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Originally published at Readmoo: https://news.readmoo.com/2022/03/28/fishmonger/

“I wanted to be a flounder too, hanging out in the sand and only having to jump up when there’s something to eat.” Lin Kai-Lun wants to live comfortably, but the “Fish Divination” system he developed gave him a different fate. “I’m actually a tuna, and tunas are workaholics. Fish with dark flesh can’t stop. They have to keep swimming.”

Fishmongering is a laborious and time-consuming profession. A fishmonger works from three in the morning to one in the afternoon, buying wholesale and hollering to customers day in and day out in the fish market.

Aside from selling fish, Lin Kai-Lun is also a writer. “I started writing around 2019 or 2020, when I felt like it was time to develop a side business. I also adjusted my workload to spend time with my children.” After finishing at the market, Lin uses his free time before picking up his children or after they go to bed to write. His labors have resulted in prize-winning fiction.  

Now, Lin Kai-Lun has published his first book of essays, Fishmongering: A Memoir, which foregrounds his observations of life in the fish market.

While his stories unfold immersively in lived reality, the narrator of his essays is more of a spectator. “We don’t just buy and sell fish at the market. Inevitably, we interact with people.” Lin does not speak for the people around him, but we still see the souls that he encounters. The things he notices are prosaic, but his words form the shape of a life.

“He probably bet that I would never leave the fish stall”

Selling fish is a family business that began with his grandfather. Little by little, the burden of the job fell on Lin, who had nowhere to escape. “My elders always told me, ‘Do a good job, and eventually, all this will be yours.’” A touch of helplessness in his voice, Lin notes: “Yep, and it was all debt.”

The year Lin was born, his father won the national lottery. “I always wondered if he had used up all his luck and mine with unexpected windfalls.”

When Lin was a child, his father ran a bubble tea store that brought in 700,000 New Taiwan Dollars a month. “Maybe earning money was too easy. He went gambling to pass the time.” Each bet was one or two hundred thousand dollars. Eventually, loan sharks that charged high interest came to the door. “I didn’t understand. I thought our family had plenty of money, so why did we have to deal with this?”

Lin’s father kept gambling, though his debts mounted. Without a day in the clear, the family fell into a bottomless pit. “It seems that as long as people believe they have a certain kind of luck, they will bet everything on it.” Lin saw firsthand how gamblers always try to turn their fortunes around in one throw of the dice, having forgotten that none of it would be necessary if they had not made the first bet.

His family lost the store and his parents divorced. Lin’s addicted father also gambled away his child’s life.

Lin has not had a holiday since junior high school. While his peers were having fun, he was at the stall, buying wholesale, killing fish, and calling to customers. “My father probably bet on my never leaving the fish stall.” He wanted to continue his education and teach sociology, but when he called his father to announce that he had scored the highest marks, his father asked indifferently, “Are you still coming to sell fish this afternoon?”

Lin shouldered the burdens of the fish stall and his family’s debt, thinking that if he accepted his fate and worked hard, everything would eventually get better. “But my father was still gambling.” Lin told his father that he could pay off the debts and keep him clothed and fed if he would just stop gambling. “He wouldn’t do it.” He secretly borrowed money from friends and relatives in his son’s name and spent the hard-earned savings as though it were a matter of course. “I didn’t understand. How could he treat me that way?”

Lin’s father stabbed him in the back as he was trying to carry on the family business and get his life back on track. Lin once believed that he could forgive his father endlessly, but his heart gradually grew cold. “I don’t know if he saw me as a son, or just someone he could use.”

If you can relate, why would you discriminate?

“Those of us with this kind of childhood in which our family lives were seriously deprived, all want to make up for these shortcomings without repeating them.”

Lin wants his son and daughter to become responsible for themselves, so that they can find what they love to do and live a happy life.

Does he want his children to take over the fishmongering business? Lin thinks it’s not necessarily a bad idea, but nurturing them properly is the priority.

Most fishmongers do not want their children to take over the business. In the eyes of society, fishmongering is a seemingly inferior profession. “Does being a fishmonger mean being dirty, smelly, and poor?” From Lin’s perspective, the fish market is just another kind of workplace, one requiring an understanding of subtle emotions and a familiarity with styles of transaction between different generations. The work is not at all lowly and should not be taken lightly.

