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Synopsis

Recent college graduate An-chun returns from Japan to Taiwan, having cut short his year-long trip of working short-term gigs abroad. He has had his heart broken by Emiko, the young woman set to inherit the hallowed wagashi (traditional Japanese pastry) shop, Han Shun Toh, where An-chun was working. Lovelorn, An-chun retreats to his mother’s home in Taichung without any plans for his future.

This lack of purpose has been the plight of An-chun’s life. He was a middling student who never felt the drive to exert himself for the sake of achieving a goal, and chose to major in Japanese largely because he enjoyed reading manga. The only constant in his life is a blog that he started in college, “A Wanderer’s Diary”, where he shares his experiences working a variety of part-time jobs and maintains an enthusiastic readership that resonates with his sense of aimlessness.

An-chun’s mother, tired of his idleness and indecision, forces him to go help out at Yang Tze Tang, the traditional Taiwanese pastry shop that has been passed down from An-chun’s great-grandfather to his great-uncle. The shop was once famous, but has fallen out of favor with modern Taiwanese tastes, which prefer Japanese or Western desserts and find the malt sugar of the traditional suncakes too sweet. It doesn’t help that Great-Uncle has a notoriously bad temper, which makes it difficult for Yang Tze Tang to retain staff.

As An-chun adjusts to the grueling work at Yang Tze Tang, he reminisces over his time at Han Shun Toh, the Kyoto pastry shop that has an even longer history and even stricter traditions. Master Imanishi, owner of Han Shun Toh, initially rejected An-chun’s application outright because he isn’t Japanese, but Madame Imanishi was convinced that having Mandarin- and English-speaking An-chun would be an asset in tourist-heavy Kyoto. An-chun thus became Han Shun Toh’s first employee who wasn’t from a wagashi-making background, and the first such person to appear in the life of Emiko, the Imanishis’ only daughter.

When they met, Emiko was struggling to earn her father’s approval as a wagashi master. Wagashi-making involves crafting original pastries for every season, and while Emiko’s creations are beautiful, Master Imanishi insisted that they were only imitations and lacked Emiko’s individuality. An-chun encouraged Emiko, suggesting that she try seeing Kyoto through the eyes of a tourist and discover new delights in the city that she took for granted. The two grew attached.

Noticing this, the Han Shun Toh staff told An-chun that Emiko was engaged to the son of another wagashi-making family. When An-chun confessed his feelings to Emiko and asked her to travel with him, she declared that she was choosing Han Shun Toh and wagashi over him. Before he left Kyoto, she created a wagashi cake for him that communicated the poignancy of their relationship: she had found her own voice as a wagashi master.

Now, in Taichung, An-chun tries to help revitalize Yang Tze Tang, urging Great-Uncle to accept an interview from a young reporter, Pin-hsin, at a popular magazine. With Pin-hsin’s encouragement, An-chun toils away to learn the craft, but still feels that he hasn’t earned the right to inherit the shop from Great-Uncle whenever others suggest it. His unworthiness seems confirmed when Great-Uncle agrees for Yang Tze Tang to compete in a pastry competition for the first time, but An-chun fails to win a prize.

Meanwhile, An-chun has uncovered the origin story behind Great-Uncle’s temper. Great-Uncle had fallen in love with a girl from a wealthy family while he was a high school dropout learning his trade, but the whole family had disappeared without a word. One day, this long-lost love sends a postcard to Yang Tze Tang: she’d seen Great-Uncle in Pin-hsin’s magazine article. She now lives in Japan, and An-chun insists that Great-Uncle go look for her. With An-chun acting as interpreter and guide, Great-Uncle gets closure. They also visit Han Shun Toh, where Great-Uncle is impressed by the Imanishis’ commitment to their family business.

Despite the attention garnered by Pin-hsin’s article, it becomes apparent that Yang Tze Tang can’t sustain itself in its current business model. When the question becomes whether to change or to close down, Great-Uncle chooses the latter. Han Shun Toh showed him that inheritance isn’t something that he should impose on An-chun without having laid the groundwork for An-chun’s success. After Yang Tze Tang announces its closing date, customers pour in for one last taste. An-chun leverages his blog to share stories about the store’s final days, immortalizing Yang Tze Tang in his own way. He starts a new journey to travel Taiwan, and is inspired to write about it in both Mandarin and Japanese.

