Liu Shuzhen, PhD, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University

Huang Jinshu’s third short-story collection, Carving on the Back (2001), focuses on the lives of Malaysian Chinese. With Malaysian geography and history serving as background to the narratives, stories such as “Carving on the Back” and “A Slow Boat to China” delve into the migratory history of Chinese in Malaysia. Technically, the writing employs a great deal of meta-rhetoric, displacing history, language, and narrative position. The most extreme examples are the book’s front cover, spine and back cover, each of which is imprinted a different title – From Island to Island, Carving on the Back, and Opium Harbor Twilight – the three names hinting at the complex and intertwining relationship between Malaysia, Taiwan, and China. Luo Yijun has pointd out, “Although the book has three titles, none unilaterally conveys all of the writer’s metaphoric implications.” Throughout the book the diasporic narrative is used to reconsider the Chinese language’s continuing existence, what Huang Jinshu in a thesis called the implementation of “Chinese-language modernism,” with greater Malaysia as its setting. Quoting Qian Zhongshu’s On the Art of Poetry Huang says of the work, “Although it kids around, it is in fact a book of suffering.” Thus, the meta-rhetoric possesses ethical significance, and is not simply a stylistic device.

The book is dedicated to the writer’s late father; in terms of the writing itself, the collection can be said to be a kind of spirit-summoning gesture, calling up the crumbled ruins of the Chinese language. “Carving on the Back,” the collection’s most representative work, is a thematic extension of “Fish Bones,” an earlier story; here, oracle-bone script – an early form of Chinese writing – links the stories’ respective protagonists’ love for a China and a Chinese language that no longer exist.

Carving on the Back was published fifteen years after Huang Jinshu after came to Taiwan, where the writer – a displaced overseas Chinese – received a traditional education in a university Chinese department, a context that further highlighted his marginality. With its untraditional narrative and setting – “displaced existence, displaced [Chinese] characters, displaced writing” – the collection stands like a lone sentry on the margins of society. 

Liu Shuzhen, PhD, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University

Huang Jinshu (1967- ) is a native of Malaysia’s Johor state; his ancestral home is Nanan, in China’s Fujian province. Huang came to Taiwan in 1986, enrolling in National Taiwan University’s Department of Chinese Literature. He earned a master’s degree at Tam Kang University’s Department of Chinese and a doctorate at National Tsing Hua University’s Department of Chinese Literature. Primarily a fiction writer, Huang also produces criticism and literary essays. He has received the Malaysian Youth Fiction Award, the Literature Award of China Times, and the Unitas Award for New Novelists. His major works include the short-story collections Dream and Swine and Aurora (1994), From Island to Island (2001), Earth and Fire (2005); the essay collection Burning (2007); and works of criticism, The Spirit of China in Malaysian Literature (1998) and Textuality, Soul, and Body: On Chinese Modernity (2006).

Huang Jinshu is a rarity, both a keen literary critic and an outstanding fiction writer. His early criticism was sharply assertive, causing furor in literary and academic circles, leading critic Wang Dewei to dub Huang “bad boy.” In 1990 Huang wrote a paper asserting that there was an absence of classic Malaysian literature, a move that aroused the antipathy of some Malaysian literati. In 1997 and 1998 his “Painful Morality” and “Slash-and-Burn” attacked Fang Beifang’s realist line, calling for Malaysian literature to cut the umbilical cord that bound it to Chinese culture, for only then would it come into its own. Huang’s radical rhetoric gave rise to much discussion in Malaysian literary circles, his critical style being characterized as “slash-and-burn” or “the Huang Jinshu phenomenon.”

Huang Jinshu grew up on a rubber plantation in the Malaysia’s Johor state, learning Chinese only after he started school. The Malaysian gum forest is the setting for much of his fiction, and diaspora and “Chinese-ness” anxiety are longtime thematic concerns. Because of his special status as an overseas Chinese writer in Taiwan, an unsettled sense of melancholy is a thread that runs through much of his fiction. “Fish Bones,” an early work, reveals this multi-layered predicament of mingled of nationality, memory, and identity. The story portrays a young Malaysian Chinese who has come to Taiwan in search of his cultural roots, using the metaphor “kill the turtle for its meat and shell” to hint at the endless psychological entanglement between Malaysia and the Chinese-ness. Recently, in addition to writing fiction, Huang has devoted himself to criticizing and editing the work of Chinese-Malaysian writers.