“Everyone thinks fishmongers are poor, and that they sell fish because they’re uneducated,” Lin says. Although Lin himself took on the family business because he had no other option, most young fishmongers today are not lacking in education. In fact, they make the choice to sell fish after a great deal of careful thinking and planning. “Fishmongers may have a low image in society, but we are actually in a higher stratum in terms of financial capability,” said Lin, adding that fishmongers can save money quickly if they are willing to work hard. It is the traditional framework of society that has created this unfair perspective.

Are street vendors necessarily worse than white-collar workers? Lin wonders, “Isn’t this just like how we ignore the people at home who are quietly serving us and giving us their time?” Service workers aren’t lesser than anyone else, and physical labor can support a family as well as a salary based on brainpower. “We must learn to have confidence in other people’s work and to respect each person’s life choices.”

Fishmongering: A Memoir is a book that clearly demonstrates Lin’s craftsmanship. “Everything I write about is ordinary. I hope people can understand me and the identity I represent through this work.” Between the lines, we can smell the fish market, hear the exchanges between fishmongers and customers, and feel the ways in which we are bound to others. “I believe even if you’re not a fishmonger, you can still relate to the book. And if you can relate, why would you discriminate?” Lin laughs. every morning, as dawn turns the sky fish-belly white, he plants his feet on the ground and moves forward with life in the fish market.

INSPIRATION: Why do you want to write an epic fantasy like this? Where did the inspiration come from?

Snowboarding has always been a popular sport since my student life in Vancouver, Canada. I used to listen to epic fantasy music while riding the snow waves, thinking just how cool it would be if I could hold blades in my hands and fight monsters with my boarding buddies while navigating through trees and powder.

It was during that time that I began some sketches and wrote down rough story ideas that would eventually turn into one of the first scenes in the books. Then I realized a magic system was needed as the high concept, and a world ecosystem to accommodate that.

The next decision was whether to set the story in a familiar world. I thought the Earth we knew would be cool, with recognizable cities blanketed by perpetual snowfall (I actually had a concept drawing of the snowclad ruins of Vancouver). You know, impossible locations for such climate – Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Solomon Islands – all of which you will all get to see in the story. Isn’t that cool? A city in the tropical zone you thought you knew, but now entirely snow-choked. They become precious monuments to explore for our protagonists. There’s something awe-inspiring to it.

Ideas grew, and it became apparent that one book wouldn’t be enough; it had to be at least a trilogy in order to cover the world map. I’m a fantasy fan, so I love looking at maps and imagining the “what-ifs”. Took me years of planning, research, and actual writing.

Book 1 starts in New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and Taipei. A primal world where no electricity could be produced. People hunt with blades and dress in furs. Pure fantasy setting.

Book 2 opens up the world, taking us further north to Shanghai (China) and Sakura Island (Japan), introducing a new civilization that leverages the snow magic – or the “snow spirits” – but in a very culturally unique way.

Book 3 goes to the far west – the European continent and a future city called Avalon – which have invented technologies to harness the same snow magic but use it in an industrial, scientific way.

There is, of course, a “looming danger” throughline that threatens all remaining civilizations on the snowball Earth. And to uncover it, our characters must make journeys to rediscover our fallen world, connecting present events to myths of what happened five centuries ago.

Can you talk a little more about the Shade Riders?

They take on most of the fighting in the books. They are humans whose souls are bonded with Ling – spirits that make unpredictable appearances around deep snow, looking like miniature aurora borealis.

A Rider’s apprentice must go through a culturally unique ritual for the binding process, locking a spirit inside their riding board crafted by an artisan.

In the face of danger, a Shade Rider may summon their spirit out of the board, having it wrapped around their chosen weapons inscribed with silver runes – and always with two pieces of weapons, one in each hand, to balance the riding stance.

Every Shade Rider is unique. With different snow spirits coupling with various chosen weaponry, we get to see many combinations of combat styles, all done while they’re riding the snow in high speed.

PROCESS: You published the first two books about nine years ago, then there seemed to be a hiatus before you published the final book last year. Why the gap? Did it have to do with your creative process?