Evaluation

This is a cozy novel that, despite its romantic setting in ancient cities and pastry shops, addresses the malaise of youth and contemporary life. It grapples with the idea of the family business, both the rigid and limiting aspects of this burden as well as how it can truly be a life purpose that ensures the longevity of a culture’s traditions. Through this, it also contrasts young people who aren’t able to find a calling with young people who have a calling forced upon them, questioning whether people really get to “choose their destiny” in their work and life.

The answer, according to the novel, seems to be that they don’t. Great-Uncle found his calling in traditional pastry, but not so much because he loved it as because he hated school and preferred helping his father. Emiko has always worked hard toward inheriting, but admits that she didn’t know whether she actually liked wagashi until she met An-chun. Pin-hsin the journalist tells An-chun that she also stumbled into the profession; she’d been in Sales but liked listening to her clients’ stories, and her supervisor switched her into Reporting. Everybody seems to commit to their professions through trial and error.

An-chun’s aimlessness is the extreme case of this. There are plenty of clues throughout the book on what his strengths are: the Imanishi family tells him that, linguistically and culturally, he is an invaluable interpreter between Han Shun Toh and its diverse visitors; the other Yang Tze Tang staff tell him that he has helped bridge the generational and emotional gap between Great-Uncle and others; he writes a popular blog that brings together different people who feel lost; he falls in love with Pin-hsin, a journalist. However, nothing clicks for An-chun. It is only at the very end, while on another aimless journey, that he meets a child who talks to him about how important bridges are and finally has the revelation that his calling is to be a bridge between Taiwan and Japan, writing in both languages. There is a slight sense of anticlimax in the revelation given the earlier clues.

But the book’s goal is not to shock the reader with twists, nor is it to wrench their hearts with true tragedy. Instead, it quietly addresses the disillusionment of youth without ever despairing in it, always maintaining a lightness of touch and an admiration for people going through their day-to-day lives. It is a “slice-of-life” story especially popular in Taiwan and Japan, comparable to Days At The Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa, and the popular series Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawagushi (minus the time travel element).

Following the conventions of the slice-of-life genre, all characters have cautiously optimistic endings despite the blow of losing the beloved shop. An-chun fills the hole that Emiko left with his affection for Pin-hsin and finally finds his own ambition, Great-Uncle seems content in retirement, and all the other Yang Tze Tang staff successfully find suitable work. Though there is no dramatic climax of An-chun miraculously saving the family business that he knew almost nothing about at the beginning of the novel, the bittersweet realism is in a way more encouraging to a reader who, like An-chun, will continue searching for purpose and meaning after this particular story ends.

The opening chapter resembles the start of a movie: the corpse of a pretty young girl lies in a peach orchard; whiteness, blood stains, blossom and the naked body create a strange beauty, accompanied by a growing sense of dread. With crisp and flowing imagistic writing, Chen Xue’s new crime fiction sets the scene for a serial murder investigation that spans many years. This becomes the core of a story that revolves around several key figures involved in this first murder, approached at the level of human nature, paying equal attention to the protagonists’ emotional lives and the narrative of events, each character experiencing a hard growing dogged by their own particular demons to become closed and lonely adults. Years pass, then fate brings these people back to where it all began to look for clarity about the cruel and poignant truth behind that bloody murder and in a search for a way out in their own lives.

Of the threesome of friends back then, Ting Hsiao-Chuan, Sung Tung-Nien, and Chou Chia-Chun, one has died in the flower of her youth, leaving behind her first love who blames himself overmuch, and a best friend who is now universally known as “the murderer’s daughter”. Fourteen years have sped by, but nothing is over just because the case was so hastily closed. Sung Tung-Nien has chosen the life of a policeman, a zombie-like existence revolving entirely around his work. Chou Chia-Chun has undergone a total transformation to become industry-leading crime feature writer Li Hai-Yen, forever seeking answers in the tragedies of others, answers about tragedy, about grief and about survival.

The Line Between Good and Evil

A detective novel such as this, proceeding from an exploration of human nature, is bound to challenge its readers’ moral compasses. Right and wrong, good and evil, light and shade, life and death, beauty and ugliness, love and hate; everything exists as oppositions, but in Don’t Die Again, everyone involved has their own way of thinking and has been living in a gray zone of ambiguity for a long time; only by escaping the fetters of conventional views will they be able to dig down to the truth about their real feelings.

