Postwar Taiwanese Literature: Learning to Speak the Unspeakable (1945–1987)

30-second overview: For forty-two years (1945–1987), Taiwan's literary world lived under a regime of the unspeakable: no Japanese, no February 28, no suggestion that Taiwan might be something other than China, no "local" literature. But each generation of writers found their own mode of indirection and learned, somehow, to speak. Yeh Shih-tao traveled from that blank page in 1945 to a 232-page Outline History of Taiwanese Literature in 1987 — via aphasia, three years of imprisonment, over a decade of silence, a 1965 essay called "Taiwan's Nativist Literature," and his 1985 declaration "Without land, there is no literature." Pai Hsien-yung read Kafka in an air-raid shelter. Wang Wen-hsing spent seven years writing a novel that was roundly condemned. Lin Hai-yin resigned her editorial post over a single poem. Yu Kwang-chung cried "wolf" to attack nativist literature. Li Ang put a cleaver in Lin Shih's hand in 1983. What these forty-two years left behind is an entire grammar of obliquity.

Yeh Shih-tao's Blank Page, 1945

In August 1945, Yeh Shih-tao was discharged from the Japanese Imperial Army and returned to Tainan.

He had published in Japanese in Bungei Taiwan at sixteen, a young writer championed by Nishikawa Mitsuru.¹ But from this month forward, Japanese became the language of the enemy. The twenty-year-old Yeh sat down with his writing paper and could not write a single Chinese character.

That blank page was not his alone. In the immediate postwar period, Taiwan's literary world fell into an unprecedented linguistic reset: writers who had spent fifty years under Japanese-language education suddenly lost their instrument; Mainlander writers who arrived with the Nationalist government were fluent in Chinese but knew nothing of the island.²

Lü Ho-jo was the writer celebrated as "Taiwan's number one talent" during the Japanese period; after the war he published only four Chinese-language stories, borrowing the cadences of Yu Dafu, Mao Dun, and Ba Jin — like a child just learning to form letters.³ Chang Wen-huan virtually abandoned literary creation after the war, returning only in 1972 to rewrite his long novel Chini Hau Mono (Those Who Crawl the Earth) in Japanese, published in Japan in 1975.⁴ Lai Ho died of illness in January 1943, spared from crossing this linguistic fracture — but the lineage of Japanese-era Taiwanese literature he embodied ended abruptly in 1945.⁵

The cruelty was that politics arrived before writers could learn Chinese. The February 28 Incident of 1947 killed Wang Tien-teng, president of the People's Herald and head of the settlement committee's propaganda division; Yang Kuei and his wife Yeh Tao were arrested, initially sentenced to death but ultimately spared.⁶ On January 20, 1949, Yang Kuei published a 600-character "Peace Declaration" in the Ta Kung Pao of Shanghai, calling for "preventing the war from spreading to this province" and for Taiwan to become "a model zone of peaceful reconstruction." He was arrested in April, sentenced to twelve years, imprisoned on Green Island from 1951, released in 1961.⁷

Six hundred characters for twelve years. The ratio is the footnote to all forty-two of those years.

Cracks in the Anti-Communist Era

In March 1950, the Chinese Literary Arts Prize Committee was established by Chang Tao-fan and Ch'en Chi-ying, paying a monthly stipend of three thousand yuan — equivalent to a senior civil servant's annual salary.⁸ In May 1951, Literary Creation monthly was launched; in 1952, the "Chinese Literary Arts Association" began rewarding "anti-communist literature." On the surface, this decade looks like a period of party-state literary templates.

In practice, it was messier.

The Chinese Literary Arts Prize Committee shut down in 1957 due to financial difficulties; Literary Creation ceased publication in December 1956 (68 issues total).⁸ The golden period of anti-communist mobilization was effectively only five or six years. In 1953, Nieh Hua-ling took over the literary column of Free China and refused to publish anti-communist boilerplate. On September 20, 1956, Hsia Chi-an launched Literary Magazine (with Liu Shou-yi as publisher, Hsia as editor), running until August 1960 — 8 volumes, 6 issues each.⁹ In the midst of anti-communist hysteria, this journal smuggled in modernism: Hsia Chi-an and his students began systematically translating Kafka, Faulkner, and Eliot, laying the groundwork for the following decade's Modern Literature.

Anti-communist literature had its templates — but also works that broke free of them. Chiang Kuei's Whirlwind was completed in 1952 but neglected for not fitting the prescribed anti-communist narrative; he self-published it in 1957 under the title Record of the Modern Hou Shu, then republished under the original title through Ming-hua Bookstore in 1959; Double Ninth appeared in 1961.¹⁰ The literary historian Hsia Chih-tsing championed Chiang Kuei, arguing he captured the human complexity of the communist revolution, transcending the templates. Szu-ma Chung-yuan's Wasteland (1951) and Chu Hsi-ning's "Iron Pulp" (published 1956, collected 1963) both operate at a remove from the standard anti-communist novel.¹¹

Literature did not die in this decade. It found ways to survive.

