This week, our editors report on literary gatherings, from a Chinese organization that seeks to bridge the cultural divide between the mainland and Taiwan, and Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA. Read on to find out more!
Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China
The Taiwan Strait measures only 130 km at its narrowest point, but it is the other distance—the unphysical distance, imposed by human prescriptions—that defines it. Recently, with the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taiwan’s own future was placed into question, with many remarking that the island was due to become “the next Afghanistan,” and criticizing American foreign policy as a hasty manifestation of 始乱终弃—to play with and abandon as if with a toy. Whether or not the US will continue its disengagement of military intervention, the geopolitical tension has deepened the chasm between the island and the mainland—in history if not in nature—with the continual wear of weariness, suspicion, and speculation.
Yet in Pingtan, Fujian, from where Taiwan is vivid and impossibly near on the other side of the waters, there persists certain attempts of breaching the cultural distance, most recently by the Pingtan Cross-Strait Sinology Center, established in 2018. Regularly hosting forums and lectures on Chinese and Taiwanese scholarship and texts, the Center, on August 18, held a talk on Taiwanese women writers, and how they write about love.
As Taiwanese writer 余光中 Yu Guangzhong once remarked, it is the work of women writers that have contributed most significantly to the nation’s exceptional range of contemporary essays. The traditional memoirist 林海音 Lin Haiyin, the nomadic and impassioned diarist Sanmao 三毛, the erudite humanist 琦君 Chi Chun—the works of such women essayists both expanded and challenged the imagination and logics of Taiwanese letters, intervening in the traditional discourse with intelligent intimations of selfhood, voyage, and being. While delivering the lecture, professor Yuan Yonglin remarked on how writers such as 张晓风 Zhang Xiaofeng and 简媜 Jian Zheng impressed deeply in their works by giving personal insight as to how they defined their relationships with the men in their lives—the former with the letters written to her husband, and the latter with writings on her father. In the depiction of men as subjects of love, these texts identified passions, affections, and aestheticizations specific to the female experience, addressing their complexity and bringing them into public language.
One cannot help but notice that most of the works spotlit by the Center, however, either maintain an intimacy and loyalty with the mainland, or are vastly distanced in subject from Taiwanese independence; the organization specifically states that its mission statement is to reinforce China-Taiwan relations with the recognition of a commonality in “Chinese classical culture,” with very little resources or recognition of Taiwanese letters as a postcolonial literature. Many native Taiwanese scholars have intentionally pulled away from sinological discourse in order to bring the originality of Taiwanese literature to attention, recognising that Taiwan’s amalgam of influences—built throughout its long history of occupation—has culminated in an utterly singular consideration of contemporary writing.
To cross a simple strip of water, one must first acknowledge that there are two shores. Taiwan’s future is marked with a seemingly unreconcilable confusion—I only hope that books continue to make their ever-undaunted passage across the strait, and that we do not mistake similarity for solidarity, and difference for opposition.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
Central America’s biggest book fair FILGUA is only days away from kick-off. Again as an online book fair, this year’s FILGUA will feature the likes of Benito Taibo (Mexico), Cynthia Ayerdi (Mexico), Carol Zardetto (Guatemala), Miguel de Cervantes Prize-winning author Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Victor Muñoz (Guatemala), Cindy Barascout (Guatemala), Pilar Quintana (Colombia) and many others. In addition, this year’s FILGUA is dedicated to the Guatemalan poet and journalist Ana María Rodas and will have as a guest of honor Central America’s most prominent literary festival, Centro América Cuenta.
Guatemalan-American author David Unger just released a children’s book called Topo Pecoso—Moley Mole (Cinco Books), about the 2017 earthquake in Mexico as seen through the eyes of a little girl. The book includes the illustrations of Argentine artist Marcela Calderon. Topo Pecoso follows David’s debut as a children’s author; last year, he published Sleeping with the Light On, based on his childhood memories and experiences during the 1954 CIA-backed invasion in Guatemala, which overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature (August 20, 2021)
- Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature (August 6, 2021)
- Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature (July 30, 2021)