellectual named Apyang Imiq. The collection can be characterized as a personal and ethnographic memoir: after obtaining a master’s degree at Taiwan’s top graduate school of geography in 2011, Apyang Imiq stayed in Taipei for a few years after graduation, but never felt at home there; so he decided mid-decade to return home to the village of Ciyakang on the east coast, to turn himself into a farmer, and to chronicle Truku life past and present.

Six of the 27 essays in the collection won him recognition at the Mandarin-language Indigenous literary awards from 2015 to 2020. The rest were completed on a composition grant awarded in 2020. Published in May 2021 by Chiu Ko, the collection won Apyang Imiq a best new author award at the 2021 Taiwan Literature Awards at the end of October. The author has made a coherent whole of the essays by arranging them into three sections, about labor, local geography, and cultural development respectively, and via a leitmotif: overcoming Marxist “alienation”.

As he later realized, he was alienated from his culture growing up. His ancestors were hunters, but as a boy he couldn’t tell a muntjac from Bambi.[*] When he started feeling alienated from his hometown as a graduate student, he decided to set off on a quest for roots. He’d hunted for a job as a college graduate, now he hunted with an old-fashioned muzzle-loaded rifle in his own hunting ground. He’d eaten hamburgers made of beef from Brazil, now he planted millet and raised chickens on his own plot of land. He’d worn t-shirts made of Xinjiang cotton, now he spun ramie fiber into yarn, which he wove into garments of his own design. Raised on Disney and Doraemon and later on Stephen Chow, he now turned his attention to the larger-than-life Truku characters, both living and dead, in his community. Growing up speaking Mandarin, he took a Truku language class and began using his ancestral language in daily life.

He also uses Truku in his essays. By the end of the collection, the reader will have built up a basic Truku vocabulary, including the words for mother/female, father/male, grandmother, grandfather, tree, hollow, name, river, bird’s nest fern, pigeon pea, millet, banana, betel nut, hoe/work, work-share, house/home, wind/spirit, ancestral spirit, boulder, stone/rock, other shore, path/road, boundaries (both personal and territorial), body/flesh (of his crops, of prey animals, and of his boyfriend), penis/dick, vagina/snatch, and culture/morality.

He dwells on the derivations of some of these terms to develop a vocabulary for overcoming alienation in Truku. Powda, the word for ritual pig slaughter derives from the verb mowda, meaning to go along or across. When there isn’t an owda, a way, to mowda, people make one, and when the state puts up a “No Thru Road” sign, they ignore it. The author traces the river that flows along the village, a metaphor for his investigations of tribal history. Along the way, he has to cross the water, which to him represents both same-sex desire and the flood of opinion about its supposedly antisocial effects. He ultimately makes it across the yayung, the river, to the sipaw, the other side. His step-father, who was horrified when he came out of the closet on social media, eventually helps him repair the pipe that draws water from the river to irrigate his field. The last essay is about a powda held to celebrate a same-sex union on this bank of this river – the Rangah Qhuni, literally “tree hollow”, an image he associates with freedom, shelter, and eros: the hollow is an open space, a refuge for a drowned classmate, and the crack of his boyfriend’s ass.

In ending the collection with this riverside powda, Apyang Imiq suggests that he has gotten himself and his boyfriend woven, tminun, into the local social fabric. As represented in the collection, the social fabric of Ciyakang is constantly changing as local people weave their own and alien threads into a new garment. The author’s grandmother participated in the process by reweaving a woolen sweater she had received from an American missionary into a shawl decorated with a traditional pattern, the dowriq utux, the eyes of the ancestors, keeping watch on the living to see that they are living according to the all-encompassing gift economy of Gaya, meaning morality or cultural tradition.

The author has a piquant sense of kari, speech or language, which, as he notes, sounds like “curry”. He spices up his Mandarin style with Truku syntactic patterns, for instance a title that might be translated: “Shoot that bhring(spirit, vital energy)-filled gun of yours at me.” He also has a taste for irony, particularly as concerns interethnic and intergenerational relations. When archaeologists turn up jades on a nearby hilltop, they get the dig declared off limits to the local descendants of the people who, several hundred years ago, traded for the jades. Bird’s nest fern is associated with Taiwanese Indigenous cuisine, but it used to be a famine food and is now only cultivated in Indigenous villages like Ciyakang as a cash crop to sell to Han Taiwanese and Japanese gourmands. A previous generation of Han Taiwanese agronomists convinced local farmers to use pesticides and herbicides, and now a new generation, of do-gooders, comes to persuade them to go organic; the only organic farmer in Ciyakang, Apyang Imiq hears from his elders about how he is going about it all wrong until he harvests his first bumper crop. Having pursued Taiwan-style middle-class aspirations – his step-dad is a retired local official, his mother an insurance agent – his church-going parents enjoy lecturing him about “Truku tradition”, but the tradition that they claim was hostile to homosexuality turns out to be anything but: when the author discovers that hagay, meaning something like fag, homo, or sissy, was originally the word for shaman, the villager who communicated with the utux, the ancestral spirits, he reclaims it by translating it affirmatively as two-spirit person.

