Historicising tongzhi wenxue, or gay literature, in Queer Taiwanese Literature (2021), Howard Chiang finds the origins of this political and literary movement in the “changing sexual configurations of the post-WWII era and the militancy and vibrancy of tongzhi 同志 activism in the 1990s.” Since its origins, the writers and texts of this subgenre have been prolific and varied, from avant-garde politico-cultural magazines such as Daoyu bianyuan (Isle Margin) to Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, Tsao Li-chuan’s The Maiden’s Dance, and Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. But what can be considered as the movement’s foundational text is Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen, a writer, visual artist, and critic who came out of the closet in that historical decade, making him Taiwan’s first openly gay—or tongzhi—writer. With more than thirty books and a body of work that span from poetry, film criticism, novels, paintings, scripts, photographs, and song lyrics, he merges in writing the thematics of Buddhist philosophical thought, science fiction, and porous queer masculinities. Chen, like his tongzhi writer-contemporaries, is living proof of a literature that has been tested by time, fortified by the activism of its believers, and has withstood the police brutality of the state and the skewed conservatism of religious groups. Decapitated Poetry came out in its Chinese original in 1995, and was published last April by Seagull Books in English translation by Colin Bramwell and Taiwanese anthologist, poet, and scholar Wen-chi Li.
In this interview, I asked Wen-chi about the history of tongzhi literature, the diverse Sino-specific gendered identities of Taiwan, the dynamics of co-translating Chen’s poetry collection, and the post-Sinophone/Japanophone futures of contemporary Taiwanese literature.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In the introduction to Decapitated Poetry, you and co-translator Colin Bramwell “felt that it was important to give a sense of the broadness of Chen’s output as a writer,” referring to the poet’s transcending beyond the corporeal-cerebral binary. Can you speak further about your experience in co-translating the aesthetic and thematic expanse of Chen’s oeuvre? How was the selection process of the poems in this collection?
Wen-chi Li (WCL): When we submitted a translation sample to Seagull Books, we originally chose Chen’s work “Notes on a Planet,” which was composed from 1978 to 1980. One of the editors, Bishan Samaddar, replied to us that he was searching for “explicit poetry” for the Pride List series, and this queer sci-fi might be too lyrical and spiritual. I said to Colin that we could then instead directly focus on the works in Decapitated Poetry. The text was a milestone in queer Taiwanese literature, the first to intentionally expose homosexual lewdness and muscle love in Sinophone communities. We thought its English collection should provide a broad view of Chen’s eroticism, so later works like “Body Poems” were also included in the compilation—but we still could not forget the glamour of “Notes on a Planet,” which intertwines topics of gay exploration and posthumanism in the form of lyrical epic (something so unique in world literature). Colin also thought that putting “Notes on a Planet” in the last part of the English collection created an upward scale from concupiscence to otherworldliness, from corporeality to spirituality. The English collection harmoniously combines such opposite elements.
AMMD: I wonder about the reception in 1995 when Decapitated Poetry came out in its Chinese original—particularly the poem “The Necessity of Anal Sex” as well as those which included imageries of condoms and male reproductive organs. How was this poetry collection received by the general public—including Taiwanese citizens who have been, because of the country’s political and cultural relationship with the US, shaped by fundamentalist Christianity?
WCL: The 1990s is a significant decade for queer Taiwanese culture. The first lesbian and gay societies were founded in 1990 and 1993 respectively. In 1995, the first gay radio program and the first gay publishing house were created. The first LGBTQ-affirming church was established in 1996. The Gay Hotline Association was founded in 1998 to support gay people’s mental health, offering counselling to straight parents and fighting against HIV stigma and discrimination. Many literary works were published also in that time, such as Tsao Li-chuan’s “The Maidens’ Dance” (1991), Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man (1994), Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Last Words from Montmartre (1996), Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes (1995), Tu Hsiu-lan’s Rebellious Girl (1996), and Wu Chi-wen’s The Dazzling Galaxy (1998). These queer achievements may have come from the relaxation of political control after martial law was lifted in 1987.
