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Taiwan 2001 |
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Literature |
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Taiwanese New LiteratureThe Colonial ContextWhereas most literature in Taiwan prior to 1920 was written in the style of the classical Chinese tradition, a new strand of modern Taiwanese literature emerged in the early 1920s in a process commonly referred to as the Taiwanese New Literature movement 臺灣新文學運動. Compared with its mainland counterpart, Taiwanese New Literature displayed two distinctive features that universally characterized colonial cultural products: its multi-linguisticity and its overriding political import. In addition to Chinese-language works, many of the literary products of this movement--especially in the later stage--were written in Japanese. There was also a viable Taiwanese Language movement 臺灣話運動 in the early 1930s, advocating the use of a new written language based on spoken Taiwanese, which is a version of the southern Fujianese dialect used by the majority of the population in Taiwan. From the beginning, Taiwanese New Literature was an integral part of a new phase of sociopolitical resistance by the Taiwanese people against Japanese colonial rule. In the 1920s, the Taiwanese intelligentsia, revolving around the Taiwanese Cultural Association 臺灣文化協會 (1921-1931), launched a large-scale cultural reform program full of various political agendas, in lieu of the futile and often brutally suppressed armed revolts in the first two decades of the Japanese period. Key figures of the early stage of the movement, such as Lai Ho 賴和 (1894-1943), frequently regarded as the "father of Taiwanese New Literature," Chen Hsu-ku 陳虛谷, and Tsai Chiu-tung 蔡秋桐, were also active members of the Association, participating in its well-known islandwide mass education lecture tours. Not surprisingly, nationalistic sentiments were expressed through their literary works. Even after 1931, when a harsh crackdown by the colonial government put an end to the lively resistance activities of the previous decade, the New Literature movement, nourished by the sociopolitical movements of the 1920s, continued to grow among the increasingly bilingual intellectual class of Taiwan. The legacy of resistance to colonialism, too, persisted, in either overt or covert forms, until the very end of the Japanese period.However, the broadly defined political nature of Taiwanese New Literature refers not only to explicit criticism of the colonizers, in works by such undaunted anti-imperialist fighters as Lai Ho and Yang Kui 楊逵, but also to the cultural hybridity in later works of the Taiwanese New Literature movement written in the colonizer's language, which was by definition a political product and carries with it imprints of an unjust power relationship. Whereas the first generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers, most of whom were born after the Japanese takeover, still exhibited a characteristically Chinese cultural and artistic outlook, there was a notable shift in the second generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers. The overall increase in the degree of hybridity in Taiwanese culture in the second half of the Japanese period may be explained by changes in the colonizer's governing policies. Beginning in 1918-1919, the Japanese adopted an effective assimilation policy 內地延長主義 ("the principle of treating Taiwan as an extension of Japan proper"), which shifted from high-handed police control and differential treatment of the Taiwanese to more enlightened civil governing, emphasis on education, and cultivation of a more congenial relationship between Japanese and Taiwanese. As the new colonial situation steadily took shape and Japanese language education became more effectively implemented, a greater number of students in the colony went to study in Japan. Those among them who enrolled in college literary departments and had contact with famous Japanese writers later played influential roles in the literary scene of Taiwan. An even more drastic change was that, during the last phase of the Japanese period (1937-1945), as Japan declared war with China, the colonial government mobilized huge amounts of social resources to enforce an intensified Japanization program 皇民化運動, (literally, "the movement of converting Taiwanese into loyal subjects of the Japanese Emperor"), which included a ban on Chinese-language publications. The hybrid nature of this colonial literature reflects Taiwan's colonial past and its relatively unusual experience as a Japanese colony. A territory of Han settlers since the 17th century and a province of the Manchurian-governed China since 1885, Taiwan was incorporated by Japan into a different geopolitical and economic system in the early part of the 20th century, and as a result went through the initial stages of modernization via its East Asian colonizer, which had itself recently modernized after the Western model. The kind of society produced in Taiwan by this process was inevitably of a hybrid nature, with modern and traditional institutions of different ethnic origins coexisting side by side. Taiwan occupied a strategic position in Japan's imperialist project, serving