Huang Huizhen, Assistant Professor, Department of Taiwan Language and Communication, National United University

“The Newspaper Carrier” is classic work of Taiwanese proletarian literature from the Japanese colonial period. The complete work was published in 1934 in the Tokyo periodical Literary Review. The story’s protagonist is a Taiwanese youth, Yang Jun. The colonial government has forced Yang’s father to sell the family’s land at an unfairly low price in order to make way for a sugar refinery. Despondent, Yang’s father dies and his mother hangs herself. Yang subsequently relocates to Tokyo to look for work. But unemployment is rampant in the Japanese capital, and it is only with great difficulty that he lands a job as a newspaper carrier. To secure the position, he hands the last of his cash over to the employer as earnest money. For twenty days Yang toils diligently, earning only a small salary. But Yang’s boss fires him, refusing to return Yang’s earnest money because the young man recruited too few new subscribers. When Yang thinks of his starving relatives in Taiwan and the land that was seized from his family and fellow villagers, he realizes it is the capitalist class that is exploiting Japanese laborers and strong-arming Taiwanese farmers. After witnessing Japanese workers striking for better wages and fairer treatment, Yang resolutely returns to Taiwan.

Wretched working conditions in Japan and abject poverty in rural Taiwan are described in explicit detail. The story is partially autobiographical – author Yang Kui once worked as a newspaper carrier in Tokyo and was also cheated by his employer. Although Yang Jun’s parents’ deaths are fictional plot elements, at the time much farmland in Taiwan was in fact taken over by sugar refineries and many farmers were hounded to death or forced into penury. Hence, “The Newspaper Carrier” combines aspects of the author’s life in Tokyo with his experience leading farmers’ movements after returning to Taiwan.

In contrast to other Taiwanese fiction of the time, “The Newspaper Carrier” portrays characters in terms of “class” rather than “ethnicity.” For example, Yang Jun’s brother, a police inspector, and the village mayor tyrannize their fellow Taiwanese, while Japanese workers Tanaka and Ito are presented in a positive light. This is no doubt because a Japanese teacher had been kind to Yang Kui in his school days, and Yang and worker friends in Japan were supportive of one another, a mutual belief in international socialism the key to their good relations. In addition, protagonist Yang Jun’s determination to fight for Taiwan is a projection the author’s own social activism.   

Yang Kui once stated that his concern for Taiwan, China, and the rest of the world stemmed from a desire to find a way out of the darkness of colonial oppression. In “The Newspaper Carrier” people of different races and ethnicities unite to resist subjugation, ultimately triumphing over the ruling class – thus, from an internationalist perspective, Yang Kui showed the people of Taiwan a way to break free of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Throughout his life Yang pursued freedom, democracy, and economic equality; whether working with Japanese leftists prior to WWII, fighting against colonial oppression in Taiwan, or allying with Chinese leftists to resist Kuomintang authoritarianism in the postwar period, all of his actions were concrete realizations of the ideals embodied in “The Newspaper Carrier.”

Huang Huizhen, Assistant Professor, Department of Taiwan Language and Communication, National United University

    Yang Kui (1906-1985), birth name Yang Gui, was a writer, social activist, and editor. He wrote under a variety of pennames. Yang Kui was born on October 18, 1906 in Tamujiang (today Tainan’s Xinhua district). He entered public school in 1915, the year of the Tapani Incident (Xilai Temple Incident), a Taiwanese revolt against Japanese rule that was brutally suppressed with tanks. The event left an indelible impression on the young Yang Kui. After testing into Tainan Second Prefectural Middle School (today’s National Tainan First Senior High School) in 1922, Yang read Record of the Taiwan Bandit Rebellion, a Japanese history that branded Tapani Incident martyrs as hooligans and thieves. Thereupon Yang vowed to use literature as a tool to correct colonial rulers’ distorted version of history.

In 1924 Yang left school and traveled to Japan to seek new knowledge and avoid marriage to an adopted sister. In 1925 he began taking night school classes at Nihon University’s Department of Arts and Literature. He read Marx’s Capital and joined workers’ inspection teams conducting on-site investigations of working conditions in all parts of the Japan. As a student working part-time, Yang frequently went hungry, experiencing firsthand the tragic plight of the urban proletariat. He became a socialist from that time on. In September 1927 he gave up his studies and returned to Taiwan, joining the Taiwan Peasant Association and the Taiwanese Cultural Association. Yang was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for taking part in social movements in resistance to Japanese rule.

