Wu Ming-yi: Writing a Vanishing Taiwan Back into Existence Through Compound Eyes

30-Second Overview: Wu Ming-yi (1971–) is a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at National Dong Hwa University and a novelist who writes Taiwan’s nature writing, urban memory, and war legacies into the same pair of eyes. Through butterflies, bicycles, the vanished Zhonghua Commercial Building, and the Pacific Garbage Island, he allows the world to read an island’s ecology and history simultaneously. The Stolen Bicycle was first published by麦田 (Maitian) in 2015; its English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize longlist in 2018. What the world sees first is that pair of "compound eyes," not the ranking of the award.

The Eyes That Stood Up on the Overpass

In the 1980s, the Zhonghua Commercial Building still existed. ¹ Eight connected buildings named for the virtues of Loyalty, Filial Piety, Benevolence, Love, Faithfulness, and Peace stood side by side; shoeboxes were stacked to the eaves in the arcades, and a child’s light leaked through the wooden slats of the public toilet doors. The youngest son of a leather shoe shop grew up between the overpass and the arcade. He later wrote this commercial building into a novel, and then watched the Public Television Service (PTS) reconstruct it in Xizhi. ² Those eyes, which first learned to find their way through a maze, would later focus simultaneously on butterfly wing veins, bicycle chains, the Pacific Garbage Island, and a line of nationality on the Booker website.

In the public narrative of Taiwan literature, Wu Ming-yi is often described as a string of awards: Good Books Open Volume, United Daily News Literary Award, and the Booker Prize longlist. The common narrative flows smoothly: he is "one of the most well-known Taiwanese writers internationally." This statement is not incorrect, but it reverses cause and effect. The international and cross-media presence are consequences that grew later. What grew earlier was a method of seeing: using many eyes to look at an island simultaneously. The compound eyes of insects, the chains of bicycles, the corridors of the demolished commercial building, the metal and ghosts left by war, and the mountains of plastic drifting at sea are all within the same field of vision.

This article tells the story of how those eyes grew. The path passes through butterflies, novels, Ximending, and Hualien, as well as Chinese-language pages and English-language book markets. Awards appear, but they are the afterwaves produced by compound eyes. If readers only remember the trophies, they will miss what he truly left for Taiwan literature: a vision capable of refocusing on what has vanished.

📝 Curator’s Note
The common "award-winning narrative" likes to arrange writers on a national honor roll. When reading Wu Ming-yi, a more useful question is: What did he see simultaneously in the same book? Compound eyes are a creative method. Only by focusing on multiple facets simultaneously can vanishing things have the chance to be written back.

At Twenty-Nine, He First Wrote Butterflies into Books

On June 20, 1971, Wu Ming-yi was born in Taipei. His ancestral home is Taoyuan, but his growing-up memories are bound to the Zhonghua Commercial Building and Yonghe. ³ His parents came from the countryside to open a leather shoe shop in the commercial building; the storefront was less than three ping, with cooking and bathing in the arcade, and shoeboxes filling the attic. He had four older sisters and two older brothers; he was the youngest. ⁴ The roof of Yonghe once housed over ten cages of birds. One day, his father released all the birds. He later said this was "the first time our relationship broke." ⁵ A merchant’s family taught him to speak and argue; his mother also left a sentence for him to chew over repeatedly: "One must deceive to survive." School taught him not to lie; home taught him the other arithmetic of survival. ⁴

In college, he studied Advertising in the Department of Mass Communication at Fu Jen Catholic University (1991–1994). ⁶ Advertising training taught him how to tell stories and how to make lies sound real. After his military service, he transferred to the Master’s Program in Chinese Literature at National Central University, completing his doctoral dissertation A Study of Contemporary Taiwanese Nature Writing between 1999 and 2003. ⁶ This path later explained why he could be both a creator and a scholar: first draw the map, then set out. His eldest sister gave him a Nikon F-801; images and text came in together. ⁴ While working at the Hyatt Department Store, he moved potted plants, raised exhibition butterflies, and the docent taught him to make specimens, telling him to "walk toward the mountains." ⁴ The tactile sense of natural history arrived earlier than the fame of novels.

Liang Hsin-yu wrote in her 2016 interview narrative about the deadline he set for himself: after transferring to the Chinese Literature Master’s program, he sought two more years, "if I can’t achieve results by age 30, I’ll give up." ⁷ Fortunately, in his twenty-ninth year, Notes from the Annihilation of Butterflies was published. ⁷ This 2000 nature essay pushed Taiwan’s nature writing from accusation and sentimental affection toward "aesthetics plus empiricism." Then came The Way of Butterflies (2003), Home Is as Close to the Water as It Can Be (2007). Butterflies, water’s edge, and field paths became his first set of compound-eye faces. During his doctoral studies, he lived in a small room on a field path for seven thousand per semester; his neighbors were foreign workers, and he could hear frog sounds at night. ⁴ Those sounds later entered his books.

