Three decades of stories cross the Straits

Chu Tien-wen talks about her 30-year career. Qi Shangmin/CFP

By He Jianwei

There are two things that have driven Taiwanese writer Chu Tien-wen’s passion for the language arts these 30 years: the desires to unearth humanity and to record modern times.

Shanghai Translation Publishing House released mainland editions of four of Chu’s books this April. The three collections of short stories and one of essays represent her writings from 1972 to 2003.

When she was growing up, Chu’s father was a writer and her mother a translator: the family passion for words found Chu during her first year of high school.

Her first book, The Legend (332pp, 29 yuan), collects 20 short stories written between 1972 and 1981. Each is drawn from her campus life and captures the youthful excitement and confusion of Taiwan’s social reforms in the 1970s and 1980s. During those turbulent years, many people who had been long oppressed became suddenly economically liberated members of the island’s new middle class.

Chu’s second phase of writing began when she graduated from Tam Kang University. Her second book, A City of Hot Summer (232pp, 25 yuan), compiles 15 short stories written from 1982 to 1987.

“I was so lucky that I experienced the New Wave cinema movement in Taiwan in 1982. All these stories were based on movie scripts I wrote during those years,” Chu said.

The New Wave films were known for realistic, down-to-earth and sympathetic portrayals of Taiwanese life. These films portrayed genuine stories of people living either in urban or rural Taiwan.

Chu’s scripts were written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a leading figure in the New Wave cinema movement and the director of A Time to Live, A Time to Die, the winner of the International Federation of Film Critics Prize Forum of New Cinema at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival.

Chu’s third collection, Fin de Siecle Splendor (150pp, 18 yuan), brings together eight short portraits of solitary urban life written from 1988 to 1990. Its name was selected as a word and year play on Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, whose 1890 art was called the “fin de siecle elegance,” Chu said.

The last volume, The One I Love, Lives South of Great Ocean (282pp, 27 yuan), contains 60 essays written between 1983 and 2003, in which she observes art, cinema, literature and social change.

Chu continues to reexamine the past to interpret it in her own way in her latest writings.