Curated by Huang Mei-E, Professor and Director, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University

We use the term “colonial literature” in two senses. First, it designates literature produced in Taiwan between 1895 and 1945, when the island was under Japanese rule; second, it refers to writing from the period that explores the phenomenon of colonialism and related issues. In the former sense, the term is a historical demarcation; in the latter sense, it encompasses the writers of the period and the ideas and consciousness manifested in the literature of the time.

Prior to the 1920s, classical Chinese poetry and prose were the primary modes of literary expression in Taiwan. Writers were Confucian scholars, many of whom had distinguished themselves in the Qing imperial examinations. When China ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, some joined in the futile war of resistance against the Japanese, fleeing to the China mainland after the cause was lost. Qiu Fengjia’s “Spring Sorrow” describes the poet’s grief at being forced into exile. Others became “people without a country,” submitting to Japanese rule and complying with directives that outlawed cultural traditions such as foot binding and the queue, a braid worn by Chinese men of the Qing era. Poet Lin Chixian felt that this trend toward modernization violated both his culture and his person – in “Braid” he laments the loss of Chinese identity wrought by abandoning the traditional hairstyle. But changes were ideological as well as cosmetic: the new rulers imported Japanese cultural values and modern Western ideas, leading to the decline of Chinese-language education and traditional ethics. Thus, writers such as Hong Qisheng, Lian Heng, and Zhang Chunfu strove to preserve the Taiwanese cultural heritage in the face of Japanese assimilation policies and Western cultural incursion. Other men of letters formed poetry and literary associations, taking part in social movements to publicize their views.

The old-guard literati faced another challenge as well. In a 1924 essay Zhang Wojun sharply criticized traditional literature’s failure to stay apace of the times, urging writers to write in the modern Chinese vernacular in order to awaken ethnic consciousness in the people of Taiwan. Heeding Zhang’s call, Lai He began writing poetry, essays, and fiction in the new literary vernacular – the Beijing dialect – ultimately winning the title of “Father of New Taiwan Literature.” Vernacular literature played an important role in the New Culture Movement that was sweeping Taiwan at the time, thus Lai’s works are significant for their social as well as literary value. In “A Steelyard” Farmer Qin Decan’s miserable fate justifies opposition to Japan’s violent rule; “Making Trouble” decries a Japanese policeman’s harassment of a poor widow, at the same time criticizing the Taiwanese people’s failure to demand justice from their oppressors. In “Clinical Notes,” a Japanese essay, physician and social activist Chiang Wei-shui prescribes education as a cure for the intellectual malaise and spiritual fatigue that beset colonial Taiwan, stressing the importance of cultural reform in bringing about social change. Authors also worked with “dialect.” Lai He incorporated elements of Taiwanese (Hoklo) in many of his stories, code-mixing – switching between two or more languages, or varieties of the same language, in speech or writing – that typified much colonial-era literature.
Moreover, in the 1930’s, Huang Shihui and Guo Qiusheng led a nativist movement that promoted Taiwanese as a literary vehicle for chronicling the lives and experiences of the toiling masses.

The 1930s was a crucial period in the development of Taiwanese literature. In addition to vernacular and nativist literature, a leftist movement sought to bring about social reform through literary activity. Wang Shilang’s “Crossroads” advocates political involvement while revealing the hesitancy of Taiwanese youth to back leftist causes. Still, writers’ concern for labor, agricultural workers, and women’s issues remained undiminished – Yang Kui’s “Newspaper Delivery Boy,” Liu Heruo’s “Oxcart,” and Wu Xisheng’s “Suckling Pig” all delved deeply into pressing social problems of the day.

After Japanese authorities suppressed social movements, Wang Shilang and others formed writers’ associations, founding periodicals such as Southern Voice, The Vanguard, The First Line, Taiwan Literature and Arts, New Taiwanese Literature, and Formosa, the latter of which was published in Tokyo. Commitment to cultivating native culture through literary endeavors bore fruit. Wu Yongfu studied with Riichi Yokomitsu, pioneer of the New Sensation School, a Japanese literary movement. Yokomitsu’s influence is apparent in Wu’s modernist “Head and Body,” an account of Tokyo life as experienced by two Taiwanese students. In Zhu Dianren’s “Autumn Tidings” an aging scholar witnesses the changes in Taipei life and the decline of traditional values that have taken place under Japanese rule. Set in Taipei, “Crossroads” and “Autumn Tidings” offer a look at the city’s colonial-era literary scene.

The decade was also a fertile period for “new” poetry – that is, works written in the vernacular as opposed to classical forms. Outstanding practitioners of new poetry were writers of the Tainan-area Salt District Poets Group and Le Moulin Poets Society. The Salt District group, represented by Wu Xingrong, Guo Shuitan and others, wrote in a social realist mode. Poets of the Le Moulin Poets Society, notably Yang Chichang and Lin Yongxiu, experimented with surrealism and other modernist techniques, innovations exemplified most notably by Yang’s “Burning Cheeks.”

Beginning in 1905, popular literature written in classical Chinese – detective fiction, martial arts novels, historical fiction, and tales of the supernatural – began to appear. In the 1930s popular novels in the vernacular gained a large readership, a trend that lasted into the 1940s, with romance foremost among the various genres. Set in Taiwan, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, Xu Kunquan’s My Loveable Enemy vividly describes the inner lives and emotional conflicts of a widower and his children. Immensely popular in its day, the book was the best-selling novel of the Japanese colonial period. The success of My Loveable Enemy and similar works reveals the delicate relationship between everyday life, popular entertainment and imperialism. In reality, however, Taiwanese had always been plagued by questions of national identity, particularly after Japan invaded China in 1937 and launched the Kominka Movement – a policy of enforced cultural indoctrination – in the same year. How would the people of Taiwan choose – were they Chinese or Japanese? Published after the Second World War, Wu Zhuoliu’s The Orphan of Asia is regarded as the work that most fully explores this identity crisis, what the author termed Taiwan’s “orphan consciousness.”

The above is an outline of Taiwan literature’s history and development during the colonial era, an overview of the broad range of literary activity that took place while Taiwan was under Japanese rule. The focus is on the trends, writers, works and styles – both new and old, popular and literary – that characterized the literature of the period. Writers of the time produced fiction, essays, and poetry in Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese; their works often touched on the complicated relationship between colonized and colonizer, dealing with issues of modernism, colonialism, and nativism. The period is also noted for literary experimentation, as Taiwanese writers adopted a variety of styles and modes of aesthetic expression – social realism, modernism, and surrealism – setting their works in urban and rural areas in Taiwan and abroad. We hope this brief presentation will prove useful to those seeking to gain an understanding of and appreciation for Taiwan’s rich literary heritage during this phase of its development.