as a base for Japan's further advancement into South China and Southeast Asia. For this reason, it is said to have received relatively benign treatment from the Japanese (as compared to Japan's other colonies, such as Korea), considerably mitigating the hostility between colonizer and colonized. The colonial condition in Taiwan is thus a product of the extremely intricate political and cultural negotiations between the colonial government and the local elite, articulated by progressive intellectuals who often served as spokesmen for the elite. Fine Taiwanese writers of the later period, such as Chang Wen-huan 張文環, Lu Ho-jo 呂赫若, Yang Kui, and Lung Ying-tsung 龍瑛宗, achieved their distinctive art under the influence of Western artistic trends through Japanese literary institutions. Taiwanese New Literature MovementAs stated earlier, the Taiwanese New Literature movement began as part of a larger cultural reform movement during the 1920s. A brief introduction of this cultural movement, sometimes called the Taiwanese New Culture movement 臺灣新文化運動, may be in order. The first events of this movement took place in 1920, when some Taiwanese expatriates in Tokyo organized the New People Association 新民會, followed by a student-based Taiwanese Youth Association 臺灣青年會. The two organizations published a journal called Taiwanese Youth 臺灣青年 to propagate progressive ideas and voice opinions about the current state of affairs in Taiwan. The zeal for cultural reform soon spread to the island itself and was carried on by the Taiwanese Cultural Association. There are significant parallels between the Taiwanese New Culture movement and the Chinese mainland's May Fourth movement 五四運動. First of all, intellectuals in both societies, faced with the imperative to modernize, identified the cultural sediments of Neo-Confucian moralism and the feudalist social order as reactionary forces obstructing progress. Inspired by democratic ideals of modern Western society, both groups had come to associate the "old" with the conservative mentality of the gentry class, and the "new" with ways of the "modern citizen"--and sought to transform the masses through popular education and cultural enlightenment 文化啟蒙. The popular idea of social Darwinism, which equated rejuvenation of national culture with survival of the people, added to the urgency of the task of cultural reform as a means of national self-preservation. Secondly, the new intellectuals of both societies were influenced by the dynamics of progressive discourse on national emancipation and socialist revolution in the years following the First World War. Such currents of thought created an imaginary alliance among the "weak and oppressed" nations of the world and provided a powerful rationale for nationalistic resistance by victims of imperialist aggression, as obviously the Chinese mainland and Taiwan both were. Thus, a patriotic discourse combining the two components of sociocultural modernization (cultural enlightenment) and anti-imperialism (national salvation and anti-colonialism) was developed in the 1920s and shared by the new intellectuals on both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. Although in the first two issues of Taiwanese Youth there were already articles on language reform and the need for rejuvenating contemporary Taiwanese literature, it was not until the heated New Versus Old Literary Debate 新舊文學論戰, which began with Chang Wo-chun's 張我軍 attack on traditional poets in 1924 and lasted until 1926, that the Taiwanese New Literature movement was formally launched. In this debate, new literary concepts--mainly those centering around the advantage of adopting the vernacular as a new literary medium and the social functions of literature in a modern age--were introduced, criticized, and defended. Traditional poets were castigated for using literature to incur social gains and political favor, their literary style criticized as hackneyed and insincere. Advocates of new literature, on the other hand, were branded as shallow and ignorant charlatans, their literary views ungrounded in solid learning. As in the case of many literary debates in modern times, the heated antagonism between opposite camps prevented a meaningful exchange of ideas. Rather, the debate performed an important ritualistic function: after the debate, traditional literary activities were increasingly confined to poetry clubs that continued to thrive but with limited social reach, while New Literature was legitimized as a powerful social institution. Through this institution, the new intellectuals denounced their Chinese cultural heritage--partly by taking traditional men of letters and their world views as scapegoats--and endorsed a vision of "modern civilization." These denouncements and this new vision constituted the major content of Taiwanese New Literature for at least a decade. If the two New Culture movements on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan were analogous but separate, the relationship between the Chinese and Taiwanese New Literature movements was actually much closer. In the early stages, literary reform in the Taiwanese New Literature movement virtually mirrored its slightly earlier Chinese counterpart (1917-1925). When Chang Wo-chun wrote the