The tumultuous recent history of Taiwan surprisingly gave the islands unusually diverse cultures. People immigrated to Taiwan for all kinds of reasons, from missionaries passing on their gospels, businessmen developing new markets, workers seeking bigger money, to refugees running from wars. Thus memories of the lost past are a motif of Taiwanese literature and a powerful approach for writers to deal with issues inconvenient to confront face to face. These issues include regime transfer, political oppression, beliefs, sexuality, family values, urbanization, fantasies, misunderstanding and discrimination. All these can be found in these two marvelous short stories.
Lin’s ABC Doggie Bites Piggie is the love story of Marva, a young woman living during the time of regime handover in the 1940s. Luo’s Nomad is an urban fantasy of today’s Taipei.
Lin Chun-Ying‘s literary works are credited and loved by his readers because of the extraordinary beauty contained in his words. In 1991 he published his first collection of short stories, The Longest Summer, which immediately built his name in the Taiwanese literary Scene. In addition to issues regarding the history and urban/rural lives in Taiwan, Lin experiments with his mother tongue—the Taiwanese dialect that has been repressed and forgotten. His other collections of short stories include A Burning Notebook (1997), Those Good Women (2005) and The Garden of Mirrors (2006), among others. His novel, My Nostalgia That I Dare Not Speak Its Name,(2012) received the Award of Taipei International Book Fair, the Golden Tripod Award, and was the finalist of the 2012 Taiwan Literature Award. His latest work, Formosa Heat, a novel, won the 2018 Taiwan Literature Award, the highest honor of Taiwanese literature.
Luo Yi-Chun is one of the most acclaimed Taiwanese writers. His works include novels, short stories, essays, and poetry. Luo Yi-Chun is the recipient of numerous awards, including the United Daily Literature Prize (1988,1990, 2003, 2004), and the China Times Literature Award (1991, 1999), among many others. His most ambitious novel, the two volumes of Western Xia Hotel won the Taiwan Golden Tripod Award (2009), Golden Medal of Taiwan Literature Award (2009), and the Hong Kong Red Chamber Literature Award (2010). In 2007 Luo Yi-Chun was one of the writers-in-residence for the International Writing Program hosted by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Luo Yi-Chun is a prolific writer; his latest anthologies of essays Innocent Worries and Cab Drivers were published in 2018. Tastes of Nostalgia
Short Stories by Taiwanese Writers
Lin Chun-Ying & Lou Yi-Chun
Translator: C.J. Anderson-Wu
Editor: Steven M. Anderson
Publisher: Serenity International Publishing House
Date: May, 2020
ISBN: 978-986-96393-2-3