In the case of Li Hai-Yen and her desire for clarity on all the unanswered questions in her life, for example her father and his supposed suicide out of guilt for his crimes, she finds the most practical approach to be voluntarily coming into contact with criminals and seeking to understand them, attempting to see the way the world works from their point of view. For Sung Tung-Nien, no amount of solving cases can work away the clot still lodged in his heart; nowhere can he find a path to his own redemption, and he is utterly consumed by a sense of powerlessness in the face of death. Also, one of the things “emotional realist” writing seeks to achieve, beyond just telling us who the murderer was, is an exploration of the motive for the crime and the presentation of a more complete truth. The choice is to explore causes and influences at the psychological level and to shine a light into the shadow cast by social and environmental factors.

By and large, tragedy occurs not due to any single cause but as the result of a whole chain of misfortunes. Each person is always the protagonist of their own story in what actually happens, and each has their own version of the truth and their own way of responding to the world. By showing us the roads each of her core characters have come down, Chen Xue presents a thorough and well-ordered account of how the process of growing up and the environment that takes place in shape the particular qualities of a person’s character.

Traumatic Memory

In this book, Chen Xue once again explores the major theme of traumatic memory through the medium of genre fiction. Sung Tung-Nien and Li Hai-Yen have both suffered profoundly because of the darkness in their childhoods and the murder, the effects revealing themselves in various aspects of their characters such as their silence and closed-off natures. They struggle on alone, doing all they can to forget, but are constantly being pulled back into the past, their lives in a stagnant state that began when they were sixteen, flipping back and forth between repression and avoidance. However, with some good fortune, the workings of love and fate mean they are no longer compelled to suffer the pain of making a fresh start all alone. Li Hai-Yen cracks the icy seal that has kept Sung Tung-Nien’s heart frozen for so long, and Sung in his turn proves time and again through his actions that he is eager and determined to make a go of building a life together. It is a healing moment during which they can genuinely appreciate the truth of the maxim that “no man is an island”.

Love Is Always Mightier Than Hate

The meaning of this crime fiction’s title, Don’t Die Again, is made manifest in the way that love remains the only answer even where, during the course of these serial murders, terrible crimes have been committed and indelible marks left on the soul. Which is why, even after a separation that has lasted many years, Li Yen-Hai and Sun Tung-Nien each still plays the part of only possible savior for the other; never, from their childhood years onward, have they known the security of being loved and cared for, always driven and controlled by their emotional wishful thinking, yet how many times does it turn out to be the case that true love is not about what you do, but what you don’t do?

In the gap between getting and not getting, we catch a glimpse of love’s power to destroy and simultaneous power to make good, the complexity that has been a theme Chen Xue repeatedly explores in her fiction. Li Hai-Yen comes to sense that love and suffering are also like this, amorphous and impervious to clear understanding. Sometimes when two people are on a journey together and have already been through so much, they will not fear for the future even if it promises only more hard trials and long nights. If all before has only been a world of darkness, then when a beam shines to cut through the night, be it never so weak or fleeting, then the light can defeat the dark and the travelers win through to a new life, testimony to the beauty and meaningfulness of sorrow.

The hard-working geniuses of Spent Bullets ought to have ideal lives by the standards of any meritocracy. After attending the best schools in Taiwan, they gain employment in big tech, recognized around the world as the pinnacle of career prestige, but we do not see the rewards for their achievements. Instead, the book is focused on the grotesque contortions of psyches shaped by such hyper-competitive systems, where one’s capacity for suffering is among the most important measures of worth.

Set mainly in Taipei and the San Francisco Bay Area through the past two decades, Terao Tetsuya’s debut work of fiction consists of nine linked stories (or chapters) with a recurring set of characters and converging plot lines. The stories switch between different first-person perspectives, and it is not until the eighth chapter that their identities are all confirmed. A re-reading of the book, which is under 250 pages, highlights the author’s ability to balance between delicately withheld information and stunning revelations.

“Terao Tetsuya” is a pen name inspired by characters from two manga series: Over Drive’s Terao Kōichi, who supports the main characters in their ambitions to be cycling champions, and Kuroko Tetsuya from Kuroko’s Basketball, who is content to be a “shadow” that helps his teammates shine. This combination might hint at how Terao the author sees his role, having experienced proximity to genius as a student on the competitive programming team at NTU and as a Google software engineer.