However, this was not a period of “popular” gay pride. In 1997, armed police officers patrolled Changde Street (常德街) and arrested around forty gay people. Without any evidence of criminal conduct, they were detained, photographed, interrogated, and threatened with being outed to their families. The police unlawfully conducted repeat searches of gay clubs, gyms, and bathhouses create fear amongst their patrons, in the hope that without customers and revenue, they would shut down. To feed the media’s hunger for sensational materials, journalists regularly snuck into gay or lesbian bars to take pictures of queer customers. The gay liberation movement had low visibility and was limited to underground gay communities. Straight people would not be aware if their friends or family members were gay. Gay life, for them, was equivalent to lasciviousness and debauchery.
The discrimination was rooted not only in the low visibility of gay life in Taiwanese traditional society, but also in the stigmatization from American and European psychiatric discourse. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed “homosexuality” as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Although the APA removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” as a mental disorder from its guidebook in 1973, Taiwanese sociologists, urologists, and Christians continued to rely on the pre-1973 Western “science” of homosexuality; it was considered a sick part of society and associated with miserable childhood, sexual perversions, abnormalities, suicidality, pill addiction, alcoholism, and paedophilia. When HIV and its gay-related stigmatization spread to Taiwan, the “Western problem” began to worry Taiwanese people and trigger widespread discussion of both the morality and the supposed dangers of homosexuality. HIV was considered a divine punishment for sexual debauchery.
In this environment, it’s unsurprising that the exposure of gay eroticism in Ko-hua Chen’s works shocked his heterosexual readers, and even the literary circle. I heard that the work “The Necessity of Anal Sex” was proposed, but later taken out of a 1993 annual poetry anthology by its committee. He was also severely criticized by elder poets. When this poem was compiled into Decapitated Poetry in 1995, the gay-friendly publisher suggested he change the title to the euphemistic “The Necessity of Entering the Back Door”—something that Chen refused. The homosexual erotica, along with descriptions of condoms, anal sex, kinkiness, BDSM, fetishism, and HIV, not only made his readers uneasy but also epistemologically challenged the heteronormative society; his works were considered obscene and pornographic. In 2003, he was blackmailed by an unknown person who intended to tell all his family and friends that he is gay. He felt that it was hilarious because all his readers have known his sexuality since 1990. To avoid such unnecessary harassment in the future, he decided to have a press conference and come out “officially.”
Decapitated Poetry, however, has supported many gay teenagers and young adults who are confused about their sexuality. The gay poet Lo Yu-chia, born in 1985, remembers that he read the poetry collection in the library of his boys’ school at the age of fifteen, during the end of the 20th century. For him, the collection displayed a queer body and enlightened him to criticize the world that has oppressed sexual minorities. He says that although a world of tolerance and PrEP was not predicted by the combinative collection, it is still necessary to read Chen’s works now.
AMMD: Tongzhi, as a term within mainland China, literally means “comrade” or “common will,” but has been appropriated by LGBTQ+ activists within Hong Kong and Taiwan to refer to themselves, marking the contrast in terms of worldviews on sexuality and gender between mainland China versus Taiwan—the latter which hosted the first (and now, the largest) gay pride march in the Sinophone world in 2003, and is currently the only Asian country where marriage equality is legalised. How has the tongzhi evolved into something Sino-specific, something that evades Western gendered ontology—eventually leading to the growth of tongzhi wenxue as a subgenre within Taiwanese literature?
WCL: Gay Taiwanese literature, in a strict sense, can be traced back to Kuang Tai’s 1976 novel The Man Who Escapes Marriage, which appealed for the social inclusion of homosexuals and an end to the stigmatization caused by Western psychiatric discourse. Pai Hsien-yun’s 1983 Crystal Boys formulated the characteristics of gay literature: lost love, exiles, prostitution, suicide, parents-and-children conflicts, and the alternative and non-biological family. The 1980s was also an origin point for gay liberation. In 1986, the activist Chi Chia-wei held a press conference and came out as gay on national television. He also operated a halfway house for HIV patients, but did not acquire much support from gay communities.