Source: NDHU Faculty Page, The Reporter Interview, Bibliography

During the same period, he expanded his doctoral research into a three-volume discourse, the "Liberating Nature through Writing" genealogy: literary history maps, writer studies, and finally ecocriticism. ⁸ He wrote a stance in his books: ecocriticism requires scientific and value support, "yet it is not a rash moral judgment." ⁸ This sentence is important. He first built Taiwan’s nature writing into a system that could be studied, then used fiction to practice "seeing from multiple facets simultaneously." The academic map came first; the international novel halo came later. Nature writing grew into a named path in Taiwan after the 1980s; he was both a writer on that path and the person who drew coordinates for that path—two identities sharing the same discipline of "seeing clearly before judging."

His NDHU teaching position began around 2000 (Chinese Department, later Department of Chinese Literature); he became Associate Professor in 2010 and Professor in 2012, teaching nature writing and novel creation. ⁹ Around 2006, he prepared lessons until dawn and once considered resigning: "But there’s no time to write." ⁵ The dean suggested a research leave, and only then did he finish Sleep’s Route. The academic map, butterfly specimens, classrooms, and the coast are different focal lengths of the same pair of eyes.

The framework of nature writing later led him to shift. Non-fiction can write species and habitats accurately, but it is difficult to simultaneously contain the metal of war, the ghosts of the commercial building, and the massive, absurd modernity of the garbage island striking the east coast. He needed fiction, so that compound eyes could stretch from the field into the depth of time. Early Taiwan nature writing was often criticized for stopping at sentimental affection and lacking ideological depth. When he entered the discourse field himself, he was drawing a map that could be debated. Writing and research share the same compound eye on him: one hand holds a net to capture the veins of butterfly wings; the other hand nails the coordinates of literary history into the land writing of Taiwan after 1980. If readers only look at the medals on the novel’s dust jacket, they easily forget he was once the one who drew the map.

Zhonghua Market Demolished, He Wrote It Back

Zhonghua Market, 1965. Photo by the Executive Yuan News Agency. This continuous shopping center, which opened in 1961 and was demolished in 1992, is the spatial prototype for Wu Ming-yi's childhood cobbler shop and _The Magician on the Bridge. Public Domain._

Zhonghua Market opened on April 22, 1961, and was dismantled in sections starting in October 1992, citing reasons such as underground rail construction, MRT, and the tree-lined avenue of Zhonghua Road.¹ For middle-aged people who walked through Ximen Street, it was a maze smelling of arcades and shadowed by bridges—a place they would slip into after school, not an entry in architectural history. After the market disappeared, only photos and oral histories remained. It wasn't until 2011 that The Magician on the Bridge wrote the Zhonghua Market of the 1980s back onto paper.²

The novel features a mysterious magician on the bridge, glowing zebras, and Xiao Bu-dian, the younger son of the cobbler shop. Wu Ming-yi told OKAPI: "Zhonghua Market was such a bizarre place; all the magic was in there."⁴ Here, 'magic' serves a structural function. The market itself had vanished, but the magic allowed the disappeared space to be traversed again. The first social application of "disappearance" focused on urban memory: who still remembered the households that cooked inside the arcades, or who could sequence the buildings of Zhongxiao Renai?

Night scene of Zhonghua Market (historical image). The neon lights and arcades before demolition are the visual memories repeatedly revisited by the novel and the television drama. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

On February 20, 2021, the public service broadcast series The Magician on the Bridge premiered, directed by Yang Ya-chieh.¹⁰ The Xizhi set spanned about two to two and a half hectares; reports stated that the set construction cost was around eighty million, recreating nearly fifty storefronts. Media outlets claimed the total production cost was about two hundred million, while the program department mentioned a budget of about twenty million per episode. These three figures are on different levels and cannot be mixed into "a two-hundred-million-dollar set build."¹¹ After filming wrapped, that mock market was dismantled one more time: the real demolition was in 1992, and the virtual demolition was around 2020—two disappearances stacked on the same corridor. Reports also mentioned that the tracks and car shelters were built to maximum capacity, corresponding to the line used for filming Hsu Hsiao-hsien's Love in the Dust.¹¹ The sound of set workers dismantling signs felt like ending an era that had already concluded.

