Written over the past several decades, Ping Lu’s The Taiwan Histories Relived Trilogy has launched an iconic new “Taiwan” novel style distinct from the classic roman-fleuve-inspired works of the last century. Apart from their disconnected time flows, neither the characters nor stories in these three novels are presented in anything resembling a sequential manner. However, their narratives similarly center on difficult situations and how characters interpret them and muddle through. Also, each of the narratives regularly cycles between “past” and “present”, using the present to better understand the past to quench conflicts that have festered and grown over time.
It may be said thusly: Ping Lu has fostered in her The Taiwan Histories Relived Trilogy not a common perspective on history but rather a common humanity shaped and guided by a shared heritage of suffering. Put another way, the history in The Taiwan Histories Relived Trilogy is told not for its own merit but for the deep and meaningful importance it has for us today.