A modern-day shaman, Apyang Imiq is a cultural translator, in the sense that he is well aware that most of his readers are not Indigenous. The fact that the collection is written partly or mainly for a Han Taiwanese audience speaks to its translatability into English. But what is the potential market for an English translation of the collection? As a collection of literary essays, it might not have the reach of novels about gay Indigeneity like Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich, or Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway, but it should appeal to readers interested in Indigenous issues around the world, and could appear in a list of must-read queer essay collections compiled by anyone committed to diversity and inclusivity. As the essays in the collection can be read in isolation, they could easily be anthologized. Scholars of Indigenous literature around the world like Qwo-Li Driskill and Daniel Heath Justice could study it and more importantly assign it, or essays from it, in college courses. It should have a particularly strong appeal in Hawaii and New Zealand, English-speaking territories with Austronesian peoples, the native Hawaiians and Māori, who are distant relatives of Taiwan’s Indigenous First Nations.

The book is a collection of short essays about the author’s father, who was a spirit medium in a small town in Taiwan. Vaguely reminiscent of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Autumn, the book reads as an intimate letter of the author to her father, an introspective search for his life and a reflection on the author’s own self and her increasingly complex relationship with her father.

The book consists of independent non-fiction short essays about different aspects of her father’s life. These include, but are not limited to, the author’s own childhood, her father’s relationship with her, his relationship with his other relatives and friends, the people who went to his father in order to ask questions to the spirits, and how her father’s sensitiveness towards the spiritual world affected both his life and that of his family. Each of the essays focuses on one topic, with the question “Who is my father?” as the leading thread connecting all of them. It is not so much about the job of her father as a spirit medium than about his role as a father and his attitude towards life, written from the perspective of a daughter and a woman.

Written in a simple and plain style, with not many cultural references that are hard to understand for foreign audiences, the author reflects upon the role of the father in a family and his relationship with its members, especially herself. This is the real starting point of the book, whereas the fact that the author’s father is a spirit medium seems to be an incidental detail trying to attract the reader – in fact, this is not an aspect that is dealt with in a very profound way throughout the essays, which focus instead on anecdotes of daily life. The book is a beautiful account of the relationship between a daughter and her father, and about a man’s life. One could argue that the book serves as the link between the author and her father, in the same way that her father is as a link between the spirits and the people, giving answers to their worries.

The main appeal of this book is perhaps the psychological deepness of the character that the author manages to build – by dissecting her father’s personality and her own relationship with him, the reader can catch glimpses of a man that has always been a mystery for the author. Apart from that, foreign readers may also find exotic the author’s account of life in rural Taiwan and Chinese traditional beliefs, as opposed to modern societies, as well as the life of people belonging to a very different cultural background. On a different note, fans of Karl Jung’s work might find the stories about the author’s dreams and the divine particularly appealing. In short, this book makes for slow, introspective reading.

Read more:
- Lin Che Li: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/authors_info.php?id=380
- Hosting the Divine: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/books_info.php?id=419

The Disaster Intervention Agent is a page-turning fantasy novel about a daughter looking to absolve her estranged father of a crime he may not have committed, the exploration of emotional ties, and combating environmental disaster from one of Taiwan’s hottest young fantasy writers. With the epic scope of Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings and the dystopian gaze of Jasper Fforde, it tells of the psyche of how traumas shape people even in unusual circumstances. This layered mystery that relies on reasoning out interspersed clues fits general and fantasy audiences.

Natural occurrences called Disaster plague the city of Taipei. Science cannot explain what these disasters are exactly, but we know that they are caused by an energy called KING.