Source: Liberty Times / Taiwan News / Tanjiang Activity Records; The three numbers cannot be mixed

During the promotional period, Wu Ming-yi said that he hoped viewers who experienced the market era would not just recall memories but live a parallel timeline again. "Just like how we can use digital technology today to create Mars and let everyone land on the planet virtually. I hope the younger generation of audiences will realize: Zhonghua Market is like the Mars they stepped on for the first time."¹²

💡 Did You Know
When Zhonghua Market was demolished, it was done in sections following the order "Zhong $\rightarrow$ Xiao Ren $\rightarrow$ Ai Xin $\rightarrow$ Yi Ping," over about ten days. The novel and the drama later turned this non-existent continuous maze into a memory entrance shared across generations.

Once urban memory is written back, readers begin to ask bigger questions: what other things have disappeared that are worth searching for with the same energy? The market was childhood, shoeboxes and arcades, performances on the bridge that were neither magic nor deception. War and iron horses stretched the scale from neighborhood to family and island history. With a single pair of eyes, one begins to focus simultaneously on short-term street life and long-term trauma.

The Fighter Jet in the Father’s Drawer, and a Missing Bicycle

In 2007, Sleep’s Route was published. ¹³ One trigger was a photo in the locked drawer of his father: his father, about thirteen years old, going to Japan to manufacture fighter jets. ⁵ The war in family memory suddenly shrank from the distant view of history textbooks into the metallic smell of the drawer and silence. The same year also saw Home Is as Close to the Water as It Can Be. The water’s edge of nature writing and the war route in the novel began to share the timeline of the same pair of eyes. Sleep, routes, metal parts, and stories unspeakable at night allowed the depth of island history to enter his long-form narrative for the first time completely.

The missing bicycle pulls the story into the next scale. In July 2015, Maitian published the first edition of The Stolen Bicycle (2016 was the revised edition adding Wang De-wei’s recommendation preface, and cannot be treated as the first publication year). ¹⁴ A long-form novel about a missing bicycle, family trauma, and war legacies, it won the Golden Classic Award for Long Fiction at the Taiwan Literature Awards in the same year; the Good Books Open Volume list reached its sixth time since The Way of Butterflies. ¹⁵ More importantly, one should remember the method: compound eyes also see how metal, ghosts, and stolen objects connect island history. ¹⁶

The novel does not pile up epic scale with war scenes. It lets readers follow the clues of a bike, a chain, and a name, and the weight of war presses in from the side. Every facet in the compound eye is partial; together they form the panorama. The bicycle is a touchable object; war is the endless line behind the object. Some people enter old streets and old archives to find the bike; some people encounter the disappearance of an entire era in parts and numbers. This line stretches from the father’s drawer to the Pacific, paving the way for the next larger ecological imagination: when the garbage island strikes the east coast, compound eyes must see myth, coast, and plastic simultaneously.

Source: NMTL / Booker / PTS / Openbook / Taipei Times (Synthesized Research Report)

A missing bicycle thus becomes a handle readers can remember. You grab the handle, and the island’s war legacies, family silence, and street memories are all lifted together. This is the efficiency of the compound-eye method: no need for encyclopedic listing, only one object capable of rotating the panorama. Readers may not remember every award year, but it is hard to forget the blank space where that bike was missing. The blank space itself becomes the narrative engine, forcing you to see how the taken-away things once organized the daily life of an island.

The Eyes the World Reads

In 2011, The Man with the Compound Eyes was published by Summer Publishing. ¹⁷ The core plot can be stated very briefly: the Pacific Garbage Vortex forms a garbage island, striking Taiwan’s east coast. The second son of Waiou Waiou Island, Ate Lie, is exiled to sea, drifting to that lifeless plastic mountain. ¹⁷ "Compound Eyes" here is both the book title and the method. Multi-species, multi-island, multi-trauma focused simultaneously. On the east coast shore, people wait for the photographic and tourist posture of "watching disaster happen"; the massive material object at the moment of impact is colder than any slogan.