Kafka in the Air-Raid Shelter

On March 5, 1960, a group of undergraduates in the NTU Foreign Literature Department founded the bimonthly Modern Literature. Its publisher, Pai Hsien-yung, was 22; the founding team included Wang Wen-hsing, Ou-yang Tzu, Ch'en Jo-hsi, Yeh Wei-lien, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Liu Shao-ming.¹²

The inaugural statement read: "We plan to systematically translate and introduce Western modern art movements and trends" and "We are determined to experiment, explore, and create new artistic forms and styles."¹²

This was the interstitial period between the high-water mark of anti-communist literature and the not-yet-arrived Nativist Debate. A group of twenty-somethings translated Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner into Chinese. The journal ran until 1973 (then was relaunched), publishing 206 stories by 70 writers.¹³

Two writers emerged from it pointing in opposite directions.

Pai Hsien-yung used modernist technique to preserve old dreams. In 1971, Morning Bell Press published Taipei People — fourteen stories written in the 1960s for Modern Literature: "Eternal Snow Beauty," "Last Night of Crazy Kelly," "Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream," "Flower Bridge Inn."¹³¹⁴ Stream of consciousness, montage, ensemble portraiture — every character carries the old world that 1949 brought from China. Taipei is their stage of reluctant reckoning.

Wang Wen-hsing went the opposite direction. He used modernist technique to dismantle Chinese itself. Family Catastrophe was drafted in 1966, took seven years to complete, and was published by Hung Fan Bookstore in 1973.¹⁵ The novel uses "tuo" instead of the standard "tao" for "escape," "mount the bed" instead of "go to bed," mixes Chinese with English and phonetic symbols, and cuts Chinese grammar to the point that readers must slow to a crawl to decipher each word. The book was attacked on publication for "destroying Chinese," but Wang continued the experiment: Backed Against the Sea (two volumes, 23 years in the making), History of Clipped Wings (17 years), writing 30-40 characters a day, hoping readers would read only 200-300 a day.¹⁶

Wang Wen-hsing is the extreme specimen of these forty-two years. When every writer was forced into indirection, he was so indirect he opened language itself and looked inside.

📝 Curator's Note: Pai Hsien-yung used modernism to preserve old dreams; Wang Wen-hsing used it to dismantle Chinese. Two writers from the same journal, perfectly counterposed around the deepest tension of these forty-two years — do you inherit history, or cut yourself loose from it? Neither answer is wrong, because these forty-two years had no correct answer.

Lin Hai-yin's Resignation

In November 1953, Lin Hai-yin took over the literary supplement of the United Daily News. During her tenure she mentored Chung Chao-cheng, Chung Li-ho, Huang Ch'un-ming, Ch'i Teng-sheng, and Lin Hwai-min — the second generation of Taiwanese-born writers — making her one of the most important literary editors of the postwar period.¹⁷ She herself published Stories from My Capital in two installments in Free China in December 1957, with the standalone edition from Kuang Chi Press in Taichung in 1960.¹⁸

Ten years later, on April 23, 1963, the United Daily News literary supplement published a poem called "Story" by Feng Ch'ih (pen name of Wang Feng-ch'ih). The poem read: "Once there was a foolish captain / because of his ignorance / he lost his way at sea / the ship drifted to a lonely island..." The authorities misread it as an allegory targeting Chiang Kai-shek. Wang was arrested. Lin Hai-yin resigned as chief supplement editor. Wang was subsequently held at Taiwan's Jen-ai Education Experimental Center for three years and five months.¹⁹

This was the "Captain Incident." A poem's cost: one editor's position, one poet's freedom for three years and five months.

Lin Hai-yin founded the Pure Literature Publishing House in 1965 and launched Pure Literature monthly in 1967. Her departure did not silence her, but it visibly lowered the supplement's political nerve by one degree.

Among the second-generation Taiwanese writers she had nurtured, the most silent was Chung Li-ho. Born 1915 in Pingtung, of Hakka descent, he had once eloped with his wife Chung Tai-mei (same surname, different lineage) to Manchuria and Beijing. After returning to Taiwan after the war, he contracted tuberculosis and the whole family lived through poverty and illness on a farm at Lishan in Meinong, Pingtung. On August 4, 1960, while revising a short story called "Rain" on his sickbed, he coughed up blood and died — blood staining the manuscript. Ch'en Huo-ch'uan mourned him as "a writer who fell in a pool of blood."²⁰ After Chung Li-ho's death, Lin Hai-yin, Chung Chao-cheng, and Wen Hsin organized a Chung Li-ho posthumous publications committee; in October 1960, Rain was published by Wen Hsing Books; on August 4, 1961 (the first anniversary of his death), The Lishan Farm was published by the Student Bookstore. Chung Chao-cheng (born 1925, Hakka from Lungtan, Taoyuan) began serializing Pear Blossom in the United Daily supplement from October 25, 1961, for 261 installments, with a standalone edition in 1962; The Taiwan Trilogy began in 1964 and took ten years to complete.²¹

The second generation of Taiwanese-born writers finally had Chinese-language works to their name — but their representative figure, Chung Li-ho, could only complete his final revision by hemorrhaging blood.