In 1980, the Golden Horse Film Festival was established to accommodate films that illicitly introduced sensitive issues such as homosexual eroticism, drug use, and HIV. Then, in 1992, under the theme titled “Love in a Time of AIDS,” Edward Lam, the founder of Hong Kong Tongzhi Film Festival, introduced the Hong Kong term tongzhi to describe homosexual people. Since 1994, the term queer was also translated to ku’er, literally “being cool” or “cool sons,” by Taiwanese scholars who knew English and could catch up with the trend of queer studies in the US.
As I mentioned, the 1990s was a decade where so many queer writers, magazines, associations, and other initiatives emerged to form more cohesive gay communities. The gay rights movement from 2000 onwards, based on these small but fundamental achievements, focused more on creating a healthy dialogue with straight people, enhancing gay visibility in wider communities, and promoting the legal and legislative actions needed to achieve gender and sexual equality. Gay Pride was first held in 2003 and same-sex marriage was proposed by legislators in 2006, but these advances made conservative people uneasy and triggered a significant backlash. In 2011, the homophobic True Love Alliance was founded to promote distorted views of queer lives. In 2013, certain Christian, Buddhist, and Taoist societies also assembled to refuse the amendment of the Civil Code on marriage. Queer writers like Chen Xue, Hikaru Lee, and Lo Yu-chia, as well as the queer politician Miao Poya then started to use their influence to tell straight people about the importance of same-sex marriage.
Indeed, contemporary Taiwanese literature tends to focus on issues of localness and gender (both feminist and tongzhi). Taiwan uses tongzhi rather than queer because tongzhi, as its name suggests, sounds like an umbrella term to include people with ideologies and sexualities that cannot be defined in traditional values. By contrast, queer tends to pose an expressively political attitude against heteronormativity. Although the term tongzhi was born in Hong Kong, it has enriched its meaning in Taiwan. The term has been localized and used in the gay rights movement and literary and cultural products in Taiwan; this significance cannot be easily replaced by the term ku’er.
AMMD: This seems to be a double-edged sword that came with Taiwan’s “strong American orientation” during the Cold War, and even in its aftermath: the transplanting of Franco-Anglo-American gay & lesbian studies and queer theory into the Taiwanese academe, along with the influence of pop culture vis-à-vis Hollywood, concurrently happened with the influx of Christian missionaries from North America. When the US decriminalised and depathologised “homosexuality,” it also set a trend. In what ways did these clashing ideologies of sexual liberation and religious conservatism manifest in Taiwan’s culture and society—and literature?
WCL: Taiwanese gay communities are still resisting discrimination and pathological discourse. As I have mentioned, Kuang Tai’s The Man Who Escapes Marriage, which is considered the first gay novel published in 1976, sought to end the stigmatization caused by Western psychiatric discourse. When HIV broke out in Taiwan, the term AIDS was initially translated as aisibing, literally “love-death disease,” suggesting a fatal illness caused by “making love.” A later and common translation aizibing, literally “love-infestation disease,” was no better, implying that the places or people were “infected” because of “making love”—in other words, by sexual promiscuity. Both translations associated same-sex sexual relations with disease and implied that gay men were addicted to casual and wild sex.
The issues of HIV, melancholia, and suicide somehow become the features of queer works in the 1990s. The hero in Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man confesses his life in relation to sex, love, and family after witnessing his best friend contract HIV and nearly dying. Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre meditate on themes such as death, sorrow, loneliness, and suffering. Tu Hsiu-lan’s Rebellious Girl demonstrates a heroine who was haunted by her girlfriend’s suicide. The protagonist of Wu Chi-wen’s The Dazzling Galaxy (1998) tries to commit suicide after being found doing prostitution with elder guys.