The international path happened earlier than "winning awards." In 2011 at the London Book Fair, agent Tan Guang-lei (Tan Kwong Lui) recommended this novel in person to editor Rebecca Carter at Harvill Secker. Translator Darryl Sterk first translated excerpts; Tan then wrote a chapter outline of about twenty pages, and the world English rights were sold. ¹⁸ After reading the excerpts, Carter offered quickly; the US edition later went to Pantheon (under the same Penguin Random House umbrella). The English translation The Man with the Compound Eyes was published by Harvill Secker in 2013, and Pantheon in the US in 2014. The French translation was translated by Gwennaël Gaffric and published by Stock, winning the Ouessant Prix du livre insulaire novel award in the same year. ¹⁹ The agent claimed translation rights were sold to over twenty languages; Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Nordic language rights can be checked in the Grayhawk catalog. ¹⁹

The industry circle and translators often describe this transaction as: an important precedent where a Taiwanese long-form novel was operated by an international literary agent and sold into Anglo-American mainstream trade publishers. The tradition of English translation in academia and independent publishers existed earlier; it is inappropriate to write "the first Taiwanese novel ever sold abroad." ²⁰ Copyright trading is a commercial path. The translation phase still had Ministry of Culture system subsidies; it cannot be written as "completely without government support." ¹⁸ Darryl Sterk once compared the novel to Life of Pi on the spectrum of wilderness and the meaning of life; that is the translator’s reading coordinate, inappropriate to miswrite as the agent’s marketing slogan. ¹⁸

Source: Darryl Sterk Interview, Taipei Times Interview with Tan Guang-lei, Grayhawk Catalog

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote an endorsement for the English translation: this is a way of telling new realities, "beautiful, entertaining, frightening, preposterous, true." ²¹ Tash Aw in The Guardian wrote that hard-edged realism meets wild fantasy, ecological care and Taiwan identity coexist. Jason Sheehan at NPR said it is "achingly sad" yet like coming home. ²² What the world reads is the product produced by compound eyes. Marketing labels follow behind; the book is in front.

Darryl Sterk later also translated The Stolen Bicycle into English (Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2017). ¹⁴ He talked about the compromises necessary when translating Wu Ming-yi’s "uncompromising localism"; that is another layer of compound eyes between translator and author. ²⁰ On March 12, 2018, the book was selected for the Man Booker International Prize Longlist. On April 12 of the same year, the shortlist was announced; the book did not enter the shortlist, and the official website book page still marks Longlisted. ²³ Wu Ming-yi became the first Taiwanese writer to enter the longlist of that award. "Shortlisted" here only refers to the longlist, not including the final six, and does not equal winning the award. ²³ In 2026, Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Wanderer (English translation by Lin King) became the first to win the International Booker Prize for a Taiwanese writer. The two events do not cancel each other out: one is the 2018 longlist threshold, the other is the 2026 final trophy. ²⁴

Source: thebookerprizes.com Book Page and 2026 Award Press Release

After the longlist was announced, the organizing committee’s website once changed the nationality from Taiwan to Taiwan, China. Wu Ming-yi publicly stated the new label "did not conform" to his personal stance; the Taiwan diplomatic system took note, and on April 4, 2018, the organizers announced the change back, with Wu to be marked as Taiwan. ²⁵ He once said: although it is only the first stage of the longlist, "the nationality written behind is 'Taiwan'." ²⁶ This line of text is for thickness; the length should be short. How literary figures are named in international contexts, a neutral record suffices. There is no evidence that the nationality controversy "caused" the failure to enter the shortlist. Temporal proximity cannot be written as causality. ²⁵

Source: Guardian / Liberty Times / Sentinel reprinted official draft / Key Comment

Sea Breeze in Hualien Bookstores, and the Clouds at Two Thousand Meters

Wu Ming-yi. Professor of Chinese Literature at National Dong Hwa University, who has taught and written in Hualien for a long time. Photo: National Dong Hwa University / Attribution.

After awards and translations, Compound Eyes has a second life: cross-media and local. The 2014 work, Floating Light, is photographic prose, published by Xin Jingdian, which pulled image writing from the periphery of nature essays into an independent experiment.²⁷ In 2019, the short story collection Land of Bitter Rain was published, which includes "Clouds at Two Thousand Meters," where a lawyer traces unfinished novel files and memories of Taiwanese snow leopards after his wife's death.²⁸ In 2025, Chen Xin-yi adapted this piece into the VR work The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up, which won the Grand Prize (Immersive Unit Award) at the 82nd Venice Biennale.²⁹ Literary short stories become inhabitable heights. After removing the headset, the audience remains between the snow leopard hide and the unfinished files. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts also used this VR as the core for an immersive exhibition, connecting mountain forest and snow leopard memory back to the bodies of urban audiences.

