Taiwanese Literature as a Driving Force in Political Movements and Its Literary Appeal

My research field is contemporary Chinese-language literature and film. When a work, whether fiction or non-fiction, is released into the world, it acquires its own unique value upon being freely interpreted by readers and audiences, independent of the author's intentions and wishes. Our job as literature and film researchers is to identify works that seem to possess contemporary importance, analyze and elucidate the meanings and messages contained within the works, and clarify how certain regions and people are influenced by the works. Among the Chinese-speaking countries, I have long focused on Taiwan. Taiwan is a political community and a nation separate from mainland China. Its unique historical experiences have caused Taiwan to form a historical memory different from that of China. This memory has been passed down in the form of stories. Through various stories, I have listened to and studied the breath and cries of the Taiwanese people, which change with each era, while remaining close to the experiences, history and reality unique to Taiwan.

Today, many people may view Taiwan as a nation with good food and culture friendly to Japan. It is also viewed as a nation which is somewhat advanced in human rights compared to China. For example, in May 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country (and the 27th in the world) to legalize same-sex marriage. The Taiwan Pride Parade, held every October, has grown into Asia's largest citizen parade in about 20 years since its inception in 2003 (the 22nd parade was attended by approximately 180,000 people in 2024). Taiwan's achievement of legalizing same-sex marriage can be attributed to the activities of LGBTQ rights groups such as the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights, the marriage equality movement centered on such groups, and the large-scale political participation of citizens as represented by the Pride parade. However, Taiwan is even more unique in how literature has clearly been the vehicle for spreading the sense of solidarity and empathy (the ability to understand others as others and imagine their difficulties and pain) among citizens at the root of this social reform.

In the Chinese-speaking world today, the word "Tongzhi" is commonly used as a term encompassing sexual minorities, i.e., LGBTQ.^[1] The LGBTQ human rights movement is called the Tongzhi movement, and LGBTQ literature is called Tongzhi literature. As mentioned above, it was undoubtedly Tongzhi literature that supported the rise of the Tongzhi movement in Taiwan. In particular, an extremely important role was played by Pai Hsien-yung's (1937-) full-length novel Nie zi (meaning sons of sin), which is even described as the bible of Tongzhi literature.^[2] The novel was published between 1977 and 1981, with the first half in Taiwan (under martial law) and the second half in Singapore, and was published in book form in Taiwan in 1983. A version printed in simplified Chinese characters was published in mainland China as early as 1987, and a version in traditional Chinese characters was published in Hong Kong the following year. In the second half of the 1980s, people in the Chinese-speaking world came to share the story of Nie zi and to confront the difficulties faced in the lives of LGBTQ individuals.

Set in Taipei in 1970, Nie zi is a long first-person monologue in which the 17-year-old gay protagonist discusses the lives of his gay friends and his own family. The work is also a full-length ensemble drama filled with pathos and laughter. Of course, there were Chinese novels depicting sexual minorities before Nie zi, but this was the first work to portray non-mainstream sexuality at the forefront. Tongzhi literature scholar Chi Ta-wei summarizes Nie zi as an extremely groundbreaking work of Tongzhi literature because it was first to create a forum--that is, a public platform--for the general public to discuss issues of sexuality.^[3]

One of the interesting things about Nie zi is that it is more than a straightforward story depicting the sense of resistance on the part of a boy. Instead, the story thoroughly depicts the feelings of children who inherit the norms and values of being "Chinese" in a traditional Confucian society upon coming to terms with their own sexuality, which conflicts with those traditional values. While the protagonist rebels against Confucian, patriarchal norms, he cannot relinquish his respect for those values. The main character is aware that he is a son of sin because he is unable to propagate descendants and continue the family line as a Chinese person. While wavering between a sense of guilt and resistance, he strives to have empathy for both his father and mother during his search for a way of life that is true to himself. In short, Nie zi forced Chinese people who lived in Taiwan in the 1970s and who had inherited the Confucian tradition to consider what it meant to live as a sexual minority, what difficulties they faced, and what needed to be reconsidered.^[4]

