The Taste of Apples

"Huang Chun-ming’s stories are early masterpieces of nativist literature. Nativist writers sought to represent the daily lives of ordinary Taiwanese, particularly the underclasses in rural Taiwan. These writers were dedicated to depicting social injustices and to building up a Taiwanese identity. In these ways the Nativists were pushing back against the KMT’s strict control over culture. The Nationalists decried the Nativists’ focus on class issues as sympathetic to communism. They were also threatened by Nativist literature’s attention to Taiwanese culture. The KMT championed writers who focused on the culture of Greater China. Given U.S. influence, they also supported writers who adopted Western-style modernism. Huang Chun-ming may be the best of the Nativist writers. His shorter stories, such as “The Fish” and “Ringworms” (just 10 pages each) stand out for their economy of focus on impoverished Taiwanese families. In each, the narrative present recounts a single day or a single evening. Other stories, most of which cover a larger sweep of time, explicitly connect the characters’ hardships to globalization, modernization, and capitalism. Huang thematizes the gulf between locals who speak only Taiwanese and the elite who speak Mandarin Chinese. From the 1950s on, the Nationalists mandated the use of Mandarin Chinese, which put Taiwanese writers at a disadvantage. Huang often uses Taiwanese expressions. My Chinese edition includes footnotes in Mandarin explaining certain expressions. A good example is “The Taste of Apples,” when a nurse in an American-style hospital surprises an injured laborer’s family by speaking Taiwanese to them. The collision of modern U.S. values and Taiwanese life drives the plot. An auto accident devastates a Taiwanese family until, in a surprise ending, the American company responsible gives generous financial restitution. The stories stand out because of Huang’s skillful narrative techniques. Most of the stories interweave third-person narration, direct dialogue, and interior monologue. These layers convey the complexity of the characters’ feelings. In many of the stories, Huang also adroitly uses frequent shifts in point of view. This technique often helps the reader understand the characters as rounded people. In other cases shifts in point of view convey the characters’ differing experiences of Taiwan’s rapid changes. In “His Son’s Big Doll” the shifts in narrative mode humanize the protagonist, a laborer compelled to work a dehumanizing job to support his family. When his wife gets pregnant, K’un-shu resorts to working as an “adman,” a costumed actor sandwiched between advertising boards. The point of view also shifts between the adman and his wife, sometimes in the middle of a single paragraph, or even conveying two points of view simultaneously. Yes, in the author’s preface Huang tells of the teacher who encouraged him to become a creative writer. Before the book bannings, she had given him two books of short stories that she had brought from the mainland. She was executed during the White Terror, arrested for her Communist sympathies and accused as a “secret agent,” though Huang has his doubts. Huang’s schoolmates tell him of seeing the body on the dissecting table. Clearly that brutality haunts Huang, but I don’t see explicit brutality in his stories. The characters are mostly downtrodden, but that’s a very slow-motion brutality. The stories are terribly sad, but they’re full of humanity."