The black hole at the center of his book is Chieh-Heng, the prodigy who can show up three hours late to a programming competition and still win. His peers enjoy remarking on his comical aloofness and incomprehensible quirks: Chieh-Heng prefers his yogurt unsweetened and with a pinch of salt. He only keeps one song on his MP3 player, which he listens to on repeat. In the three chapters told from his perspective, we see Chieh-Heng’s own bafflement at the neurotypical expectations for socializing and emotional expression. Chieh-Heng never finds a sense of belonging, but it’s not for lack of trying. He bends himself and diminishes his individuality to try to fit in. Within the same week, he goes from an ex-gay support group to a meet-up for gay Taiwanese men in the Bay Area, but he fails to connect because of other people’s fear, misunderstanding, resentment, and obsessive adoration of him.

Mostly, Chieh-Heng does what school and work expect of him. His most vital deviation from these rigid systems is his years-long sadomasochistic power exchange with classmate Wu Yi-Hsiang, a tormentor turned lover who offers a thin tether to reality. Their relationship establishes an early and continuing conflict. Wu Yi-Hsiang is fascinated by Chieh-Heng’s inscrutable intelligence and, with an anxious need to please, carefully tends to Chieh-Heng’s desire to be debased and made into nothing. But Wu Yi-Hsiang is also frustrated by Chieh-Heng’s apathy and seeming inability to communicate emotionally. As their sex grows increasingly meaningless, the sub is shown to hold the real power over the dom.

None of these dynamics are stated directly, and a different reader may come up with different conclusions. While Chieh-Heng and Wu Yi-Hsiang are both first-person narrators, their stories are recounted from a cold distance. Such a detached style reflects how they have been trained to be calm under pressure from a young age. Their subtle dialogues are aligned with the “iceberg theory”, which leaves much unsaid while gesturing toward certain truths. The prose often turns to qualities of light and shadow. The California sun is “bright and vapid”, and in another instance, “orange like free detergent from the on-site laundry room”. In the heart of a desert city, “spotlights of innumerable colors” give form “for a few fleeting seconds to jets of water that have no business being here in the first place”. At times, the lens zooms in: zippers on a fly are interlocked tooth by tooth “like a greedy snake biting its own tail”, and a face is adorned with “a row of freckles like an inkjet printer ad”. Partly for this cinematic quality, Spent Bullets is now being adapted into a movie by Each Other Films, a company based in Taipei. The sense of uncertainty in the visual descriptions also highlights the theme of how impossible it is to truly understand another person.

The steady, deadpan sentences also allow for unexpected strikes of humor. In the opening story, a boy can’t stop scratching at his itchy face even though he is about to get peed on by his classmates in a rite of humiliation: “Dead skin flaked off his skin as though he were a giant shiitake mushroom dispersing spores into the wind.” Later in the book, after saying their wedding vows in English at a notary in Vegas, a gay man declares in Chinese to his newlywed lesbian wife, “I don’t love you.” She replies, “Me too.”

Much of this comedy is born out of the absurdity of striving. After visiting a classmate hospitalized for her suicide attempt, Wu Yi-Hsiang vows to make a lot of money as compensation for their lost youths and self-destructive habits. But despite all the six-figure salaries and stock options that come their way, there is no description of indulgence in luxury other than a pool with added sea salt to imitate the smell of vacation and a strip club in which “grease from one face is smeared onto another” via the dancer’s breasts. To save money, characters would rather drive than fly from San Francisco to Vegas. Instead of gourmet meals, they eat at Panda Express: “Chinese food as pictured in the American imagination”. The most pride a character ever feels is when they snag a free washing machine at the office, having stuck an “out of order” note on it the night before.

Aside from the thrill of gun ownership and a heightened sense of social alienation, the characters behave no differently in America than they would in Taiwan. In Tsung-su’s short story “Want to Fly” (1976), an important text in the lineage of tongzhi literature, the Taiwanese protagonist goes to study in America, excited by its promises of liberation, only to find himself becoming an exploited laborer. Three-and-a-half decades later, the characters of Spent Bullets must have no illusions about how Silicon Valley would be a mere extension of the oppressive machinery that they’d endured all along.

On their annual trip to Vegas to commemorate Chieh-Heng’s death, Wu Yi-Hsiang asks his friend Ming-Heng whether he’d choose the same path again, from grueling preparations for exams in high school to their miserable jobs. Ming-Heng says yes, acknowledging that nothing about their lives would change. This obstinacy is one of the book’s great puzzles. It seems that in the depths of despair, they have seen something about the world that they would not wish to unlearn. The book opens with a suicide, but it ends with another character’s choice to go on living: to bear patiently the burdens of their fate, but also to bear the memory of the beloved, like a bullet in a glass case that will never tarnish.