The Snake on Luku Mountain

In 1949, Lu Ho-jo fled to the Luku base (today in Shiding, New Taipei City) following the Guangming Daily case. The year before, he had been a music teacher at First Girls' Senior High School in Taipei. The year before, he had been "Taiwan's number one talent."

For seventy years, the Taiwanese literary history of his death was written as "disappeared, year unknown." Then, on December 27, 2020, the Academia Historica released a handwritten report by Liu Hsueh-k'un: Lu Ho-jo died on September 3, 1950, at 3:30 p.m., from a snakebite on Luku Mountain, dying over 8 days and 12 hours.²²

This discovery arrived seventy years late. It tells us two things: how Lu Ho-jo died, and how some core anchors of postwar literary history can only be written accurately once classified records are declassified. Until then, every textbook could only write "disappeared."

Lu Ho-jo was not an isolated case. In these forty-two years, "disappeared" was a form of political language — encompassing execution, imprisonment, forced silence, forced language change, and forced erasure from literary history's chapters.

Yeh Shih-tao himself was arrested by the Bureau of Investigation on September 20, 1951, sentenced to five years in 1953, then had his sentence reduced to three years and released in 1954.¹ After release, he worked as a janitor in Tainan, ghostwrote love letters, and dared not touch literature. Over ten years of silence.

In November 1965, he published "Taiwan's Nativist Literature" in issue 97 of Wen Hsing. This was his first systematic argument for "Taiwanese literature" as a category since the blank page. At that time, the phrase still could not be spoken directly in public.²³

The Wolf-Cry Supplement Column

In April 1977, issue 2 of Cactus Magazine ran a special "Nativist and Realist" section, edited by Wang Chien-chuang, publishing three-way pieces by Wang To, Yin Cheng-hsiung, and Chu Hsi-ning.²⁴ Wang To argued that the flourishing of nativist literature was a welcome development, suggesting it be renamed "realist literature"; Yin Cheng-hsiung criticized nativist literature for risking becoming "a vehicle for expressing hatred and resentment"; Chu Hsi-ning attacked nativist literature's provincialism, suggesting its overemphasis on Taiwanese consciousness showed "separatist tendencies."

The combustible atmosphere of the debate began to build.

In June, Ch'en Ying-chen (under the pen name Hsu Nan-ts'un) published "The Blind Spots of 'Nativist Literature'" in issue 2 of Taiwan Literature and Arts, criticizing the "Taiwanese consciousness" and "Taiwan standpoint" of Yeh Shih-tao as "ambiguous and difficult to untangle." In July, Ch'en again published "Literature Comes from Society and Reflects Society" in issue 5 of Cactus.²⁵

On August 20, 1977, Yu Kwang-chung published "The Wolf Is Coming" in column 12 of the United Daily News supplement, accusing nativist literature of being "'workers', peasants', and soldiers' literature that someone in Taiwan is now openly advocating," invoking Mao Zedong's Yan'an Forum talks.²⁶ The most frequently quoted line from the piece: "To cry 'wolf' when there is no wolf is to alarm oneself; not to cry 'wolf' when there is a wolf is cowardice."²⁶

"Workers', peasants', and soldiers' literature" was a label that could get a person jailed in Taiwan in 1977.

On August 29, the Nationalist Party convened its "Second National Literary Arts Conference," with Yu Kwang-chung chairing the presidium. Wang Chien-chuang later recalled that the Garrison Command official overseeing cultural affairs said at the meeting: "As for those who do not heed the government's advice, the government is not unwilling to act — it is only a matter of timing."²⁷

The debate was about to escalate into arrests.

On November 19, the Chungli Incident erupted: voters suspected ballot-rigging in Hsu Hsin-liang's campaign for Taoyuan County magistrate; crowds stormed the Chungli precinct and set it ablaze, a turning point in the dangwai opposition movement. The government's attention was diverted.²⁸

On January 18, 1978, Wang Sheng, director-general of the General Political Warfare Department, closed the Armed Forces 67th Year Literary Arts Conference by calling for "unity in defense of the local," and the debate ended.²⁹ Ch'en Fang-ming later tabulated the Collected Discussions on Nativist Literature: 60% supportive, 30% opposed, 10% neutral.³⁰

The debate ended in a draw, but nativist literature won its readership. Huang Ch'un-ming's "The Taste of Apples" (written 1968, first published by Cactus Press 1969) and Wang Chen-ho's "An Oxcart for a Dowry" (published 1967 in Literature Quarterly, mixing Taiwanese and Mandarin) had already written the Lanyang plain and the Hualien market into literature.³¹ After the debate, nativist literature's legitimacy was established. But the deeper cost of the debate lay elsewhere: every writer came away better versed in how to write in ways that didn't sound too much like "workers', peasants', and soldiers' literature" — in other words, more practiced at self-censorship.