Mostly it was just life getting in the way. A couple years back I tried game writing, and wrote a Kickstarter comic on the side (also a futuristic fantasy setting). So, Sunlight was placed on hold.

On the realistic side, there was a waiting period before a new publisher could take over. You know, contractual issues. The new publisher was instrumental in hiring a professional artist to conceptualize my world-setting, creating the posters you now see.

It’s the kind of story that no one’s seen before, hard to categorize as any traditional genre (Well… I call it futuristic fantasy), so coming up with visual posters really help readers to quickly envision the setting in their minds. Mr. Lu DongBiao, a great film concept artist, has totally captured the mood of this world.

On top of all these, I knew the final book of the series must be both intellectually and emotionally rewarding to the readers, who wanted to feel that all the time invested in reading the first two installments would be worthwhile. So, I set a super high bar for Book 3. I don’t think I’ve done this much research before in my creative career, trying to design whole civilizations across three continents based on Sunlight’s high concept and power system. The process was really fun, and the results paid off (according to my readers). Typing up loose threads, plotting dramatic escalation, designing revelations that go hand in hand with our heroes’ emotional journeys...all these took time. I just never expected them to take that many years.

So you have three, or four new civilizations on a planet that is entirely covered by snow. The scale of work seems daunting on many levels. But what does this mean to the heroes of the books?

I have a passion for world-building, so those came natural to me. But good stories still come down to the characters’ choices and transformation.

Most of the POVs are Shade Riders, who begin their journey in one specific location on the map. Subsequent civilizations are revealed through the characters’ discovery of them, so we experience the story through their eyes just as they’re making sense of a world that’s been silent and sunless for the past 500 years.

With each discovery, characters old and new are confronted with important questions. How do we bring Sunlight back? Does it even exist behind the clouds? If people finally get to see it with their eyes, will it damage their faith? – These are just some of the questions the characters are asking themselves as they navigate through the snow-covered world.

What does Sunlight mean to each surviving civilization? How about the Shade Spirits? And the monsters? Why did they appear? Each POV character will derive a different interpretation from their chosen journeys. And a lot of this reflect on our current environment, the way different cultures could view the same thing so differently.

And maybe there’s a beauty to that. Why do cultures and individuals form vastly different interpretations from the same intangible ideas? Or even from concrete facts. Under miles of thick snow, that might just be the core of truth we’re all trying to explore.

WORDS TO READERS: Anything you’d like to say to readers overseas?

Sunlight is a “futuristic fantasy” story – where fantastic elements emerge on Earth five centuries into the future. There are sci-fi elements, too, reinterpreted and reimagined. I trust that readers of different tastes will all find joys from these books. It also suggests a world that dangerously resembles a future when climates go wrong.

At the core, though, Sunlight is still about the spirit of adventure and exploration. About the bonds we share as humans no matter which culture we’re originally from, or which historical roots we are born into. I am curious to know how American readers, African readers, European readers, and readers from various backgrounds might respond to the story. Will be nice to hear their opinions, to be inspired by their interpretations.

So hopefully I can invite you to come into my world, to ride through a thousand icy terrains with the Shade Riders, finding lost relics and rare remaining Soul Woods, unravelling climate-altering mysteries, and witnessing the almighty Sunlight for the first time in 500 years.

Science fiction is the most important phenomenon of twenty-first century Sinophone literature. By the end of the last century, Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung and Chan Koonchung; China’s Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Wang Jinkang; Taiwan’s Lucifer Hung, Chi Ta-wei, and Andrew Yeh; and overseas writer Chang Shi-Kuo, among others, have all written about time travel, interstellar war, alien monsters, biochemical weapons, the earth in crisis, utopias and dystopias, and other subjects outside of mainstream realist fiction. Large-scale works such as Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem and Han Song’s Tracks and Hospital either conceive of the last struggles of human civilization in the face of extinction by alien invasion or reflect on the Kafkaesque confines of the human condition. While these works engage shrewdly with grand themes, they also lead the reader into unknown worlds and give access to unrevealed visions. Dung Kai-cheung’s Histories of Time offers retrospective accounts from the future of a submerged Hong Kong, while Chan Koonchung, who once lived in Beijing, concocts a socialist heterotopia connecting past to future.