This is the discrimination and pathological discourse that can be observed in Taiwan’s Christianity. I was in the church and know that they had an Exodus programme for homosexual people, intended to convert their sexuality. In the 2013 demonstration against same-sex marriage led by a Christian-majority alliance, the conservative protesters raised slogans like “All kids need both a dad and a mom,” and “Made by daddy + mommy.” They sang hymns and prayed for the recovery of people from the “gay disease,” and for the “purification” of the land. This stigmatization encouraged some queer writers to come out and speak for equality. I’ve noticed that new queer literary works tend not to limit themselves to closed queer communities, but instead seek to reach the public and find communication and understanding. Some writers publish queer-positive materials or argue that there is no fundamental difference between homosexual and heterosexual love.
AMMD: For Queer Taiwanese Literature: A Reader (Cambria, 2021), you and Bramwell co-translated the short story “A Non-existent Thing” by the major lesbian writer Chen Xue, one of the architects of tongzhi literature. Chen’s story revolved on the modern-day issue of surrogacy, something that mirrors what the anthology editor, Howard Chiang, said about the evolution of tongzhi literature to include “other forms of social and cultural transgression: bisexuality, asexuality, aging, HIV/AIDS, indigeneity, recreational drug use, transgenderism, and assisted reproductive technology.” What do you foresee in the future of tongzhi literature? Any emerging trends and themes?
WCL: I notice that queer Taiwanese literature has become more diverse recently, partly because Gay Pride since 2003 has promoted the visibility of LGBTQ communities. Unlike Ko-hua Chen’s gay poems, which tended to be provocative, and Chiu Miao-chin’s lesbian stories, which were inevitably indulgent in melancholia, writers in the new millennium are excited to explore multiple dimensions of queer experiences. Hikaru Lee tries to use an optimistic tone to comprehend the loss of the beloved one and imagine an alternative form of family in Phototropic Plants (2016). Li Kotomi, a Taiwanese writer living in Japan and the recipient of numerous Japanese literary awards, illustrates the transnational travelling and migration of lesbian people in Solo Dance (2018). Kevin Chen also describes his migration experience in Germany and, at the same time, the haunted memory in Taiwan in Ghost Town (2019). It seems that queer Taiwanese literature has inherited the motives of escape and exile from its pioneer writers, and has also tried to expel the negative feelings of sadness and melancholia and suicide attempts. Now, writers have begun exploring the possibility of happy endings and multiple forms of family. I expect that transcultural elements will be more emphasized in queer Taiwanese works.
AMMD: Beyond the tongzhi and ku’er (queer), which displaced tongxinglian or tongxing’ai (“homosexuality”), contemporary usage include gendered terms such as the shuang xing ren (literally “middle sex”) to refer to intersex identities. The 90s also saw the rise of gender-bending artists of fanchuan (“cross-dressing”) theatre shows, and in the 2010s, music groups who identify as zhongxing (neutrosexuals). Can you speak about the diversity of Taiwanese-specific gendered identities?
WCL: In the early twentieth century, the terms tongxinglian or tongxing’ai (“homosexuality”) were used by Chinese intellectuals to comprehend attractions that could not be included in love between a man and woman. “Ying-yang person” was a pejorative term to describe an intersex person. The term zhongxing is still used now in Taiwan to describe someone’s “unisex” outfit. Fanchuan show, inspired by ladyboy shows in Thailand, aimed to entertain straight people, both males and females, in the 1990s. This cross-dressing context should not be confused with drag shows that are performed for queer audiences in the US and Europe, but I always think that the fanchuan show may be the reason why Taiwan seems more tolerant of transgender people.
AMMD: A lot of your works of translation are in collaboration with a co-translator. How do you choose the translators you work with? And in your experience, how does co-translation differ from translating solo?
WCL: I found Colin Bramwell when I intended to translate Yang Mu’s poems, and posted a message on a Facebook group to ask someone who might be interested. I had hoped for a native speaker with a literary background, and Colin is the right person. He is a poet and performer and has degrees in literature. I need him because I am not a native speaker of English, and will not notice certain slight differences while translating a work.
Co-translation is a process of improvisation, discussion, persuasion, and reconciliation. I say to Colin that it is acceptable to provide a radical translation that looks completely fresh and different from the original—and I would be responsible for re-affirming the authors’ intent and find reconciliation. This process works well in poetry because this genre requires a lot of effort to choose the right sounds, words, and layouts to mobilize reader emotion and engagement. Colin is a genius at finding multiple literary strategies to enhance both aesthetic values and readability.
