Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan

"The collection offers an extraordinarily broad range of stories by 14 major women writers. A few are émigrés from the mainland; others the daughters of émigrés. Some would identify as Taiwanese, and two, Eileen Chang and Hsi Hsi, never lived in Taiwan but profoundly influenced women’s writing there. The stories address a great breadth of topics, and they employ a rich array of storytelling forms. The narratives span the early twentieth century through the 1980s. Major themes include the predicaments of wives and concubines, new responses to women’s sexuality, the horror of the Cultural Revolution on the mainland, women’s changing social roles, and the alienation of youth. One story highlights the clash of Western colonial privilege with Chinese poverty in Shanghai. Another gives a nuanced portrait of a male character, the husband, who forgives his disgraced wife in the face of his family’s rejection. Several works explore the challenges of ageing, retirement, and intergenerational households—both pre-revolutionary and during Taiwan’s modernization. Whereas most depict the difficulties of isolation, “Journey to Mount Bliss” celebrates an elderly widower who finds love and then his family’s blessing in remarrying. The collection also showcases diverse storytelling techniques. Many of the stories use straightforward realism, at times structured around shifts in point of view, or by the use of front frames or end frames. Several employ high modernist techniques. Ou-yang Tzu’s “Vase” uses interior monologue that emphasizes psychoanalytic insights into projection and aggression. Li Ang’s “Flower Season” uses double-voiced narration to switch between the young protagonist’s real life and her fantasy of being ravished. Hsiao Sa’s “The Aftermath of the Death of a Junior High Coed” is told like a detective story. Lin Haiyin’s “Candle” is among the most psychologically probing stories. It’s about Grandma, the matriarch of a wealthy family whose loneliness has left her bedridden for three decades. In the backstory, shortly after the birth of her fifth child, her husband had begun an affair with their temporary nanny. She allows the younger woman to stay and loses her husband’s affections. As she overhears their nightly laughter across the hall, she longs for her husband’s touch. After she faints and comes to in her husband’s arms, she regularly feigns illness, her sole means to solicit attention. This defense mechanism leads progressively to her self-erasure. Over years her emotional desolation turns into physical paralysis. The story underscores the context of the two women’s circumscribed options. Given their social class, Grandma had expected to choose her husband’s concubine; she feels abandoned when he makes the choice himself. Although she acquiesces to the young woman’s pleas to stay, this loss of face leaves her denigrated and powerless. By performing illness she paints herself into a corner, and the story becomes a parable about the costs of despair. While evoking empathy for Grandma, the story challenges the reader to confront her own potential self-constraints. Ch’en Jo-shi’s “Chairman Mao Is a Rotten Egg” is well-known and directly describes a family in the midst of fear and repression. Having read many of her stories and similar ones in other volumes, though, I found most memorable Pan Renmu’s “A Pair of Socks with Love.” The story is unlike other fiction I’ve read about the Cultural Revolution. The tale testifies to the power of tenderness to transcend political and societal norms. For most of the story, the narrator recalls her privileged childhood as the daughter of an honest judge. She describes her parents’ tenderness, her father’s merciful jurisprudence, and her family’s beloved servant. The end of the story jumps from the 1940s to 1980 as the narrator reads a letter informing her of her father’s vilification in 1976. Following her father’s murder at the hands of Red Guards, the servant, by then an old man, risked his life to honor her father’s bloodied corpse with a clean pair of imported socks. In portraying the father’s compassion and his faith in China’s legal development, the story condemns the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution and reasserts hope for measured reform."