polemical essays that triggered the Old Versus New Literary Debate, he was a student of Beijing Normal University. During the debate, the major tenets for the May Fourth literary revolution, such as Hu Shih's 胡適 "Principle of Eight Don'ts" 八不主義 from his "Preliminary Suggestions for Literary Reform" were introduced with slight modifications. Even the harsh style of the way Chang Wo-chun castigated the traditional poets was immediately reminiscent of the radical Chinese reformist Chen Tu-hsiu 陳獨秀. Furthermore, throughout the decade of the 1920s, creative works by Chinese New Literature writers, such as Lu Hsun 魯迅, Hu Shih, Kuo Mo-jo 郭沫若, Ping Hsin 冰心, Wang Lu-yen 王魯彥, and Ling Shu-hua 凌淑華, were reprinted in Taiwanese journals and undoubtedly served as models for literary practice. However, within a decade, this dependent relationship began to change. Apparently, during this time the deepening of Japanese colonization had begun to structurally transform Taiwan society and steer it further away from the cultural orbit of the Chinese mainland. Consciousness of this new reality among the Taiwanese intellectuals manifested itself in two consecutive literary debates in 1931-32, the Nativist Literature Debate 鄉土文學論戰 and the Taiwanese Language Debate 臺灣語文論戰, and represented a turning point in the Taiwanese New Literature movement. The Nativist Literature Debate testified to the prominent leftist presence in Taiwan's literary circles. The literary program proposed by its chief advocate Huang Shih-hui 黃石輝, who suggested that writers target their creative works at the masses in the working class, was clearly modeled upon the leftist concept of proletarian literature. The split of the Taiwanese Cultural Association in 1927 was primarily a result of disagreement in resistance strategies between the nationalist right wing and the socialist left wing. After the split, the association was controlled by the left-wing members Lien Wen-ching 連溫卿 and Wang Min-chuan 王敏川. The more moderate members formed the Taiwanese People's Party 臺灣民眾黨 and continued to fight for greater constitutional rights for the Taiwanese people. However, the political climate in the colony was so disillusioning by that time that even the Taiwanese People's Party bagan to display a leftward leaning tendency. Consequently, it was forced to dissolve by the colonial government in 1931. Initially, the Taiwanese New Culture movement focused on cultural enlightenment to address the society's internal needs to modernize, and the main targets of its attack were old Chinese customs and lingering social ills of feudalism. As Taiwan proceeded along the course of modernization, however, the worldwide economic depression of the late 1920s exacerbated social problems, such as unemployment and class exploitation, thus leading to a rise in support for socialist ideology and Taiwan nativism. Primarily concerned with internal social problems and conflicts between classes, leftist intellectuals called for a Taiwan-centered view in literary creation. Aside from his class-oriented literary view, Huang Shih-hui was also known for forcefully arguing that Taiwanese writers should only write in their own language about things on their own homeland. Termed by historians as following the direction of "self-improvement based on one province (Taiwan)" 一島改良主義, advocates of the nativist literature clearly envisioned a "Taiwanese consciousness" as something to be distinguished from the more inclusive "Chinese consciousness," or the ethnic consciousness of the Han race 漢民族意識. This Taiwanese consciousness was the core spirit of Kuo Chiu-sheng's 郭秋生 campaign for the Taiwanese language. The Taiwanese Language Debate, with the literary journal Nan-yin 南音 as its major forum, revealed the anxieties and ambivalent feelings of a colonized people in their attempts to develop a national language. In an effort to assert Taiwanese subjectivity, the movement had effectively severed the Taiwanese intellectuals' emotional ties with China. First and foremost, the movement called attention to the fact that early advocates of the Taiwanese New Literature movement had followed the Chinese model of the May Fourth movement too closely. They had thus unwittingly mistaken the latter's problems and strategies for their own, without giving proper attention to the objective circumstances of Taiwan. To facilitate popular education in a country with an extremely high illiteracy rate, advocates of the May Fourth movement proposed to replace the difficult, obsolete classical Chinese language with modern Chinese vernacular as the official written language. The basic theoretical assumption was that since there would be a close correspondence between the spoken and written versions of modern Chinese, as reflected in the famous slogan "我手寫我心" (My hand writes what my heart feels), the efforts required to become literate in Chinese would be greatly lessened. In reality, however, a standard Chinese vernacular had yet to be popularized within the country; people from different regions were still predominantly using dialects, some of which were even mutually unintelligible, for daily communication (see section on Dialects in Language). There was, to be sure, a considerable disparity between the standard