Science fiction in Taiwan has not been able to develop its own climate, but this has not prevented dedicated writers from experimenting with form and imagining alternate realities. Lou Yi-Chun’s Daughter deploys a knowledge of quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence while reversing typical understandings of moral realism and gender roles. In Kuang Chaoren, Lou incorporates the astrophysics of black holes and white holes into a creative landscape wherein pathological changes in the human body create cracks that allow glimpses into celestial storms. The setting of Lou’s Ming Dynasty pays homage to Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. In the story, a robot transmits data on the Ming Dynasty to another galaxy as the blueprint for a future civilization. Egoyan Zheng’s Ground Zero imagines the causes and consequences of a Taiwanese nuclear power plant explosion and the strange visions brought about by the catastrophe, no less than a tribute to the novel The Ruins of Taiwan by Sung Tse-lai, a writer of a prior generation.

All these works can be categorized as science fiction, but they have won the attention of readers not only because of their authors’ fantastical imagination and how they cross the boundaries of realism. As science fiction theorist Seo-Young Chu reminds us, the subjects tackled by science fiction narratives are not themselves fantastical. On the contrary, they may be more real than the realities of realist fiction. Chu even believes that all literary creations are works of “science fiction” that turn vulgar matters into magic. The techniques of reenactment and mimesis that realist fiction relies on are only the first step. Science fiction’s ability to reflect on and reconstruct inconceivable, inexplicable reality is what truly demonstrates the power of literature to turn the imaginary into the real. More important, Chu argues that the basic unit of science fiction is the poetic or lyric metaphor – it uses the complex twists of figurative language to turn the “dream world” into narrative expression.

If so, what are the metaphors in Egoyan’s science fiction compared to that of his contemporaries? Liu Cixin is concerned with the state of emergency before the collapse of human civilization; Han Song is always mired in the claustrophobic syndromes of a black box (China!); Lou Yi-Chun specializes in abject and impossible to unravel ethical farces; the clock of Hong Kong under Dung Kai-cheung’s pen ticks haphazardly; Chan Koonchung’s world is filled with conspiracies that appear in the full light of day. In contrast, Egoyan’s works are more involutionary, like Rubik’s cubes or Russian nesting dolls, spiraling, overlapping, and recursive. Historical, political, ethical, and gender issues all revolve around his surveys of intimate relationships, and all his plot points and characters ultimately point toward the topology of love.

Egoyan believes that love is the most wondrous variable separating humans from non-humans. Each story in the collection sets up a dialogue or argument about love. In “The Masaki Nikaido Virtual Idol Scam”, the main character willingly invests her life into a lover she meets in dreams. She has no regrets, having asked herself: “Am I afraid of a life without love, or am I afraid of a life without companionship?” In “The Rest of My Life”, an actress and director couple pursue the zero degrees of separation found in perfect love, unable to bear the compromise of anything that “also counts as love”. They experiment with their neurobiologies and do not hesitate to replace their lives as human beings. In “The Dream Projection AI Uprising Against Humanity”, The Phantom, an imprisoned AI creature, shows disdain for humans but is speechless when asked, “You have no desire to reproduce, so are you not capable of love?”. In “Lights in the Mist”, the prevailing church of “Global Consciousness” look negatively on all beliefs, as well as the human capacity for rationality and cognition. They work hard to purge all notions of divine will and all prior philosophical ideas about transcendence in order to become a cleaner species. But while the survivors of the slaughter speak eloquently of their anti-faith beliefs, they are at a loss to explain the origins of “sentience” and its associations with love.

A dialogue within the fake book’s fictional afterword is rich with meaning. A reporter meets with a virtual pornography mogul to discuss the ways in which human dreams are put into practice. While the survivors of the Global Consciousness cult express their doubts about human cognition and propose cutting the body off from the soul as a way to achieve zero degrees of separation, the porn mogul chooses to go in the opposite direction and uses the most advanced dream making techniques that customizes for all erotic needs, attaining zero degrees of separation through fantasy and pleasure. The climax of their dialogue reveals a shocking clue that leads to another variation of the love-dream debate.

