Taiwanese Postcolonial Fiction

When the Japanese Nobel Laureate in literature KenzaburŌ Ōe visited Taiwan for a symposium held in his honor in December 2009, he hardly anticipated the political controversies into which he was thrown. Even before the conference, politicians accused the Academia Sinica, the organizing institution, of kowtowing to China by reducing a trilateral symposium involving Japan, Taiwan, and China to a “cross-strait event” and by replacing the Taiwanese novelist who was to act as Ōe's interlocutor with one more acceptable to China. Aside from the China factor, the underhanded politics tapped into ethnic tensions in Taiwan and the problematic national identity of Taiwan. While the original interlocutor, Li Ang, and her substitute, Zhu Tienwen, are critically acclaimed women novelists just a few years apart in age, Li is of Minnan ancestry and Zhu a second-generation Chinese mainlander whose father fled with the Chinese Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) government to Taiwan in 1949 after losing China to the communists. More important, Li is a postcolonial writer, whereas Zhu deploys postmodernism to resist decolonization.