Chinese vernacular and the southern Fujianese dialect used by the majority of Taiwanese. Moreover, as Taiwan had already been politically separated from China for over two decades, its people had far fewer channels for learning the standard Chinese vernacular through public institutions, such as an education system, publications, or a state bureaucracy. Nevertheless, early advocates of the Taiwanese New Literature movement still favored the adoption of Chinese vernacular as the medium for Taiwanese New Literature. The fact that this position was uncontested at the time shows that by then the ethnic-cultural identity of Taiwanese intellectuals was still predominantly Chinese. One popular argument they espoused was that since most of the Taiwanese gentry class members were still tutored in the written language of classical Chinese in their childhood, minimal additional efforts would be needed to enable them to use the Chinese vernacular as a literary medium. The advantage of this was that it would facilitate the circulation of Taiwanese literary works in the larger Chinese community, since obviously Chinese recognition was still highly regarded by Taiwanese intellectuals. In practice, however, despite the goodwill on the part of most Taiwanese New Literature writers, the disadvantages are by no means negligible. It is said that Lai Ho had to write his works in classical Chinese first, then translate it into the Chinese vernacular, and finally revise it with more lifelike Taiwanese colloquialisms. Yang Shou-yu 楊守愚, a writer well-versed in the Chinese vernacular because of his background, had to regularly rewrite works submitted for publication when he served as the editor for the literary section of the Taiwanese People's Newspaper 臺灣民報. Such a cumbersome and laborious process work against the fundamental principle of realistic literary writing, which explain why the kind of reevaluation offered by the Taiwanese Language movement was well-received even by Lai Ho, a writer with ostensible Chinese consciousness. Without political enforcement, however, the goals of the Taiwanese Language movement were very difficult to materialize. The fact that many words in the Taiwanese spoken language are not believed to have corresponding Chinese characters made the development of a new writing system an enormous project beyond the reach of private groups. It is said that Lai Ho, after extensively using the Taiwanese language in writing his short story "A Letter of Criticism from a Comrade" 一個同志的批評信 (1935), was so frustrated with the experiment that he completely stopped writing fiction in the New Literature style. The colonial government, not surprisingly, only tried to hinder such a nationalistically motivated project as an obstacle to the implementation of Japanese as the official language in Taiwan. The Taiwanese Language Debate thus reveals a typical dilemma facing colonized people: as the effort to develop a new national language based on the native tongue was seen by the Japanese colonial rulers as mainly a linguistic strategy of resistance and a means to assert one's own subjectivity, it was not likely to gain the political support required for its success. Despite failure, however, the Taiwanese Language movement must be regarded as a significant turning point in the Taiwanese New Literature movement. There was a marked decline in the number of works by Chinese New Literature writers reprinted in Taiwanese journals after 1931. From this point on, the development of Taiwanese New Literature began to consciously depart from the Chinese model, embarking on a path of its own. Maturation and GrowthA crackdown of leftist organizations and the general suppression of sociopolitical movements in 1931 ironically heralded a period of maturation and growth for Taiwanese New Literature, which lasted for over a decade. Various literary organizations were formed and new literary journals mushroomed. Having passed its initial, experimental stage, the evolution of the new literary form, particularly in the technical respect, made impressive progress during this period. Whereas the first generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers continued to be productive, a group of young talents also joined the ranks. There was, however, a notable gap between the two generations of Taiwanese New Literature writers in such respects as cultural outlook, aesthetic preference, and vocational orientation. This apparent disjuncture in the relatively brief history of Taiwanese New Literature is particularly noteworthy, as it points to a rapidly changing cultural landscape in the second half of Taiwan's Japanese colonial period. It has been argued that by the time the New Literature movement began, the cultural identity of Taiwanese intellectuals was still predominantly Chinese, despite the fact that Taiwan had already been colonized by the Japanese for more than two decades. Members of an ordinary Taiwanese gentry family were still sufficiently exposed to the Chinese cultural tradition, as children were still sent to private tutorial classes, or shu-fang 書房, to study classical Chinese. Most of the first generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers, being members of the traditional gentry class, were