Read previous part: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/latest_info.php?id=263

Last year also saw the release of Books from Taiwan recommended selections Tender Is the Night and Island Rhapsody, both of which also involved unique cross-media collaborations.

Tender Is the Night, a collection of short comics written by author Chien Li-Ying and illustrated by comic artist Huihui, won high accolades in the Taiwan’s market. Previously known for her stage plays, Chien once again came into the public eye with the release of her popular television series Wave Makers, which was not only credited with being the spark that ignited the #metoo movement in Taiwan, but also went on to be nominated for Best Miniseries at this year’s Golden Bell Awards. Chien’s collaborator, the comic artist Huihui, is a giant of the independent comic scene who won a legion of devoted fans with the release of Blowing-up Adventures of Me!, a graphic novel that explores female sexual desire and questions of identity.

What makes Tender Is the Night particularly unique is that the written material for the comic derives from a play that Chien Li-Ying was unable to stage in Taiwan. Through a series of nine stories of hotel-room flings, Chien shines a light on heterosexual, homosexual, transgender and disabled people’s insecurities with intimate relationships and their own bodies as well as their sexual yearnings and desires. Tender Is the Night relates stories of love and solitude, but told through the lens of sexual encounters in various hotel rooms – this racy subject matter naturally posed a problem when trying to bring this script to the stage. Luckily, those elements of the script that might have been considered too risqué to perform on stage find full visual rendering through the comic medium.

In Island Rhapsody we find yet another interesting case of cross-media collaboration. The original material for this comic derived from a travel show called Listen! Taiwan is Singing, hosted by the famed musician and Golden Bell nominee Chen Ming-chang. The production company, GoodTrip Creative, teamed up with Gaea Books to invite comic artists to create short comics for each of ten classic Taiwanese songs picked from Chen Ming-chang’s selections. The publisher also commissioned the creation of special NFT designs to serve as promotional prizes for the first printing during the book’s release, combining online and in-person elements in their book launch event.

Aiming to weave together tales of music and local memory, the creators of Island Rhapsody invited ten comic artists representing a range of different styles to create ten short comics based upon the feeling and inspiration they drew from the songs assigned to them. Music is the common language running throughout these stories—at the end of each comic there is a listening guide for the song that inspired the comic. Readers can scan a QRcode to listen to a portion of the song while reading an article providing background and analysis of the tune by Taiwanese music scholar and Golden Tripod Award winner Hung Fang-yi.

In the summer of 2022, following on the success of her first Qseries venture, Wang Shaudi released the Qseries 2 project, which featured television adaptations of eight original Taiwan’s literary works. The works featured included FIX, I’ve Walked Through Love’s Wilderness, Rhapsody of Time, Golden Dream on Green Island, Scarecrow, Struggling to Raise Children: Globalization, Parental Anxieties and Unequal Childhoods, The Legend of a Shandong Kid, and Non Homicide Novel. Following along with the first season’s cross-media collaboration theme, each of the literary works were also simultaneously adapted into graphic novels. At present, six graphic novels including FIX, The Red Rope, Scarecrow, The Time Traveller from Showa Era, The Hedgehog: I’ve Walked Through Love’s Wilderness and Open Eyes, Open Mind have already been released.

Ultimately, regardless of what medium one uses, the most important thing is to “tell a good story”. Collaboration between comic authors and comic illustrators is quite common in the Japanese manga industry, but in Taiwan, despite their being increasing cross-media collaboration between television, film and comic artists, there are also stable comic co-creating teams. For instance, the playwright Seal Hsieh, who primarily works as a comic writer, has recently co-created two suspense thriller comics (Pansy and The Mountain of Eternal Night) with the comic artist Chuai Huang. These two works have been extremely popular on the online comic platform Webtoon and the film rights for the latter were recently sold with production due to start on the film soon.

Perhaps, the time for a great cross-media coalition of forces has truly arrived. The future of the Taiwanese comic industry looks bright with ever more channels for great stories to be shared and a proliferation of interesting collaborative models providing fertile ground for creativity and innovation.