    In 1934 Yang’s short story “The Newspaper Carrier” (written in Japanese) took second prize as a selection in Tokyo’s Literary Review, making Yang the first Taiwanese writer to achieve recognition in Japanese literary circles. At the end of that year, Yang took over as Japanese-language editor of Taiwan Literature and Arts but left the job in 1935 due to philosophical and literary differences, whereupon he founded he periodical New Taiwanese Literature. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War) took place in 1937, Yang opened Shuyo Plantation with the help of Japanese police officer Nyuta Haruhiko and went into the flower business. Yang emerged again in 1941, and in 1943 took part in the Fecal Realism literary debates, vigorously opposing literature that supported Japanese war efforts.

    After the war ended in 1945, Yang threw himself into efforts to rebuild Taiwanese society and establish a new kind of literature in Taiwan, heading up the Liberation Committee, the New Life Promotion Team, the People’s Welfare Association, and the Committee to Aid the Surviving Families of Taiwanese Revolutionary Martyrs; he also took part in setting up the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Taichung headquarters. Yang founded the One Sun Weekly, and served as chief editor of literary columns for Peace Daily News, Cultural Exchange, Taiwan Express’s “New Literature,” and Taiwan Literature Series. He planned the bilingual Chinese-Japanese “China Arts Series,” guided a new generation of writers in the Silver Bell Society, and took part in debates on new literature in “Bridge,” the Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News literary supplement.

    Yang Kui was imprisoned twice after the war, the first time for participating anti-violence activities related to the 228 Incident of 1947; both Yang and Ye Tao were jailed in April of that year and released the following August, after which Yang withdrew from the KMT. He was arrested again on April 6, 1949 for drafting the “Peace Declaration” and sentenced to twelve-year prison term. In 1951 he was transferred to Green Island, where he served out the remainder of his sentence. While doing time he wrote for the prison wall-newspaper New Life and the periodical New Life Monthly, and also scripted plays for the entertainment of fellow inmates, his work from this time still spirited and optimistic. 

    Yang released was from prison in 1961. The following year he opened the Eastern Sea Flower Garden in Taichung’s Dadu Mountain, returning to the literary scene in the 1970s, at the height of the Nativist Literature movement. In his final years, in addition to reissued earlier works, a memoir, transcriptions of speeches and talks, Yang also published new writing, the majority of which were essays. “The Indomitable Rose” (a retitling of Yang’s “Spring Can’t Be Caged”), a work from his prison years, was included in Taiwan’s junior-high school Chinese textbooks in 1976, a first for a native Taiwanese writer of the Japanese colonial period. When Formosa magazine was founded in August of 1979, Yang served as a committee member, actively resisting KMT authoritarianism. In 1982 he accepted an invitation to attend the University of Iowa’s International Writers Workshop, and also spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Association of Taiwan Literature in Los Angeles. On his way home Yang visited Japan, where scholars conferred on him the title “Gem of Taiwan Literature.” In November 1983 he received the sixth Wu San Lien Literature Award and the first Taiwanese American Foundation Humanities Award. In August 1987 the Salt Belt Literary Arts Camp honored the writer with its New Taiwanese Literature Special Esteem Award. Yang Kui passed away on March 12, 1985.

Yang Kui called himself a “humanistic socialist,” dedicating his life to the quest for a democratic society free of injustice and oppression. Because he personally took part in social movements, Yang’s works display strong class-consciousness and critical spirit; a proletarian writer, he ranks as a major figure among Taiwan’s leftist literati. His oeuvre includes poetry, fiction, drama, translations, essays, and criticism. His most notable works are Story of Three Kingdoms, Mother Goose Gets Married, Goat Head Collection, The Indomitable Rose, Letters from Green Island, A Blind Man Opens His Eyes, and Optimists. The Complete Works of Yang Kui was published in December of 2012. In November 2005 The Yang Kui Literature Memorial Museum opened in Tainan’s Xinhua District, showcasing Yang Kui manuscripts.