AMMD: Which literary works from Taiwan, regardless of the time, in your opinion, were not well translated into English and therefore, deserve re-translation?
WCL: When I researched Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, I noticed that the translator Bonnie Huie sometimes reversed the young author’s over-sentimental and immature phrases into cheesy motivational words like “embrace freedom” or “forget the past”—which make readers cringe. She also fails to grasp complicated and non-grammatical expressions, simplifies certain imageries, or provides wrong translations. The sentence “Jean Genet was granted amnesty with the help of Sartre” was translated into “he was granted amnesty by Saudi Arabia.” I laughed out when Sartre became Saudi Arabia. Shate 沙特 in China’s Mandarin is Saudi Arabia, but in Taiwan, refers to the French philosopher. The translator knows Mandarin from China but has little knowledge of Taiwan’s Mandarin. A good translator should know local contexts, idioms, and terms well. Still, Notes is generally a good translation for readers beyond Taiwan.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on tongzhi literature, which books and works would you include as key texts?
WCL: My knowledge of queer Chinese and Hong Kong literature and films is limited. But for Taiwanese works, I recommend Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town, Li Kotomi’s Solo Dance and Polaris, and Hikaru Lee’s Phototropic Plants. Wu Chi-wen’s The Dazzling Galaxy discloses the taboos of being gay and transgender while exploring the political trauma from the White Terror era. Chang I-hsuan’s Farewell to the Era Where I Will No Longer Exist ambitiously interweaves personal gender exploration and the history of democratic movements together. For films from Taiwan, I also like Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. I always invite European friends to watch it with me, and they never get bored. I also like the films of Tsai Ming-lian, who was born in Malaysia and now develops his career in Taiwan. His film, The Wayward Cloud, is classic. It is a story of heterosexual love, but you can notice some kinky moments that could only have been made by a gay director.
AMMD: What about a course, for instance, on diverse writings from Taiwan? In Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (2023), you and your co-editor Pei-yin Li argued for Taiwanese literature that surpasses its Sinophone and Japanophone past.
WCL: Taiwan was colonized by the Empire of Japan for five decades. In that time, some writers chose to use the Japanese language for a broader readership in Japanophone communities. These Japanese writings were much underestimated when the Mandarin language policy was imposed by the Chinese Nationalist Party, which took over Taiwan after WWII. It was not until the 1980s that Taiwanese people discovered and translated these works into Mandarin, which filled in a missing piece of literary history. These works have essentially been excluded from Chinese-language or Sinophone literature.
Taiwanese literature, with its multiple facets of localness, identity, language, culture, experience, and history can be open to various possibilities. Recently, Taiwan has welcomed the writings of new immigrants from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. I appreciate Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “potential to not-do” in The Coming Community, which suggests an identity that refuses to be strictly defined or actualized. Taiwanese identity welcomes all possibilities, and Taiwan literature is full of potential to constantly challenge governmental or institutional authorities and monolithic, patriarchal, heteronormative, Sinocentric, and Han-centric societies.
Wen-chi Li is co-editor of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (with Pei-yin Li, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Winner of the 2018 John Dryden Translation Prize, he has contributed to Queer Taiwanese Literature: A Reader (Cambria, 2021), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023), Chinese Literature Today, Liangho Literary Magazine, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, as well as in anthologies by Columbia University Press and the University of Washington Press. In Taiwan, he has published three poetry collections and edited Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT (Dark Eyes, 2019). He holds MSc by Research in Chinese Studies and MSc in General & Comparative Literature degrees from the University of Edinburgh. He is the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at the University of Oxford after completing Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and acquired a PhD in Sinology from the University of Zurich. He is a co-founder of the Balestier Press series World Literature from Taiwan.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines, is the editor-at-large for the Philippines at Asymptote. Author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), contributor to The Best Asian Poetry, and nominee to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essay, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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