Wang Chien-chuang's recollection of "the government is not unwilling to act — it is only a matter of timing" is the background noise every writer in these forty-two years could hear.

Lin Shih's Cleaver in Lucheng

In 1983, Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife won the eighth United Daily News novella first prize. Set in the fictional "Lucheng" (a thinly veiled Lukang), the protagonist Lin Shih marries the butcher Ch'en Chiang-shui, endures prolonged domestic violence, starvation, and public humiliation, and ultimately kills her husband with a pig-slaughtering cleaver.³²

United Daily supplement editor Ya Hsien published the piece under pressure. At the time, all of Taiwan was still under martial law, and "domestic violence" was not even a term in public vocabulary. Lin Shih killing her husband accomplished something in advance of naming: it gave the first legible shape to patriarchal violence for which that era had no words.

Li Ang was not isolated. Hsiao Sa's "My Son Han-sheng" won second prize in the United Daily short story award in 1979, published as a standalone volume by Chiu Ko Press in 1981, exploring a single mother's relationship with her rebellious son.³³ Liao Hui-ying's Sesame Oil Herb won the fifth China Times Literary Award's selected first prize in 1982; it was adapted into a film in 1983 with Wan Jen, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Ko Yi-cheng as collaborators.³⁴ Read together, between 1979 and 1983, Taiwan's women writers put female domesticity, embodiment, and desire into the mainstream literary prizes — four full years before the lifting of martial law.

The women's literary awakening on the eve of lifting martial law was another path, under the conditions of "not being able to speak plainly," toward learning how: not through politics but through the body; not through debate but through story.

📝 Curator's Note: Yeh Shih-tao, Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Wen-hsing, Huang Ch'un-ming, Li Ang — what these five wrote cannot be neatly filed under "postwar literature." But they have something in common: every one of them had to work obliquely. Yeh Shih-tao worked obliquely through literary-historical criticism; Pai Hsien-yung through the memory of an old world; Wang Wen-hsing through Chinese grammar itself; Huang Ch'un-ming through the margins of small-town life; Li Ang through the female body. "You cannot say it directly" was the condition of these forty-two years. "Indirection" was their methodology.

Yeh Shih-tao's 232 Pages

February 1987. Martial law had not yet been lifted.

Yeh Shih-tao, 62 years old, published a 232-page book through Kaohsiung's Literary World Magazine Press. It was titled Outline History of Taiwanese Literature. Beneath the title: no "postwar," no "Republic of China," no "Chinese" — only two words: "Taiwan." This was the first postwar literary history to take Taiwan itself as its subject.³⁵

The preface read:

"My vow to write the main contours of a history of Taiwanese literature aims to illuminate how, in the flow of history, Taiwanese literature developed its fierce will toward autonomy and forged its unique Taiwanese character."³⁵

Forty-two years had passed since he had sat frozen before that blank page in Tainan. In between: arrested, imprisoned for three years, taught elementary school, ghostwrote love letters, kept away from literature for over a decade; published "Taiwan's Nativist Literature" in 1965; published the critical collection Without Land, There Is No Literature in 1985; published the literary history in 1987.³⁶

Six months after publication, on July 15, 1987, martial law was lifted.

What these forty-two years left behind did not lift with it. Yeh Shih-tao's history is still on the shelf. Wang Wen-hsing's Family Catastrophe still generates controversy. Li Ang's Lucheng Lin Shih still holds that cleaver. The 206 stories in Modern Literature are still being read. Chung Li-ho's blood-soaked manuscript, Yang Kuei's letters from Green Island, Lu Ho-jo's death on Luku Mountain — seventy years to unlock the truth — are all still there.

The next forty-two years were for someone else to write.

Further Reading

• Post-Martial-Law Taiwanese Literature — The explosion of 1987-2000: nativization, gender, mother-tongue pluralism
• Contemporary Taiwanese Literature — 21st century: Wu Ming-yi's internationalization, Lin Yi-han, and the digital wave
• Taiwanese Literature during Japanese Rule — Lai Ho, Lu Ho-jo, Chang Wen-huan, Yang Kuei: the Japanese-era starting point that is the other end of postwar aphasia
• White Terror — Political context for Yeh Shih-tao's imprisonment, Yang Kuei on Green Island, Lu Ho-jo at Luku

References