Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan

"This collection bore testimony to the courage and sophistication of queer fiction in Taiwan during the 1990s. Taiwan has for decades been on the forefront of LGBTQ rights in Asia. (Taiwan legalized gay marriage in 2019, the first Asian country to do so.) In Angelwings , Martin collected and translated ten stark stories published from 1989 through 1998. The stories’ significance also lies in their formal control of stormy psychological conflicts. Trauma threads through many of these stories. Two of the most powerful stories focus on troubled mother-daughter relationships. In Chen Xue’s “Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel,” the protagonist struggles with hostile ambivalence after her widowed mother turns to prostitution. Through a lesbian affair, the protagonist learns that she could be worth loving, that she loved her mother, and that she can reunite with herself as her lover encourages her to finish the story we are reading. Then she awakes to realize that her lover was a dream. More brutal than Chen Xue’s story, Hong Ling’s “Poem from a Glass Womb” directly eroticizes the mother-daughter relationship. Water imagery pervades the text: swamps, lakes, pools, with the mother named Shelly, her lesbian lover Sandy, and their daughter Aquaria. The story careens between the mother’s and the daughter’s interior monologues as they struggle in the aftermath of Sandy’s suicide. The overlap between the end of each section and the start of the next suggests their shared fixations and fantasies, as well as their final reconciliation. I have three favorites, the two stories I just mentioned, and “Rose Is the Past Tense of Rise.” The collection’s most sensual writing may be passages in this story, an excerpt from Wu Jiwen’s novel Galaxies in Ecstasies. The story tells of Seikei, a young man in Taiwan who from childhood identifies as a girl, and by high school feels convinced that the woman inside him is his real self. After his schooling and military service, Seikei works as a transvestite performer in Japan. There he learns of a doctor in Morocco who does gender reassignment surgery. When Seikei arrives in Casablanca, he is acutely aware of the exotic sights, sounds and smells of the city around him. Here the story’s sensuality betokens his bittersweet farewell to his old life. As he wanders the unfamiliar streets, he greedily breathes in the wind, the scent of roasting coffee and bread baking at the bazaar, and the proud voices of women. The next day after “he” goes into surgery, “she” wakes up in the recovery ward. After a month’s recovery, she again wanders the city and glimpses a man bathing. Her physical arousal deepens her admiration for her surgeon’s skills and her hope for her own future pleasures. Five interwoven passages from a travelog reinforce the main narrative’s explicit archetypes of femininity and masculinity. Seikei’s life story is intercut with excerpts from a Swedish explorer’s journal. Sven Hedin, a real-life archeologist, was searching for an ancient lost city, sited on an elusive “wandering lake.” Rivers flowing into the desert formed this seasonal lake that moved from year to year (and then disappeared). The explorer’s search for this wet cavity could be an allegory of a search for elusive femininity. By contrast, the place the explorers reached, Lop Nor, later became China’s nuclear testing site in Xinjiang . Lop Nor could signify modernization, masculinity, power, and force (explosions and obliteration). It’s been my pleasure, Sophie. Thank you."