Chung Hui is an unemployed young girl living alone in the City of Taipei, estranged from her painter father after the death of her mother, who died due to the outbreak of a disaster ten years ago. She loses her home in a minor disaster, forcing her to go to her father to ask him for shelter. She learns that there have been numerous strange cases of teenagers disappearing recently. Witnesses claim that the victims were all brought into a white fog and vanished by a criminal the tabloids call the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Shih-fei, a student of Chung Hui’s father, ask to meet Chung Hui to share what she’s learnt about the identity of the Piper, but vanished when she arrived. Chung Hui and her father are dragged to the police station, where a pale woman in black suddenly appears and announces that she will be taking over the case. She is a member of the Countermeasures Unit, and she has an offer for Chung Hui – join her team to track down and uncover the true identity of the Piper.

The author uses familiar themes and images in modern society and puts her own spin to them. There is a subtle weaving of the theme of family and its influence on self-identity, allowing the concept of family relations be both a background and key concept of the story. There is no true good or bad people, except a few bad ones, and there is no standard answer to the making of a decision.

The plot builds slowly. There is a lack of information in the beginning, and the clues that explain the state of the world are interspersed in conversations, interactions, reminiscences, conflicts, and narratives for the reader to piece everything together in the end. The reader witnesses the growth of the characters in the story as they reconcile themselves with the past by sharing, and understanding each other.

It presents the city of Taipei in a different light, and those familiar with the setting will be delighted to see it featured. The long build-up and scattered telling of the story requires more focused reading, especially with its length. On the other hand, when all the groundwork has been laid, the reader will be fully immersed in the plot and characters and gain an understanding of them that will allow them to sympathize, and see reflections of humanity in them.

Read more:
- Xerses: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/authors_info.php?id=112
- The Disaster Intervention Agent: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/books_info.php?id=418

The novel starts off with a nameless boy adrift at sea in a dugout canoe, starving and wasting away with no land in sight. He’s visited by an apparition of a Formosan clouded leopard who, upon the boy’s agreeing to paddle in the direction of a massive typhoon, hands him a cylindrical piece of jade. On shore, Tailas, the daughter of the chieftain of Hacying village, Kataw, is at the house of Yafo, the leader of the tribe’s hunting party and hunter training. Her father rushes over and tells Yafo that his daughter, Pana, has gone missing and a hunt for her ensues. Yafo finds her at the beach, a taboo place for their people. She keeps calling out that there’s a boy in the water and convinces Yafo to go off into the waves to rescue a boy in the surf, just barely clinging to life. The boy is rescued but slowly regains consciousness days later only to say in his newly acquired language that he is Vali, the deceased son of Pana. He’s clutching the jade cylinder which has a huge significance for Yafo.  

After describing the first few weeks and months of adjustment to his new life after the new Vali comes ashore, the novel fast-forwards by five years to a crisis. Vali is out hunting, and after successfully hunting a prize deer, he’s surprised by Tailas. Suddenly though, things aren’t right when they then stumble upon a corpse-walker who isn’t supposed to have crossed over the river from the “valley of death”. The appearance of such a heinous creature is a harbinger of things not right in the (super)natural world. They escape and warn Yafo and a select few others who then form a search party to confirm the sighting.

Matters only get worse as more people begin to disappear and the villagers realize that more corpse-walkers are crossing over the river. What’s worse is they realize the corpse-walkers are impervious to regular weapons. Weapons disintegrate at the slightest touch of the corpse-walkers – until they figure out that jade, or the tears of the Earth Goddess, are just one of two ways to vanquish these ghouls, the other being water. There’s just one problem though – Hacying village has no jade of its own, and the village, under duress and ever-increasing walker incursions. A battle ensues where the three generations of sorceresses in the village, Tailas among them, conjure a seven-day flood to keep the shambling corpse-walkers at bay. After this battle and the rescue of the village with several tragic deaths, the elders of Hacying Village decide that they must trade their rice with the Deep Valley settlement to replenish their jade weapon supplies. The village sends off an entourage to trade with their allies in the Deep Valley tribe, but on their way, are ambushed by the not-so-friendly head-hunting raiding parties of the Giant Stone tribe. Problems ensue when love trysts and younger, unhappy villagers who contest Yafo and disbelieve his tales of the coming of the corpse-walkers. More tragedies strike again. The entourage races back to Hacying village with little time left to spare before Hacying is overrun by the corpse-walkers. A miracle occurs though when Vali joins in with Tailas, and the other shamans to invoke their ancestor’s protector spirits – clouded leopards.