We live in an era of entertainment overload. With the development of the internet and the influence of globalization, film, television and music streaming services have come to occupy most of the leisure-time hours of a once-devoted comic readership. Forced to the margins, the Taiwan’s comic industry has been hard at work exploring new and diverse modes of production including adaptation of film, television and literary and historical narratives and collaboration with musical acts, among other cross-media collaborations.

In the past, most conversations regarding film and television cross-media collaboration revolved around adapting comics into television series or movies, but in recent years, the comic industry seems to have embraced a renewed spirit of cross-media experimentation. Luo Yijun’s essay collection My Little Boys, for instance, was adapted into a cartoon, which then inspired a comic book, while the classic animated film Grandma and Her Ghosts was made into an illustrated book and a graphic novel. These experimental forays into cross-media collaboration raised new questions for the industry: what new collaborative possibilities could be spawned by first releasing film and television versions of a work? Could playwrights first collaborate with comic book authors even before film or television versions were released? Or, could film and television versions be jointly released with comics?

Toward the end of 2016, Director Wang Shaudi launched Qseries, a project centered around cultivating television and film acting talents. Apart from filming eight original series, the project also trained twenty-four up-and-coming actors who would later become known as the “Little Qs”. For each of the eight series, experienced directors, screenwriters and actors were paired with relative newcomers during the production process. With the aid of this thorough training, many of the Little Q’s soon made names for themselves on screens big and small. Rising stars like Greg Hsu, Liu Kuan-ting, Sun Ke-fang and Chen Yu also all took home prizes at the Golden Bell and Golden Horse Awards.

Later on, Qseries launched a side project devoted to publishing comic versions of their works. Wang enlisted a team of experienced comic book authors again paired with up-and-coming talents to adapt all eight original series into comic form. The roster boldly included a group of four new artists including Monday Recover, Shinyan, Chen Jian and Ejan , the latter of whom went on to win the Golden Comic Awards Best New Talent prize for his Close Your Eyes Before It’s Dark. Comic artist HOM and Golden Bell Award-winning screenwriter Ko Yen-hsin also took home the prize for Best Comic For Young Adults at the Golden Comic Awards for Magic Moment: The Actor, a graphic novel also released under the Qseries sub-label, which details the arduous process of becoming a professional actor.

In the past, interaction between the television and film industries and the comic world in Taiwan was few and far between. The Qseries Comic Project, which released publications from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2018, was full of experimentation and served as a galvanizing force that enlightened both industries to the untapped potential for collaboration. For Taiwanese comic artists and publishers, this unprecedent collaboration was a daring and excitingly new enterprise. Magic Moment: The Actor, for example, was an attempt by Gaea Books to create a new form of collaboration between comic artists and screenwriters: Former Golden Bell Award winner and screenwriter Ko Yen-hsin molded a new story from extensive interviews she conducted with several of the “Little Qs”, which comic artist HOM then adapted into comic form, conjuring an entire pictorial world out of Ko’s stories.

The collaboration might seem like a match made in heaven, but the artists involved had to overcome significant obstacles. Firstly, professional film and television screenwriters are very sensitive about how their material is rendered visually. When writing their screenplays, they already have a specific vision of how they will appear. These screenwriters often conceptualize their stories in blocks of 15-minute vignettes, 45-minute episodes or 90-minute full-length films. However, translating this temporal logic from film into the induvial panels of a graphic novel required a new vision.

The early stages of collaboration on Magic Moment: The Actor involved a long and drawn-out process of discussion and negotiation. After Ko Yen-hsin produced an outline of the script, she began wide-ranging discussions with the project’s editor and the comic artist HOM on a variety of issues including how to represent the dialogue, and only after a period of intense deliberation, did they eventually find themselves in lockstep. Following over a year-long back-and-forth of collaboration between the screenwriter and the comic artist, Taiwan’s first comic centered around the professional lives of actors, Magic Moment: The Actor, finally saw the light of day. The two-part comic series went on to win the Best Comic for Young Adults award at the Golden Comic Awards and Ko Yen-hsin and HOM were invited to take part in the bd Boum Comic Festival in Blois, France.

This new collaborative model between screenwriters and comics reached a new stage of maturity in 2022 when screenwriter Cheng Hsin-mei, who had previously won a Golden Bell for the series The Best of Youth, began collaborating with comic artists on two of her unreleased scripts. This was very likely the first time a screenwriter adapted their screenplay into a comic before it had even been filmed. During this co-creative process, the comic artists had to first read through the original screenplays and then find ways to adapt the screenplays into one or two completable outlines all while in close coordination with the screenwriter.