well-versed in classical Chinese and competent in traditional Chinese poetry writing, a practice to which some of them returned after Chinese publications were banned in 1937. The fact that there were no substantial changes in society in the ethnic content of cultural production or reproduction is attributable to the special kind of colonial policies that were applied to Taiwan during the first two decades of the Japanese colonial period. Acknowledging that the colony had a separate history of its own, the Japanese were primarily concerned with maintaining social stability, rather than culturally assimilating the Taiwanese people. The cultural upbringing and community imagination of Taiwanese writers whose formative years fell into the first half of the colonial period were therefore not fundamentally transformed by colonial rule, even though most of them also received formal education in Japanese and were equipped with modern knowledge. Lai Ho, for example, went to a modern-style medical school and knew the Japanese language well, but he never used it in his creative writing. More importantly, as evidenced by both his writing and the role he played in the literary community, he was in many ways an exemplary traditional Chinese intellectual. Significantly influenced by the Chinese May Fourth movement and its reformist ideology, the historical role played by this generation of Taiwanese writers was primarily that of new intellectuals in a premodern society struggling to break away from the past and to usher in progressive social visions. The past, however, was still very much with them. It can be easily demonstrated that, compared to their younger followers, this generation of Taiwanese writers carried over a considerable cultural legacy from the Chinese tradition in their New Literature-style works. Many of their works criticized a "spiritual disease" of Taiwanese society directly reflecting the Neo-Confucian moralist world view. The formal dimension of literary works by writers of this generation also displays a characteristically transitional character. The omniscient narrative point of view and episodic plot structure were obvious traits inherited from Chinese vernacular fiction. Since the modern short story, the novel, and free verse were essentially forms imported from the West, this generation of Taiwanese writers' assimilation of Western literary techniques and artistic conceptions was largely superficial. The situation, however, was very different with writers born at later dates (Yang Kui was born in 1906; Weng Nao 翁鬧, 1908; Chang Wen-huan, 1909; Lung Ying-tsung, 1911; and Lu Ho-jo, 1914). In their formative years, the colonial cultural institutions were increasingly consolidated, and there was consequently a marked decrease in the value of Chinese learning as cultural capital. Generally speaking, unlike their immediate predecessors, the generation of Taiwanese writers active in the 1930s and 1940s lacked a solid background in traditional Chinese learning and demonstrated a more characteristically hybrid cultural identity. (Hsu Chun-ya 許俊雅, a researcher from the Taiwanese Literature Studies workshop, points out that the use of Japanese in literary creation gradually began to increase around 1933, and by around 1936 to 1937, there were actually very few works written in Chinese.) At the same time, rapid social change, already a norm in 20th-century non-Western countries, was greatly accelerated by Taiwan's colonial authorities. The gap between the social visions of the two generations of writers was even more remarkable, as the younger writers were raised in a society at a considerably more advanced stage of modernization than their predecessors. Several critics have pointed out that Lai Ho seemed to be obsessed with the abusive power of laws and regulations enforced by the colonial government and its agents. These critics often justified Lai Ho's criticism with the fact that police control was notoriously harsh in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. Nevertheless, judging from the many passages in Lai Ho's fiction in which he meditated on the demarcation line between justice and law from various philosophical points of view, one gets the impression that his ideals and framework of reference were still derived from a premodern, Confucianist world view. The fact that younger writers tended to present both the evil and the benign sides of the law indicates that these writers held a more realistic view of the modern judicial system, despite discriminatory practices in the colonial context. Thus, in many ways these two generations of Taiwanese writers perceived the relationship between the individual and society quite differently. Another significant factor is that the younger generation of writers were oriented to the literary profession in an entirely different manner from their predecessors. The 1930s saw the emergence of a new cohort of writers who had studied in Japan, a group that constituted the majority of second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers. While in Japan, these aspiring young Taiwanese writers found themselves on the periphery of an entirely different system of cultural production, and many of them began to earnestly seek membership