The first story in Zero Degrees of Separation, “Say I Love You Again”, points to “unfulfilled dreams and the deprivation of love” as the origin points of human trauma. In the story’s climax, a scientist obsessed with cetaceans at the neglect of her child suddenly says “I love you” to her son while in the final stages of developing a cetacean neurobiology. These are human words spoken in the language of orcas. The moment presents a convergence of death and life, fire and light against the night roar of the sea, a place where happiness and the end of happiness are indistinguishable. Is love a miracle? Is it the perfect culmination of a made-up dream? Or is it the most mysterious aspect of being human? Egoyan voices the baffling questions of the posthuman era in the most lyrical terms without giving a definitive answer.

“The source of love is not known; it only grows deeper.” The bewilderment and lament of the pre-modern dramatist Tang Xianzu still echoes in our posthuman century. In Tang’s classical romance, love’s greatest dimension is that the living may die of it, while the dead may live again through it. If so, a work of science fiction like Zero Degrees of Separation subtly tells us that a posthuman life is always the life of a survivor: the meaning of love begins with picking up the wreckage of (imagined) love.

Originally published at The News Lens: https://www.thenewslens.com/article/158988

The Guerrilla Female Perspective: Breaking Through the Monotone of the Masculine Narrative

Casey and His Gas Shop is based on the story of three gas shop owners: Casey, a newcomer to the city of Yilan; Wang Zi-Jian (“Prince”), whose business is going downhill; and Lin Tu-Tou (“Peanut”), whose business is booming. The book tells of their conflicts and the local customs of Yilan. One expects a story featuring three male characters to be masculine, but author Hao Ni-Er does not stop there. She expands the narrative to include the perspectives of Prince’s wife Yeh Shu-Ching and daughter Wang An-Ni; Peanut’s wife Lin Su-Yu; Grandma Fang, a customer, her son Fang Hsiang-Chun, daughter-in-law Hsiao Mei, and granddaughter Fang Huai-Hisang.

Amid this cacophony, the female perspective stands out: Wang An-Ni’s teenage adventures, Yeh Shu-Ching’s housekeeping, Lin Su-Yu’s quiet observations, Hsiao Mei’s struggles with her desire and infidelity, Fang Huai-Hsiang’s bewilderment at Casey’s pursuits. These scenes come alive in Hao Ni-Er’s narrative to paint a holistic picture of the ecology of each company. For instance, here’s a scene in which Yeh Shu-Ching urges her husband Prince to collect the money from their customer:

“Yeh Shu-Ching told him over and over again not to take credit. Halfway there, he received a call. It was her repeating: ‘Get a deposit at least.’” But at the doorstep of the less privileged, Prince cannot hide his soft spot: “Though embarrassing, a gas bottle that is worth a few hundred dollars would allow these people to last a few more weeks, to have hot water and warm meals, as if it would prevent their life from tilting too fast.” Thus, he assumes his wife’s reprimand. Seeing that she is about to scold him, he quickly thinks up some excuse, but does not expect that “she just picked up two bags of fruits and walked away. As she turned around and saw that Prince had not stepped out of the car, she asked, ‘Everything alright? Could you give me a hand?’ He says of course and helps her carry the vegetables and fruits.” Unannounced, a family drama ends. It is touching to read the couple’s tacit understanding of each other.

Instead of accepting a typically masculine portrayal of women as being focused entirely on petty profits, the novel offers a realistic and unpretentious restoration of familial interactions, making the otherwise stiff and sweaty gas shops wonderfully human. This is what makes Hao Ni-Er’s novel so powerful. The novel goes at length to set up the story, but ends in a precise and beautiful way, reminding us of all the compromises and helplessness in life. These last scenes give us a truthful close-up of the locals’ daily lives.