In 2023, Hotel Sea Breeze was published by Xiaoxie, winning the Openbook Book Award for Chinese creation that year.³⁰ The novel draws attention to the eastern coast near Xiulin, Heping Village, and cement factory areas (local place names in the book are rewritten as "Haifeng," etc.), writing about the Taitung land, giant myths, and who tells the story.³¹ The animal protagonist is ultimately a three-legged crab raccoon. He extensively reads materials on Taitung and references fieldwork papers obtained with consent.³¹ The distribution strategy itself was an industry event: sold only in independent bookstores through events for 56 days across 86 venues, from Hualien Shiguang Used Bookstore to Wugu, New Taipei.³⁰ The author's long habit of visiting independent bookstores was amplified into a tour across Taiwan that year. When the first print run piled up like a small mountain by the window of a Hualien bookstore, Taitung place names and cement factory smokestacks were already placed on the same novel map.

Source: Openbook p-68257; Black Tide Foundation Grant page

At the Golden Classic Awards deliberation, some judges felt that certain character portrayals in the book were stereotypical and thus did not vote for it. This was an internal aesthetic disagreement among the judging panel and a public debate, not an event where "the indigenous community officially rejects the novel."³² The representation politics of Han authors writing about the Taitung cement protests should have been sharply discussed. Thickness must be retained; the narrative of condemnation does not need to be.

Environmental practice does not stop on paper. He has long served as an executive director of ecological concern associations and a board member of the Black Tide Marine Culture Foundation. Since 2013, he established the Black Tide Grant in his mother's name, providing about one hundred thousand dollars annually to encourage scientific exhibitions, research, conservation, and artistic creation centered on the sea.³³ By the mid-2020s, this grant had reached its thirteenth cycle, with dozens of recipients accumulated over ten years.³³ Reporters noted his participation in activities such as beach cleanups at the mouth of the Hualien River, where the classroom was not far from the tide line.⁷ The sea fog on the National Dong Hua University campus, the classrooms on Black Tide Coast, bookstore counters, and the VR cloud layer are facets of Compound Eyes in contemporary times. Teaching, locality, and cross-media all transform simultaneously.

In Compound Eyes, there is observational training from classrooms, industry choices from bookstore tours, grants from Black Tide Coast, and the two thousand meters of clouds inside a headset. He spoke at TEDxTaipei about "literature rooted in the land": what students practice in class is how to focus simultaneously on a species, a street, or a historical trace without breaking them into unrelated essay topics.

⚠️ Controversial Viewpoint
The "stereotypical" discussion sparked by Hotel Sea Breeze at the Golden Classic Awards reminds readers of one thing: when writing across ethnicities about the eastern coast's cement and indigenous memories, representation itself is politics. Wu Ming-yi chose to walk into this risky area; the sharpness of the commentary does not automatically equal a failure of the work, nor does it equate to a unified judgment from the indigenous community.

Compound Eyes Still Turn

After the neon of the Xizhi set is turned off, the temporary Zhonghua Commercial Building will be demolished again. The memory of the real demolition in 1992 and the second vanishing of the fake building around 2020 overlap on the same corridor. If readers walk through that arcade in the PTS drama, it is equivalent to using someone else’s eyes to live through a space that no longer exists.

On the Booker website, the 2018 The Stolen Bicycle still marks Longlisted; the line of the author’s nationality, after being changed and changed back, writes Taiwan. ²³²⁵ That line is only for thickness. What is still turning is the commercial building neon, the rust on the chain, the waves of Pacific plastic, and the book stack by the window of the Hualien bookstore—all still seen simultaneously in the same pair of eyes.

Compound eyes still turn. Vanishing things, as long as someone looks at them this way, still have the chance to be written back.

Image Sources

• Hero: 1965 Zhonghua Commercial Building Architecture — Bureau of Information, Executive Yuan, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
• In-text: Night View of Zhonghua Commercial Building, Taipei City — Bureau of Information, Executive Yuan, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• In-text: View of the First Floor of the 'Xin' (Faithfulness) Building of Zhonghua Commercial Building — Bureau of Information, Executive Yuan, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
• Portrait: Wu Ming-yi — Department of Chinese Literature, National Dong Hwa University, Attribution Used via Wikimedia Commons
• Video: TEDxTaipei Literature Rooted in the Earth 2013 (Official Channel)
• Video: PTS Drama The Magician on the Bridge Official Teaser Trailer

Further Reading

• Ximending — The neighborhood where the Zhonghua Commercial Building once grew, understanding the urban coordinates of The Magician on the Bridge
• History of Taiwan Literature — Placing Wu Ming-yi back into the longer island writing genealogy
• Post-War Taiwan Literature — How the post-war generation writes land, war, and daily life
• Contemporary Taiwan Literature — Coordinates of the same generation for novels and international translation after 2000
• Indigenous Literature — Contrast vision when reading the representation politics of Hotel Sea Breeze
• Post-Lifting of Martial Law Taiwan Literature — Institutional and social background of the rise of nature writing and urban memory

References