Winnowing wheat from chaff
But, for all that Taiwan’s traditional culture is filled with gods and spirits, the island doesn’t have much in the way of a “yaoguai culture.” It’s not that Taiwan has no fantastical creatures, it’s just that orthodox historians and folklorists haven’t paid them much heed. But Taiwan’s more than 400-year-long documentary history is littered with heterodox discussions.
As with mainland China’s The Classic of Mountains and Seas and Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, and with the Greek myths, turning these stories into a creative resource requires that they first be collected and compiled. Recognizing that it is the repeated use of such stories by later generations that gives rise to a yaoguai culture, Ho and the Taipei Legend Studio have made it their mission to pioneer Taiwan’s largely untouched fantastical terrain.
In 2016, the Taipei Legend Studio published Taiwan’s first literary history of fantastical creatures, Yao-Guai Matters. The book integrates fiction and reference material, and includes original short stories that have each of its 49 fantastical creatures encountering people in the modern world. Co-author Kao Pei-yun explains: “We took the kind of stories that seem like they would have taken place in a rural village long ago, and put them into a modern setting to see what would happen.” Luo Chuan-chiao adds: “We didn’t want to make it seem like yaoguai were things from that past that no longer exist.” With the book’s publication, the modern summoning of Taiwanese fantastical creatures had begun.
Ho himself has moved on from integrating fantastical creatures into his fiction to exploring the literary history of Taiwanese yaoguai. His Taiwan Monster Story, published in early 2017, offers an encyclopedic take on the 229 appearances of fantastical creatures in Taiwan recorded in books and newspapers from 1624 to 1945.
Ho incorporated yaoguai into his novels Fantasy Alley and Monster Maze, and describes these rich cultural assets as a “goldmine” and a “treasure trove” for artists. He says, “Rather than just revitalizing a cultural asset for my own use, I’m hoping to encourage talented people to incorporate yaoguai into a variety of fields, like television, film, comics, tabletop games, and mobile games.”
Ho and the Taipei Legend Studio are like farmers who have laboriously tilled the soil and are now waiting for their harvest. Having banded together with their friends to talk about Taiwan’s yaoguai stories and strengthen the underpinnings of Taiwanese fantasy fiction, they hope to build the fertile soil necessary to nurture the genre.
Writing under the pen name Shinjitsu Sagasu, Taipei Legend Studios members published a fantasy novel that interweaves fact and fiction in a way that invites readers to explore more deeply.