Lin Zhaoli, PhD candidate, Department of Taiwanese Literature, National Cheng Kung University

In October 1978 “My Land” won the first annual China Times Excellence in Literature Award, and later appeared in Blackface Khing-a (1978), Hung Hsing-fu’s short story collection. Because the Hung rewrote many of the stories prior to the collection’s publication, the collected version is somewhat different from that which won the literary award.

As the story opens, protagonist Ma Shuisheng is about to sell his family’s last piece of land. Ma rambles on about the rapid transformations that have taken place in recent years: “It’s only been fifteen or sixteen years [since Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese rule], and in these fifteen or sixteen years there’ve been big changes. Before the war we didn’t have so much as a vegetable garden. Things got better after the war though; as soon as land reform took effect, we became the owners of that hectare of land we’d been planting!” Yet within a few years the Ma family’s land has all been sold. The reason? Ma Shuisheng’s parents contracted tuberculosis and were in the terminal stage of the illness. To ease their suffering, Ma paid for morphine injections by selling off land, parcel by parcel, and within two years the hard-won family plot had been completely sold off. The story’s ending is tragic – after a family dispute, Ma’s parents hang themselves in the middle of the night so as not to burden their children and grandchildren. 

 “My Land” portrays country people’s simple honesty and good-heartedness, depicting a Taiwanese farming village in a changing era. In the Japanese colonial period Ma’s father risked his life to clear a plot of land, digging until his hands bled. When he withstood a brutal beating by Japanese policemen, the incident highlighted destitute farmers’ will to survive in a desperate situation. The sorrow and sense of helplessness that informs much of Hung Hsing-fu’s work is present here as well: For example, when faced with his parents’ impending death and loss of the family’s land, Ma simply writes it all off to bitter fate. But as scholar Xu Junya has pointed out, “Although [Ma] is forced to silently abandon his resistance, his dignity in the face of the inevitable makes for a warm and moving reading experience.” Even though Ma is powerless to reverse his fortunes, the land sale and his parents’ suicides display both dignity and a refusal to submit to adversity.

Scholar Fan Mingru has noted that that “My Land” is a milestone of 1970s’ nativist literature, marking a turn from writing that was about people to writing that was about the land. Ma’s parents choose suicide rather than lose the ground they worked so hard to obtain, constantly admonishing their son: “The land is ours, the land we toiled to cultivate; that is our fate” and “The land is ours; come what may, you must work hard to get it back!” Here, the significance of “land” in nativist literature supersedes that of “humans.” Thus, we can say that “the land” is the story’s true protagonist.

Lin Zhaoli, PhD candidate, Department of Taiwanese Literature, National Cheng Kung University

Hung Hsing-fu (1949–1982) was born Hong Macong but chose to go by his pen name because he found it to be more elegant. His other pen names are Situ Men, Ma Cong, and Luo Ti. Hung grew up in Erlin Township in Changhua County and studied at Taichung Teacher’s College (now National Taichung University of Education). At the age of eighteen he published “Counter Current,” his first story. While at Taichung Teacher’s College he founded the magazine This Generation, and he and several friends set up the “Hou-Lang Poets Society.” Hung later collaborated on the Taiwan Literature and Arts magazine.

Hung wrote novels, modern poetry, prose works, reportage, and criticism, but he is best known for his novels. He won countless awards, including the Wu Zhuoliu Literature Prize, the United Daily News Prize for Novels, and the China Times Literary Prize. The short story collections Ching-Tsai the Black Face (1978) and Legends of the Street (1981) were published during his lifetime. People of Farms and Villages was published only a month after his untimely death in a car accident on July 31, 1982. This was followed by Thinking on the Crashing Gong (1983), which included some of Hung’s previously uncollected works and commemorative texts by friends and writers. In 1991 Changhua County Cultural Affairs Bureau published The Collected Works of Hung Hsing-fu.

Hung Hsing-fu’s early works show modernist influences, and both his novels and poetry have an experimental flavor. After 1972 he gradually began to move towards realism, particularly in his novels, which principally portray the ordinary inhabitants of farming villages in changing times and places. His novels use skillful structuring and a straightforward style that is emotionally rich and inspiring. Thus, scholars view Hung as one of the best writers in postwar Taiwanese nativist literature.

It is often said that although Hung Hsing-fu’s portrayal of the modernization of agricultural villages is full of compassion for the vulnerable and the weak, it fails to critique wider social structures. However, scholars such as Chen Jianzhong believe that social criticism was not Hung’s aim. He was simply conscious of the gradual disappearance of the countryside and strove to record this traditional world’s varied sights and forms of suffering. In doing so, however he unwittingly transformed it into something sacred.