Cheng Hsin-mei and comic artist Sen used this collaborative model to co-create Found Not Guilty (Pt.1), a procedural drama comic set in Taiwan. Simultaneously, Cheng also completed a collaboration with comic artist Aniyong on the comic Go-to Dishes, a story that revolves around classic Taiwanese dishes like minced pork with pickles, stir-fried rice noodles, chicken rolls and pig’s feet rice. At first glance, Go-To Dishes may seem like a typical food comic, but the focus of these stories is not so much on the cuisine as the deep-set feelings and complicated relationships behind every dish. Cheng Hsin-mei also divulged that she believed releasing comics first would serve as a good proof of concept for prospective television and film investors.

Read on: https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/latest_info.php?id=264

Mathematics is probably the most despised and misunderstood subject among elementary school students. It’s the “most despised” because as far as kids are concerned, it’s just solving problems over and over again, and it’s the “most misunderstood” because it’s always equated with numbers and formulas.

A Source of Inspiration: Math Problems in Japanese Shrines

Author Lai I-Wei discovered the answer to this conundrum while on a trip to Japan. Japanese shrines have a culture of mathematics that goes back several centuries. There used to be mathematicians who traveled across the country drawing elaborate calculations on ema (small wooden plaques) and presenting them as offerings to the gods. This made him realize that he could actually reverse how children dislike and misunderstand math by getting them to interact with the cities they live in, both in the present and by looking at the cities’ long histories.

By looking at the various metropolises he’d visited and their architectural histories, Lai managed to unearth how math can shape the character of a city. Take Barcelona for example, which you could say was the most mathematical city. The neatly arranged octagonal buildings of manzana and Avinguda Diagonal in the Eixample district weren’t the result of a sudden flash of inspiration by passionate Spaniards, but the work of the rational architect Ildefons Cerdà who used math to overturn the discrimination and injustice of the Old Town.

The same thing happened in Paris, Kyoto, and London. These cities used to represent filth, riots, danger, disease, and get-rich-quick schemes, but through mathematics they have become the charming and livable global metropolises that they are today.

The Creative Challenge: Balancing History and Math

Although the history and mathematics of these cities were both very interesting, it was a challenge to strike a balance between them and make it relatable to children who had never traveled abroad. We decided to start with the history of each city and how its appearance is widely recognized today, then look back at the various problems it had in the past and use these contrasts to create a sense of fun and disbelief. How has the city changed so much? It turns out, it’s math! We ended each chapter with a short story about history and math. For example in Paris, we looked at how Napoleon wasn’t just a politician, he was also a mathematician which is why the math of the city became so integral and balanced.

“Is this really math though?” was the most common question I kept asking Lai as I read about the mathematics behind each city. I think I had a deep-rooted negative impression of math, but editing this book was like taking a math class all over again. It turned out that math could be demonstrated through curves, colors, shapes, time, religion, medicine, and all sorts of other elements, so I stopped obsessing over this need to include more numbers and formulas in the book just to conform with this this so-called idea of mathematics.

This diversity was also great at sparking creative inspiration for illustrator Chen Wan-Yun. In addition to math that needed to be present in the book, there were written words that didn’t look like math and there wasn’t any stereotypical math in there, instead the illustrations were filled with more room for imagination. Chen created her illustrations directly from the feelings she had while reading the text, which frequently produced the best results.

Not Just Numbers: The Benefits for Young Readers

Many cities around the world have such long histories that even local residents struggle to grasp the whole picture. The hope is that this book can make residents and visitors not only appreciate the city as it currently is, but also learn why and how it has changed throughout history.

City planning isn’t just a huge mathematical puzzle, it’s also tied to the planners’ heartfelt desire to make the place where they reside more thoughtful and livable. By including his own city, Taipei, at the very end of the book, Lai hopes that it’ll make young Taiwan readers care more about where they live, or even be inspired by other cities around the world to make their hometown better.

Math isn’t actually that difficult after all. Anyone who understands numbers and mathematical symbols can communicate with each other across different countries and ethnicities, just as Lai was able to understand the ema by the ancient mathematicians despite not knowing Japanese. By the end of the book, not only is Lai already looking for math in other fields such as art, science, and technology among others, but also anticipates that this common language will help children realize once again just how fun these subjects can be.