To paraphrase the author’s own words, she wanted to bring light to a part of Taiwan’s neolithic history through the creation of a fantasy version of a village belonging to the Beinan culture that existed near Taitung, in southeastern Taiwan from between 5,200 to 2,300 years ago. One of the hallmarks of this prehistoric culture are the adornments fashioned from jade. One of the underlying messages, written a handful of times by Kuzuha, is the idea of greed and its consequences. At the end of the novel, she writes that the “corpse-walkers” are those ancients who were punished for their own attempts at gaining immortality and an insatiable greed; their punishment being turned into corpses that feast on living flesh, siphoning off the spirits of the living at the simplest touch; this is contrasted starkly with those who accept their own mortality and are blessed with eternal slumber, being transformed into clouded leopard spirits, meant to be awakened in times of crisis such as with the coming of the corpse-walkers. On a related note, Kuzuha’s world-making also includes support for environmentalism and an undercurrent of resistance to over-consumption is present throughout Kuzuha’s work. Sustainability, not taking more than what’s needed, and recognition of limits are present throughout the book.

Apart from conceptualization of the consequences of greed, the novel presents ample examples of our heroine, Tailas, standing up for herself and breaking all the rules that would normally be enforced and limit any other girl. My one disappointment is that even though her grandmother explains to Tailas that everyone in Hacying knows she’s better than all the boys in so many ways, she still pushes her granddaughter into the role of the future sorceress for the tribe and this may reinforce a concept that nobody can really escape their lot in life and must play out the fate that accompanies one’s status at birth. To be sure though, several times throughout the novel, Kuzuha writes scenes where Tailas plays a decisive role or proves martial prowess just as well as, if not better than the male characters. The focus on matriarchy is also something worth noting, and this is a reference not just to Taiwan’s Indigenous context but within the global historical context as well. From distant antiquity and beyond around the globe, matriarchy has been theorized to have been the main trend, only shifting away to patriarchal systems beginning within the last couple thousands of years. Many Indigenous Taiwanese have long had matriarchal hierarchies even up to the present moment, and Kuzuha’s writing is a sort of homage back to that. Within Hacying village, and their allies deep in the mountains, the sorceresses in particular play an all-important role within the succession of the tribe. Whomever marries the sorceress in these societies becomes the next chief. In many ways, Tailas reminds me of the heroine from the Studio Ghibli classic, Princess Mononoke – regal, puissant, courageous, and dutiful, tasked with an impossible mission.

While most of the fighting in the novel are nondescript mentions of corpse-walkers being pierced in the skull or chest with jade tipped spears, the most memorable description of martial acumen to me is the fight between Yafo and Poyak, the next chief-to be from the Deep Gorge tribe from where the jade for Hacying’s survival is precariously sourced. The two, old master and young buck, fight off against each other in a duel using spears following Poyak’s arrogance and grave misunderstanding about the jade trade the elders of the tribe have permitted, as he aims to stop the entourage from Hacying from returning to their village with their hard-negotiated deal. I’m a big fan of martial arts novels and this work heavily reminded me of several of the fight scenes in Yoshikawa Eiji’s Musashi. Although not a long-standing rivalry to the extent between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro, the suspense from Kuzuha’s writing gave me a lot of joy when reading the descriptions of dodges and feigns, and the ultimate surprise ending of the fight.

For those readers searching for a work that reminds them of martial arts novels of yore with supernatural twists, this book is for you! If prehistorically set survival stories are your niche, this story is your jam! If you’re searching for strong female characters, you can’t miss this book!

Read more:
- Kuzuha: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/authors_info.php?id=379
- Vali: The Lost Story of Taiwan: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/books_info.php?id=417

A Subtle Foundation in Eastern Philosophy

Skin Deep has all the favorite sci-fi tropes – a future where a hi-tech invention changes every aspect of life; where technology is omnipresent and all-powerful; where the world is harsh, cold and lonely; where the big tech firm and the government come head to head. But these aren’t what make the novel refreshing, nor are they the beating heart of the story. It is the debates and discussions of life, death, time, existence, memory, parallel universe, the real, the virtual, the soul, the body, the consciousness, the will, the self, perception, identity and more within the structure of hard science fiction and a thriller that makes the book stand out.

As the best-known science fiction classics originate from Europe and the US, they are inevitably steep in “Western” mentalities and concerns, inspired by the turbulence and trauma of the 20th century – the decline of imperialism, the reality of colonialism, the horror of war, the threat of annihilation – and their underlying worldview are informed by the relatively dualistic nature of monotheistic Abrahamic religions. As such, risking gross generalization here, many are stories of Us Against Them (be it aliens, AI, the powerful, etc) and “Them” are always the Other – “They” are not just different, but often the opposite of “Us” (usually humans) in terms of values and beliefs, thus threatening and menacing.

