Zhuang Jiawei, PhD student, Graduate Institute of Chinese Literature, National Chung Cheng University

Calm observation of local customs, things, and human interactions is a characteristic that runs through all of Shu Guozhi’s essays. “Life in Taipei,” a representative work, depicts a number of ordinary locales in 1990s’ Taipei – although the city is seemingly crowded and chaotic, residents are relaxed, easygoing, and tolerant.

 “Taipei – I don’t know where to begin” opens the essay. This isn’t to say the city lacks interest, but rather its ordinary-looking lanes are in fact so full of surprises and possibilities that the writer is faced with too many choices. Although the essay reads like a casual stroll through Taipei, it can be divided into three sections: urban geography, citizens’ interrelations, and the city’s changing and unchanging features.

Spatially, Shu Guozhi characterizes Taipei as “extremely free, extremely chaotic.” The writer first leads readers into a xiangzi, a distinctive feature of the 1990s Taipei cityscape – a lane of small, low houses, flowers, trees, and a variety of inhabitants, a byway similar to Beijing’s hutong and Shanghai’s nongtang. Shu also shows readers traditional southern Fujian-style “arcades” – roofed passageways – and rows of apartment houses, crammed together, inelegant, but orderly nonetheless. Not big, not small, leisurely, free and disorderly – this is how the writer characterizes the appeal of Taipei’s landscape.

In examining human interaction in the city, Shu Guozhi becomes an urban psychologist, carefully decoding how citizens make the most of the tiny areas allotted to them – erecting canopies over rooftops, marking off parking spaces on the street, drinking tea at tables set by the roadside – their actions all informed by warm feelings of mutual tolerance. Architecture, smells, and sounds allow readers to experience residents’ heterogeneity. Thoroughfares flanked with luxurious high-rises, alleyways lined with modest homes and small temples, a variety of scents and sounds – all explain the historical reasons for the convergence of an assortment of humanity in postwar Taipei, a metropolis that blends modernity and tradition.

Lastly, Shu Guozhi shows readers the city’s changing and unchanging aspects. A street observer, the writer is witness to Taipei’s rapid transformation from a small municipality of creeks and drainage canals to one of the world’s foremost urban centers, all within the space of a few decades. In the midst of the development Taipei still boasts many lovely sights; for example, “a tree that has grown through a roof,” which Shu praises as a symbol of the city; moreover, he calls Taipei “a city with a country feel” because residents accommodate both nature and civilization, the classical and the modern existing side by side.

A leisurely look at the Taipei cityscape, Shu’s essay is in fact layered with meaning – the author excavates humans’ harmonious relations with history and the land, revealing Taipei’s emphasis on “mutuality” in living culture, illustrating the significance of humanism in landscape.

Zhuang Jiawei, PhD student, Graduate Institute of Chinese Literature, National Chung Cheng University

Shu Guozhi (1952- ) was born in Taipei to a family originating in China’s Zhejiang province. Since graduating from Shih Hsin College of Journalism (today’s Shih Hsin University) Shu has served as a reporter and writer for the China Times Weekly, taken part in documentary filmmaking projects, and made guest appearances in movies. In 1979 his “Villagers in Trouble” won the second annual China Times Literature Award, garnering praise from critic Zhan Hongzhi: “The best works leave theorists speechless.” In 1981 Shu began writing Reading Jin Yong, his first book-length project. Royalties from the work’s sales financed a trip to the United States, and from 1983 to 1990 the writer visited forty-four of the nation’s fifty states.

After returning to Taiwan in 1990, Shu Guozhi began publishing travel and food articles. Shu’s sharp, meticulous prose – informed by the writer’s vast erudition, encompassing both classical and modern learning – captures the living landscape familiar to ordinary people, shaping the uniquely personal style in which he relates his travel experiences. Writer Ke Yufen praised Shu’s works: “A good writer must be obsessed with clean prose. One of the most distinctive things about Shu Guozhi’s essays is his precise emotional control; he never projects his own sorrows onto the landscape, nor does he lament the fate of the nation.” Stylistically, Shu essays are characterized by unadorned grace and scholarly elegance, uncovering simple details of everyday life. Before “travel-writing” became popular in Taiwan, Shu Guozhi had already roamed about the world, his essays precursors of the travel genre. In 1997 his “Traveling Alone in Hong Kong” won the first-annual China Airlines Travel Literature Award, and in 1998 “Remote Highway,” which recounted his travel experiences in the United States, received first prize in the first annual Eva Airlines Universe Travel Literature Awards. The two prestigious prizes won the writer belated recognition, and his name is now synonymous with travel writing. The essay collection An Ideal Afternoon (2000) – subtitled “About Traveling and About Wandering” – attracted an even wider readership.

Shu Guozhi continues to write prolifically, penning columns for the China Times “Human Realm” supplement, Business Weekly, Taiwan HSR Monthly, and Global Views Magazine. His published works include Reading Jin Yong (1982), Revisiting Taiwan (1997), An Ideal Afternoon (2000), Wandering (2006), Outdoor Kyoto (2006) Taipei Snacks (2007), Talking of Food in the Midst of Poverty (2008), Watertown Taipei (2010), and Taiwanese Treats (2014).