Jobs Are Neither Noble Nor Humble: Grinding Matters for the Workers

In her afterword, Hao makes clear that “I was raised not to believe ‘jobs are neither noble nor humble’.” As the daughter of a gas worker, she wants to describe in writing the cruelties of that particular world. This makes Casey and His Gas Shop special in that it pierces the facade of appearance. Wang An-Ni, the daughter of Prince, has to face all kinds of gossip and suffers great humiliation because of her father’s profession. “Good grief! He works so hard to earn a living, but look at his daughter!” However, Hao Ni-Er deliberately allows her character to have the resilience of resisting this flawed and stereotypical narrative: “If I were a daughter of a civil servant, would anyone say such things? What if I were a banker’s child? What’s wrong with a gas worker?” On reading this, readers might loosen up and feel sympathetic toward the cruelties behind a phrase like “jobs are neither noble nor humble”.

Although workers need more respect, they often remain silent. In fact, at the very beginning of the novel, Hao Ni-Er already provides such an insight – Prince thought that his daughter’s rebellion is “because of the gas smell all over me?” To everybody’s surprise, the daughter rebelled only because her father’s name sounds like the name of a brand of instant noodles, and she worried that he would be ridiculed by her schoolmates. The smell of natural gas permeates the novel; before he delivers gas bottles to restaurants in Dongshan, Peanut always bathes, noting: “The boss detests the smell of gas, so I cannot go without a shower.” When Casey stands before someone he likes, he has nowhere to hide the smell: “Casey certainly knows what he smells like. The gas workers, no matter how thoroughly they wash themselves, have nowhere to hide the smell, when the others wrinkle their nose.” That odor, a constant, baleful presence in Casey and His Gas Shop, is a reminder to the novelist herself as well as to the readers that matter how much you want to maintain a peaceful surface, it is better to admit that some smells cannot be washed away.

This is what makes Casey and His Gas Shop so special: it is honest, straightforward, and unapologetic. Hao speaks for the workers, not just to harvest popular acclaim, but also to make us reflect on whether we are being hypocritical when we blurt out “I understand” and “I know” in response to every observation, and whether we overlook the importance of honesty and sincerity. “Sincerity is the most moving sound,” the author writes; this is precisely what Hao Ni-Er’s Casey and His Gas Shop has taught me.   

Originally published at Openbook: https://www.openbook.org.tw/article/p-66274

Known for her literary reportage, Ku Yu-Ling has recently released Margins of Time, her first novel. The book reads like a series of memory exercises, describing Taiwan’s wounds and scars, interpersonal bonds and burdens, as well as individual pains and sorrows.

Unable to forget our grief, we live more like a collective nation than a generation.

The novel is valuable for more than Ku’s ability to stick a needle where it really bleeds. Her memory exercises also work like daily conversations that take place between the moments of meals, movements, and quiet looks. Following a plot as plain as water, the readers realize that strength and vulnerability co-exist – those lives shattered by explosive events that happened decades ago have not died, instead, they strike on the here and now quietly like aftershocks. 

Fiction Fills an Unknown Past.

Speaking about her creative process while writing Margins of Time, Ku Yu-Ling said she deployed results from a life of field research, because “fiction, in fact, does not reveal what is already known, instead, the characters often go to places that are unfamiliar to us. Quite often, I had to stop and think where they were taking me.” This is all new to Ku Yu-Ling. She said with a sweet smile: “I call the time spent on the novel ‘sweet hours’. Every day, I looked forward to an unknown journey.”

These “sweet hours”, however, took thirty years to reach fruition. The phrase “field of her life” is, in a larger sense, no exaggeration. Many characters in Margins of Time took shape when Ku graduated high school; one of the protagonists, Chang Chin-Shan, is an example.

“This character was modeled after my high school geography teacher. In his youth, he endured Japanese rule. When people in my generation read history, it told us that World War Two is all about fighting against the Japanese. That conflict seemed to define everything. But the fact is that Taiwan participated in the militaristic expansion at the time. This part was not included in the materials we had read; everybody was just happy to celebrate the victory. I did not have the opportunity to read other versions beyond the history of fighting against the Japanese until after the lifting of martial law.”

Ku was so shocked by her findings that even today she can only use adjectives like “explosive” to describe the “other world” that she saw after the lifting of the martial law.

“I started to wonder what the adults I knew, and what my geography teacher, or even my father had actually gone through,” Ku Yu-Ling said. Her reflection came to a shattering conclusion: “I knew nothing about their past.”