in Japanese literary institutions. They enrolled in university literary classes, attended salons revolving around famous writers, and, above all, joined literary contests, which seemed to be an effective way of earning recognition from mainstream Japanese literary circles (often referred to as Chung-yang wen-tan 中央文壇). Yang Kui, Lu Ho-jo, and Lung Ying-tsung were winners of literary prizes in the mid-1930s. As Japanese assimilation of the West surpassed that of the Chinese in the same period, the Taiwanese writers' knowledge of Japanese seemed to have enabled them to have a firmer grasp of Western artistic concepts, and, more important, of the kind of vocational vision that artists in a modern society often take for granted. These writers soon came to perceive themselves as professional artists with their own technical expertise and individualistic aesthetic visions, and thus it was less conceivable that they would ever become spiritual leaders like Lu Hsun or Lai Ho, whose status as major writers was derived from personal charisma and outstanding moral character in addition to literary talent. Apparently, the younger writers enjoyed access to a wide range of literary models, mainly from the West, as evidenced by the remarkable diversity their works have shown in both artistic mode and ideological outlook. To give a few better known examples: Yang Kui adhered to a more orthodox leftism and dedicated his literary works to humanitarian criticisms of class exploitation, imperialism, and general evils in a capitalist society. Chang Wen-huan's approach was more humanistic in a liberal vein. His interest in the mystic power of the individual's inner self, projected onto Nature, resulted in some beautifully written lyrical pieces. Lu Ho-jo successfully emulated naturalism, offering realistic portraits of Taiwan's degenerated gentry class through "typical characters." Lung Ying-tsung's works showed influences of Symbolism: delicately aesthetic but with visible touches of decadence. It is perhaps ironic that, whereas early advocates of the Taiwanese New Literature movement insisted on using the Chinese vernacular to ensure a place in the Chinese literary world, two out of three Taiwanese stories first collected in anthologies published in China--"The Newspaper Man" 送報夫 by Yang Kui and "The Ox Cart" 牛車 by Lu Ho-jo (the third story selected was the Chinese language "The Ill-fated" 薄命, by Yang Hua 楊華)--were translated from Japanese. Furthermore, the high reputation enjoyed by these two stories was clearly derived from the fact that they had won prizes in literary contests sponsored by important Japanese magazines. Hu Feng 胡風, the editor of the Chinese collections in which these stories were found, Mountain Spirit: Short Stories from Korea and Taiwan 山靈: 朝鮮臺灣短篇小說集 and Anthology of Stories from Weak and Small Nations in the World 世界弱小民族小說選, was a renowned leftist literary theorist. The fact that Hu selected Yang and Lu's stories in recognition of their anti-imperialist spirit points to an extremely complex relationship between the Taiwanese authors and their Japanese colonizers, who were simultaneously oppressors and bestowers of cultural prestige. Such facts speak eloquently of the profoundly ambivalent cultural positions in which the second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers found themselves in the 1930s. End of an EraAfter the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the colonial government in Taiwan started an intensive Japanization program and banned the Chinese-language sections in newspapers and magazines. The impact of the harsh reality of war was not, however, fully felt until 1941, when Japan launched the Pacific War. The year 1937, for example, still saw the publication of the literary magazine Wind and Moon 風月報, the only Chinese-language magazine of this period. Wind and Moon featured popular types of literati writings, such as pulp romance, familiar essays, and occasional pieces of traditional scholarship, and enjoyed wide circulation. In 1940, a literary organization consisting mainly of Japanese writers published the aesthetically-oriented journal Literary Taiwan 文藝臺灣. With the onslaught of the Pacific War, however, the Japanese stepped up their war campaign efforts and began to actively mobilize people in the colony to make a contribution to the "Great East Asian War" 大東亞戰爭. Between 1941 and 1942, Literary Taiwan chimed in with the colonial government's call for arms and published such stories as Chou Chin-po's 周金波 "Volunteer Conscript" 志願兵 and other unabashedly propagandist poems and plays. Several well-known second-generation writers of Taiwanese New Literature, disapproving of both the political stance and artistic orientation of Literary Taiwan, formed their own literary organization and began to publish Taiwanese Literature 臺灣文學 in 1941. Before the two journals were forced to merge by the government under the new name of Taiwanese Literature and Art 臺灣文藝 in 1944, Taiwanese Literature published perhaps the most important works of second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers: "Capon" 閹雞 and "Night Monkeys" 夜猿 by Chang Wen-huan; "Wealth, Offspring, and Longevity" 財子壽, "Peace for the Entire Family" 閤家平安, and "Guava" 石榴 by Lu