Chung Chihwei, PhD student, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University

Tsai Su-fen’s (1963- ) Children of the Saltpans was completed in 1993 and won that year’s United Daily News Fiction Award. Published in 1994, the novel achieved wide popularity, and in 1998 Taiwan Public Television adapted it as a serial. The resounding success of both book and TV serial thrust author Tsai into the literary limelight and cemented the novel’s status as a contemporary classic.  

The novel’s opening scenes take place in Tainan’s Qigu district in the early postwar period. Wang Chih-Hsien, a hardworking pedicab driver, leaves his job in Taipei and returns to his home in the Qigu saltpans after witnessing the chaos following the Nationalist army’s arrival in Taiwan: “A group of shabbily-clad soldiers, wearing grass sandals and speaking a strange dialect, entered stores and grabbed whatever they wanted off the shelves.” The plot revolves around Wang Chih-Hsien’s daughter Ming-Yueh, who is in love with Ta-Fang, her childhood sweetheart. Ming-Yueh and Ta-Fang wish to marry, but Ming-Yueh’s parents are opposed to the union – they want to keep Ming-Yueh at home to help with finances, hoping to find her a husband who will come and live with the family. Ta-Fang is an only son – according to custom he must remain at home to fulfill his filial obligations, thus the young lovers are not destined for a life together. 

Ming-Yueh’s parents marry her off to Ch’ing-Sheng, an orphan, but the marriage is an unhappy one: Ch’ing-Sheng is a gambler and wife-beater. When her husband is arrested and imprisoned for selling salt illegally, Ta-Fang gets Ming-Yueh pregnant and she and gives birth to a daughter, Hsiang-Hao, without revealing the father’s true identity. Ta-Fang begs Ming-Yueh to divorce Ch’ing-Sheng and marry him, but when she refuses he dolefully leaves the Qigu saltpans to seek work in Kaohsiung. Some time later, Ming-Yueh and Ch’ing-Sheng also move to Kaohsiung in search of opportunity – in the 1960s-70s, great numbers of rural youths migrated to urban areas in hope of escaping poverty. Subsequently, Ta-Fang makes a fortune in the booming real-estate market. Ming-Yueh still suffers Ch’ing-Sheng’s abuse, but her honest and upright character is unchanged. When she chances to meet Ta-Fang in the novel’s final scene, Ming-Yueh maintains her resolve – refusing to meet her former lover’s gaze, Ming-Yueh mounts her scooter and rides away.

The story is simple, but the plot takes many twists and turns. Ming-Yueh’s frustrations and disappointments embody those of a generation of Taiwanese women forced to compromise romantic ideals for family realities. Children of the Saltpans is never militant in condemning unfair social mores, but as critic Qiu Guifen has pointed out, the novel goes far in exposing postwar gender and economic inequalities in rural Taiwan. 

Ming-Yueh and Ta-fang’s daughter Hsiang-hao is a major character in Tsai Su-fen’s The Olive Tree (1998) and The Stars Are Talking (2014), novels that span generations and continents, parts two and three of the so-called Children of the Saltpans trilogy. 

Chung Chihwei, PhD student, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University

Cai Sufen was born in 1963 in Qigu Township in Tainan County. She studied Chinese at Tamkang University and continued her studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Cai worked as editor-in-chief for the monthly World of Chinese Language and Literature and as editor of the Mandarin Daily News. She is currently a writer, literary supplement editor-in-chief, and literary-section director at the Liberty Times. She is also chief executive of the Lin Rung San Foundation of Culture and Social Welfare.

Cai Sufen began writing while in senior high school and by the time she went to university had already won multiple awards. But what really enabled Cai to scale the heights of literary endeavor was none other than Children of Salt Pans, which won the 1993 United Daily News Prize for novels. The book was published the following year and soon won an enthusiastic response. In a bravura performance, Cai also won the Central Daily News Million Prize, the Chung Hising Arts and Literature medal, the Medal of the Chinese Arts Association Arts, and the Nanying Literary Prize.

After the publication of Children of Salt Pans, Cai Sufen wrote ceaselessly. On the one hand, she published short stories such as “Taipei Station” (2000) and novels such as 1996’s Letters of Two Sisters. On the other hand, she continued to depict the fates of the characters from Children of Salt Pans, giving rise to the 1998 novel The Olive Tree, which portrayed the 1970s campus folk music scene, and The Stars Are Talking (2014), which described the protagonist’s wavering between an American and a Taiwanese identity. Together, the three books form a trilogy whose vast scope encompasses several generations and regions.

Cai Sufen’s works tend to take as their point of departure urban migration in Taiwan. As she meticulously describes this process, she also shows how the broad context of social development is intertwined with individual lives, in particular focusing on the struggles of individuals to persevere in abysmal conditions and the longing for and determination to find love. She sketches this out in clean and simple language, with a restrained and subtle writing style. This has won her much favor from critics, one of whom – Qiu Guifen – has said that Cai Sufen’s works are a milestone in Taiwanese women’s nativist literature. In addition to her work as a writer, Cai Sufen also works in the media and as a newspaper journalist.