Another important feature of Nie zi is the continued adaptation of the story over the years. The book was first made into a film in Taiwan in 1986, then reached living rooms as a prime-time television series in 2003, and was revived as an artistically-themed stage play in 2014. It was also adapted again for the stage in 2020, the year following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan.^[5] Each version of Nie zi has been adapted to fit the era and social context. Through these adaptations, it is clear that Taiwanese people are constantly returning to the canon of Tongzhi literature. Furthermore, as a current issue, Taiwanese people are constantly reexamining the conflicts and difficulties faced by Chinese sexual minorities who carry the traditions of Confucianism. Every time that Nie zi is popularized through adaptation, the difficulties faced by the LGBTQ community are once put forth as a public issue. This repeated examination has led to social reforms in regard to LGBTQ individuals.

Today, Taiwan can basically be described as a nation of immigrants. It has been ruled by foreign powers such as Spain, the Netherlands, Zheng Chenggong of the Ming Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, Japan, and the Republic of China. Even so, the reality of Taiwanese citizens as an oppressed group is not uniform at all. The Han people who immigrated in large numbers during the Ming and Qing dynasties enforced their own superiority and seized the land of the indigenous Austronesian-speaking peoples. When looking at the history of Taiwan, we realize that the relationships between oppressor and oppressed, us and others, and center and periphery are very fluid depending on the era and region being examined.

Various marginal voices resonate polyphonically in Taiwan. These voices gradually began to spin a wide variety of non-mainstream historical narratives. Especially in the 1990s, when the country made a push toward democratization after the lifting of martial law, various marginal voices came together in the literary ecriture. Women, sexual minorities, Hoklo (Minnan) and Hakka peoples, indigenous peoples, Ma Hua (Malaysian Chinese) people, and others confirmed their collective memories through literary creation and raised their consciousness of collective identity as groups (known as tribes in Taiwan). They then formed solidarity with each other and pushed forward with their respective identity politics.

As has been aptly summarized in the recent observation that "politics is at the heart of Taiwanese literature,"^[6] readers who pick up a Taiwanese novel, the number of which has increased in Japanese translations, may be overwhelmed and a little taken aback by the political intensity contained therein. However, I believe that this is also an expression of a certain sense of mission in Taiwanese literature today, which is always trying to be conscious of the fluidity between the center and the periphery, to exercise empathy toward a myriad of others, and to unite the identity politics of groups and individuals on the periphery. Certainly, sensing that political intensity and imagining the background to that cautious attitude is one of the interesting aspects of reading Taiwanese literature.

[1] For information on the evolution and history of the word "Tongzhi," see Suzuki, K., The Birth of Taiwan's Same-Sex Marriage Law: The Journey to Become a Lighthouse of LGBTQ+ in Asia (tentative translation), Chapter 1, (2022, Nippon Hyoronsha).
[2] Suzuki, K., Ibid., p.15.
[3] For details, see Chi Ta-wei, A Queer Invention in Taiwan: A History of Tongzhi Literature, Chapter 4, (2017, Taipei: Linking Publishing).
[4] This is my own conclusion, based mainly on the views of Zeng Xiuping in Lone Subjects, Sons of Sin, Taipei People (tentative translation), (2003, Taipei: Elitebooks).
[5] For more details, see Yagi, H., "A Monumental Achievement in Depicting Sexual Diversity: 40 Years of the Taiwanese Novel 'Nie zi,'" (Mainichi Shimbun Newspaper, Tokyo morning edition, February 11, 2024) and Yagi, H., A Study of Adaptations of Pai Hsien-yung's Novels: Variations in Contemporary Taiwanese Literature (tentative translation), (Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo, 2018, Chapter 4).
[6] Akamatsu, M., The Heart of Taiwanese Literature (tentative translation), 2025, East Press, p. 1.