Ho-jo; "A Village Without Doctors" 無醫村 by Yang Kui; and "Rapid Torrents" 奔流 by Wang Chang-hsiung 王昶雄. The contention between Literary Taiwan and Taiwanese Literature between 1941 and 1944 represented a significant turn of events, as second-generation Taiwanese New Literature writers began to directly confront oppressive relationships within the colonial structure. For these writers, who had been partially nourished by Japanese culture in their formative years and to which they held various degrees of allegiance, this experience must have been simultaneously disillusioning and educating. Above all, it became clear to them that artistic approaches were not ideologically innocent. One thing that the Taiwanese writers objected to was the Japan-centered, typically colonist point of view of Literary Taiwan, which treated Taiwan as an exotic "foreign" place to be romanticized for the connoisseurship of readers in Japan. To the Taiwanese writers, such a literary approach was obviously complicitous in the colonial government's effort to involve culture in the process of political domination by way of diverting people from sociopolitical concerns to purely aesthetic ones. Such realizations were undoubtedly behind the tactics used by writers of Taiwanese Literature in their endeavors to champion realism as opposed to the exquisite aestheticism and romanticism of Literary Taiwan. Aside from works directly informed by leftist ideology, such as those by Yang Kui, it is said that some writers of the Taiwanese Literature group consciously shifted to more detailed depictions of local customs, rural life, and folk traditions of Chinese/Taiwanese origin in order to register their resentment of the Japanization program. The nationalistic orientation of Taiwanese Literature, however, failed to attract some of the ardent writers of an even younger generation, such as Yeh Shih-tao 葉石濤 and Chou Chin-po, who published their works in Literary Taiwan and expressed either aestheticism or political loyalty to the colonizer. Yeh even wrote the controversial essay "Shit Realism" 糞寫實主義, which provoked a heated response from colleagues at Taiwanese Literature. However, it was not until the next period that some of this younger generation of writers began to deeply reflect upon the complicated issues surrounding colonial subjectivity. The unusually convoluted trajectory traveled by Taiwanese New Literature writers may also be illuminated by a brief examination of their intriguingly different attitudes toward the issue of modernity. The wholehearted embrace by many first-generation writers of modernity as an advanced stage of civilization was expressed in vacant terms, for essentially they never had any real experience of a truly modernized society. Most of the second generation, pressured by wartime literary policies, engaged in indirect resistance by means of asserting nativism, to the effect of notably decreasing their criticism of traditional, feudalistic traits in Taiwanese society. However, if some of them consciously denigrated modern urban civilization, symbolically represented by the Japanese metropolis, still others held exactly the opposite stance. In the works of Chen Huo-chuan 陳火泉 and the younger writer Chou Chin-po, both of whom opted to side with progress, a prominent theme was the urgency to modernize in view of the obvious benefits that modernity could bring to the Taiwanese people. As Japan was equated with civilization, they ardently supported Japanization, albeit not without doubts from time to time. In artistic terms, the modern literary form of the Taiwanese New Literature movement significantly departed from the classical Chinese tradition, but its evolution was brought to an abrupt cessation at the end of the Second World War when Taiwan was returned to China. Several years later, the Nationalists, having lost the Chinese mainland to the communists in the civil war, relocated to Taiwan and started an entirely new era. The drastic changes such historical events brought to Taiwanese society caused most of the Taiwanese New Literature writers to halt their creative activities. Thus, many artists were never allowed to develop to their fullest potential, and the movement ended before any genuinely masterful works of art could ever appear. The legacy of the Taiwanese New Literature movement was suppressed in the postwar years, as the dominant culture now consisted of the mainland Chinese tradition. However, there were still some significant works written and published under the Taiwanese New Literature movement, and the exploration of colonial subjectivity continued to be the dominant concern of works written by writers directly nourished by the Taiwanese New Literature of the Japanese colonial period, such as The Orphan of Asia 亞細亞孤兒 by Wu Cho-liu 吳濁流, The Oleander Flowers 夾竹桃 by Chung Li-ho 鍾理和, The Man Who Rolls On the Ground 滾地郎 by Chang Wen-huan, and later works by Yeh Shih-tao. Despite their largely marginal position, these writers would play a crucial role in Taiwan's postwar literary history by offering alternative visions to the dominant culture, and their impact was increasingly felt in the nativist 本土化 movement of the last two to three decades.
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