Whereas for Isaac Hsu, although grew up on a diet of the Western sci-fi classics, the outlooks and points of view he explores in Skin Deep are “Eastern” at the core, though these influences are never overtly stated or name-checked. His AI creations are not feared because of their ability to approximate human behaviors, emotions and thought processes – in fact, their humanity and intelligence are cherished and encouraged. It is human greed and the grapple for power that poses threats to their existence and tries to corrupt their sympathetic nature.

Hsu’s view of the world is also not absolute or in a dichotomy. One of the biggest revelation in the story is that Z-Yee is G-Na’s AI training subject, upturning every assumption the reader has made, and he continues to drop hints up until the end of the book, pushing the reader to rethink what is real and what is virtual and what is genuine and what is in existence. In this, it feels certain that the author is drawing from Chinese philosophy as well as Buddhism – whether consciously or subconsciously – including the allegory of Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly, which spurs the thinker to question whether it was he who dreamt of becoming a butterfly, or whether it was the butterfly who dreamt of becoming him. This ever-shifting perception is also at the heart of Buddhist beliefs, for there is never just one viewpoint, one world, one absolute; there are always overlapping multiples; and no-one has the full view of anything because nothing is constant and unchanging.

A Comment on Beauty and Appearance

The defining technology of the story – the liveskin suit – is a powerful comment on modern society’s obsession with beauty, the pressure of putting the best face forward at all cost, and the desire to chase after the beauty standard of the day. In the story, the definition of female beauty is represented by a celebrity called Sister Apple, and there are faces throughout the story that resembles hers, including the character Apple, who is named thus because of the similar appearance.

Other than purchasing expensive technology to mask the real self, in the additional conversations between G-Na/Apple and Z-Yee after the end of the novel, there are also speculations that wearers of liveskin are taking plastic surgery to create the best bone structure for optimization. And cosmetic procedures – to replicate the common notion of beauty (often represented by celebrities) or to get closer to the airbrushed effect of filters on photo apps – are increasingly common practice today, especially in Asia.

The author also touches on the blurring of reality and make-believe in the pursuit of beauty, and by extension, fantasized expectations of gender behaviors. Z-Yee, being a teenage boy, shapes the AI G-Na in the image of the dream woman in his fantasy, which is part informed by anime, giving her the unrealistic Barbie-like combination of huge bust and tiny waist, big doe eyes that are disproportion to the face, a kittenish voice and inviting mannerism. And in Z-Yee’s “real world” these features can become a reality with changing legislation of liveskin. The reactions of Z-Yee to G-Na’s physical allure – sometimes sparked off by a mere change of outfit – are poignant observations of the today’s objectifying gaze towards women as perpetuated by popular media, as well as the awkwardness of the average-looking person in a society obsessed with beauty and youth.

A Contemplation on Life, Death and Loss

The most distinctive feature about Skin Deep is its ability to meld substantial discussions of heavy philosophical or existential subjects with the thrill of unravelling a mystery – the plot to assassinate the President. The two AI training programs – Z-Yee’s mentorship of G-Na, and G-Na’s coaching of her mysterious student – unwittingly play the key role in trying to overcome the base code in AIs that forbids them to harm humans, and the intended result is for G-Na to murder the President. Part of the conditioning to kill is for G-Na to understand death and betrayal, and the process begins with the Corporation forcing Z-Yee to choose between the two AIs he has been training, G-Na and B-Li. He has to decide which one can continue to live in the virtual Manor world, while the other will be deleted from the system. The disappearance of B-Li makes G-Na challenges Z-Yee, and they debate on the possibility of bringing back or traveling back to the past, on dealing with loss, on clinging onto memory, on the origin of life, sentient and the “soul”, and these considerations are expended further in the three short stories and conversations between Z-Yee and G-Na/Apple at the conclusion of the novel.

A Short, Engaging Novel to be Savored

With such serious subjects, it is natural to assume that the book may not be the most diverting, but in fact, Isaac Hsu’s writing is engaging and sparkling. He expounds on these weighty discussions with a light touch that one feels compelled to whisk through the short chapters – fascinated by the conversations while eager to find out the mysterious of the worlds the characters are in. Hsu does live up to his reputation as one of the foremost sci-fi writers from Taiwan with his skilled and effortless balancing of plot and concepts. The experience of reading Skin Deep recalls watching films like Inception, Synecdoche, New York, or The Truman Show – your heart is hammering to the excitement on screen while your head is spinning to catch up with the bursts of ideas. It is a novel that invites more than one reading.

Read more:
- Isaac Hsu: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/authors_info.php?id=321
- Skin Deep: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/books_info.php?id=416