Lament on the persuasive novel
What on Earth was going on? Had something happened that she didn't know about?
Chu couldn't write a thing. Instead, she read books by the opposition dangwai, adding to her knowledge of Taiwan in an effort to understand people of her generation whom she just didn't get, Taiwanese who thought second-generation immigrants weren't Taiwanese.
After a time, she again picked up her pen and went to work on The Diary of Taiwan University Student Guan Lin, later renamed Times Change, Things Pass. Chu began to feel her way towards the mixture of fiction and essay that became the "persuasive novel."
The United Daily News presented its first "best novella" award to Hsiao Li-hung for A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers. Chu's Wei Liao, which depicts life in a military dependents' community, won one of the five prizes awarded the following year. Chu spent the NT$120,000 award on repairs to her home.
Wei Liao was her first fictional look at a military dependents' community. When she moved out of such a community herself, she hadn't realized she was leaving it behind forever. "My friends were still there, so I thought I could go back and visit whenever I wanted," she says. But then the community was torn down. By the time she went back, everyone had moved away. Her hometown had been wiped off the map. "How do you tell your kids where you came from when you've lost your hometown?" Wei Liao was an extended lament on her loss. By the time she wrote Remembering My Brothers in the Military Dependents' Community a decade later, the community felt more like something she'd experienced in a past life.
Her worldview had changed in the intervening decade. "Growing up" had been tough, but she'd learned that outsiders just didn't see the military dependents' communities the way she did.
She didn't get it and was angry at the unfairness. In the years between I Remember and Remembering My Brothers in the Military Dependents' Community, "I didn't study abroad for even one day, but my existence suddenly became that of a 'second-generation mainland immigrant.' I was a lackey of our rulers. I had no legitimacy. Even though I was here, I had no right to speak. As Edward Said put it, I was an absent presence."
This sentiment persisted through The Old Capital, which came out around the time of Taiwan's first direct presidential election. She posits that the reason people of the past were so deeply suspicious and determined to test the loyalty of everyone around them was that they didn't have control over their own affairs. She argues that by becoming masters of our own domain, we've become our own people and made this our place. In our present situation, who needs tests? Chu proposes "fighting for the freedom to disagree," the right of immigrant workers, of people too poor to leave, of those who don't profess a love of Taiwan to exist here provided they don't engage in violence.
If the pre-The Old Capital Chu was still engaged in "direct struggle" and "direct resistance," still doggedly declaiming that "it's not that way" and "you're all misunderstanding," by the time she wrote Roaming, she "felt like a student in a class for rejects. I'd talked myself blue in the face and still wasn't accepted, wasn't liked by my teacher or classmates. But I could always still leave, right?" So she left in a huff.
Critic Huang Jinshu says the tone of Roaming is one of lamentation. Chu herself disagrees.
Critics have deemed Chu an "old soul." She finds this strange. "Shouldn't every writer be an old soul?" she asks. "Shouldn't every writer be the kind of person who remembers everything?"
A family photo taken some time prior to Chu's marriage in 1985 catches Chu's mother holding her canine "son," Chu with a feline "daughter," and sisters Tien-wen and Tien-yi.