Ku said when she was younger, she thought about adults only in terms of “the annoying and the not-so-annoying”. The onset of a new era brought all kinds of materials to light. What she “desperately wanted to know” was not just the information in history books, but the stories of individual lives. “But then you realize there is no way of knowing people simply through your intelligence, you are sometimes constrained by the framework of the era. Of course, I later also benefited from the era.”

Ku Yu-Ling recalled reading classified historical records from the White Terror together with someone who had been a political prisoner then. “We read left-wing political economy and Marx. For a child who grew up with anti-communist sentiments, a whole new world opened up, the adults around us became three-dimensional, and I began to imagine more. A novel can contain that kind of imagination.”

A Small Step Toward Reconciliation, a Big Step Toward Understanding

All the wounds and scars in Margins of Time, no matter how big or small, are caused by the aftershocks of politics and class structure. Therefore, what most concerns Ku in the midst of these aftershocks is how these people lived their lives.

In the process of reading the book, readers may be easily drawn in by the propelling plotlines of war and politics. But Ku also spends an equal amount of energy laying out pressing issues like housing, labor, and environmental protection. “If we are able to understand the constraints these people felt, the choices they made, and the consequences they had to bear, then we should also reflect on our own life.”

More than thirty years have passed since the lifting of martial law. The children born then are now old enough to start their own families. Ku Yu-Ling’s desire to write awakened those three decades ago. The characters beat in her mind day and night. And she hopes to launch a new dialogue with readers in their twenties and thirties.

“This generation is very different from ours. They have been to all kinds of memorials and museums since their youth. My greatest fear is that after they finish reading the long historical records, they would say: ‘It is good that it is over. It is good that it is different now.’ What I fear most is the perfect tense of democracy, not knowing its inadequacy, not having the strength to resist.”

In this way, Margins of Time remains unfinished. The curiosity, patience, and suspicion of the characters, though different in their own ways, ultimately reflect an era. Some cannot find the right words at the moment when something happens; time then passes on like water, and the pain becomes an unspeakable wound, a fog in the mind. I hear some are eager for reconciliation, as if the fog could be controlled or dispersed completely.

“I do not write to reconcile, far from it,” said Ku Yu-Ling. She meant that she writes to understand.

Now she understands that “sometimes, the pain of individuals cannot be relieved or reversed by other forces, but demands the whole social structure to relax in order for them to find relief.” Therefore, writing is a must, no matter how far the so-called “truth” as we understand it departs from reality. Ku Yu-Ling is willing to let her inquiry and her work become a part of the “collective” forces to that end.

Although the Illustrators Exhibition at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair was launched in 1967, Taiwan didn’t have its first featured illustrator until 1989. The timing closely followed the lifting of martial law in 1987 when after decades of political and educational repression, Taiwan gradually began to open up and make progress towards reform. As politics opened up, all kinds of creative spheres now had freedom of thought and expression which let them flourish and become more diverse. Then as education opened up, there was a shift in the Taiwanese perspective on childhood and what it meant to produce books for young readers, so the publishing industry began experimenting with other possibilities beyond moral storytelling.

2019 marked the peak of Taiwan’s participation in the Illustrators Exhibition when Taiwanese illustrators accounted for 9 of the 76 featured artists from around the world. As of 2022, the exhibition has featured 89 Taiwanese illustrators since Hsu Su Hsia’s (徐素霞) work was first chosen in 1989. These illustrators include Page Tsou (鄒駿昇) and Cho Pei-Hsin (卓霈欣) who won the International Award for Illustration (awarded by Fundación SM, part of Spanish publisher Grupo SM) in 2011 and 2021 respectively.

If an artist’s work is featured in the exhibition and they’re able to go on and publish a full-length picture book, it usually has a substantial impact on their domestic reputation, and the relevant invitations start to pour in, such as those from government bodies involved in making picture books that relate to policy or cultural conservation. For example, the Taoyuan Government’s Cultural Affairs Department invited Ballboss and Lin Lian-En (林廉恩) to each create their own work on the topic of “Remembering Military Dependents’ Villages”. These works portrayed the communities which gradually formed in settlements that were purpose built for Nationalist soldiers and their dependents when they retreated from mainland China in 1949. In 2022, Ballboss was featured in the Illustrators Exhibition for a second time with his book Flight from Crow Cave (從烏鴉洞起飛), and Page Tsou was featured a fifth time with his work Hide and Seek (捉迷藏) which was published by the National Taiwan Museum.

There are two illustrators from the last few years whose works we particularly wanted to recommend to international readers. Both artists have been featured twice in the Illustrators Exhibition:

Liu Hsu-Kung 劉旭恭 (2015, 2018)

After creating children’s picture books for the last 20 years, Liu had already amassed a large number of loyal readers by the time his work was selected for the Illustrators Exhibition. His books were often philosophical without being pretentious and while the style was very childlike, a lot of adults also found themselves falling in love with the stories after reading them aloud. His first book I Want to Eat Durians! (好想吃榴槤) still transcends age boundaries and is widely beloved by readers. Similarly, his other books such as The Orange Horse (橘色的馬), Off to Tortoiseland (到烏龜國去), The Little Paper Boat (小紙船) and Little Mouse’s Dream (小老鼠的夢想) are all worth recommending to international readers.

Who’s Stop Is This? (誰的家到了) (featured in the 2015 Illustrators Exhibition) is a board book, which is a format that remains relatively rare among Taiwanese children’s books. Although the plot and image composition are both quite simple, there are still details that are worth exploring such as the protagonist which is a bus designed to look like an animal so that it feels kinder and a little less mechanical. The passengers get off the bus one after the other and head home, creating a steady rhythm with the kind of added variations that children enjoy. It’s a book that ultimately caters to the emotional needs of toddlers and there’s a comforting ending which leaves them feeling satisfied.

In Where Did the Ticket Go? (車票去哪裡了) (featured in 2018) the story immediately begins with a series of narrative climaxes that combine with powerful colour contrasts to make the story feel fast-paced, but the book’s ending and the way the story develops in the middle section both leave the reader with a feeling of tranquillity. Again and again, the characters are full of determination as they embark on challenging expeditions together. However, what truly stays with the reader isn’t the characters’ drive but rather the thoughtful way their determination transforms as they approach their difficult goals.  

Chang Hsiaochi  張筱琦 (2020, 2021)

Before her work was selected for the Bologna Illustration Exhibition, Chang Hsiaochi had mostly collaborated with other writers and her characters often felt like they were doing little leaps. While there was a slight cautiousness to these leaps, it was clear from her illustrations that she longed to be less constrained and have more narrative scope. After her five drawings from Waiting for Mama (等媽媽來的時候) were selected for the exhibition in 2020, then another five from Which Side is Which? (哪邊是哪邊) were selected in 2021, she developed the original illustrations into picture books where she could act as both author and illustrator. These two books and her two other titles that were published at around the same time (The Moon Today (今天的月亮) and We’ll Get There Anyway! (反正都可以到嘛)) showed just how agile her illustrations could be and how in the process she could make readers’ childlike hearts leap too.

While all four texts are extremely short, there is a joyful rhythm in reading them aloud. Moreover, with the exception of Waiting for Mama’s relatively clear-cut subject matter, all of Chang’s picture books are almost impossible for the reader to easily define. It can seem like there isn’t an underlying purpose to these books and yet they always leave the reader feeling good. And after all, what could be more important for a picture book creator than writing and illustrating works that make her happy and make her readers feel good?

Both Liu and Chang’s illustration styles tend to be unpolished in a way that feels effortless and their simplicity holds up well over repeat readings. The Illustration Exhibition has also featured Taiwanese artists whose picture books confront heavier issues. For example, Sometimes (有時候) by Ali Ginger (阿力金吉兒) (featured in 2012) poetically depicts the strength of human resilience in the face of natural disasters; Good Things (好東西) by Huang Yu-Chin (黃郁欽) (featured in 2016) creates an unusual character to get readers to contemplate nuclear energy; and Once Upon a Time, A Train Came to the Island (從前從前，火車來到小島) by Yi Wen (黃一文) (featured in 2021) confronts historical scars from a perspective of transformative justice. All of these books feature spectacular words and illustrations that make each of them significant and far-reaching in their own way.