These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan’s most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun’s intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth.
Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator’s younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday ‘absurdities’ in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family.
In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn’t given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang’s teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.
Table of Content
Translator’s Introduction
My Kid Sister
A Present Just for Me
Nausea
A New Breed of Woman
First Love
Her Taboo
On Treatment
All That Remains Is Our Shell of Flesh
Listening Intently and Telling Stories
The Awakening of Laughter
Chronicle of Death
Ending in Insanity
Wild Child
Friends
The Beginning
In the Streets
In the Heart of the Night
Stories
Games
Good-for-nothings
The Handgun
Annie
The Past
On the Rooftop
Brothers
Mistakes
The Hotel
The Port
Changes
The Poster
Secrets
The Window
Happiness
Learning
From Birth
Pitiful
The Celebrity
The Adoption
The Negotiation
The Birthday
And Supposing
Forgetting
About the author
Chang Ta-chun is among Taiwan’s premier contemporary authors. His prolific and varied output has transformed him from a cult literary figure into a virtual celebrity in Taiwan, where he produces and hosts a television program on literature. He has published twenty-one books since his emergence on the literary scene almost two decades ago and has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He lives in Taiwan and maintains a home in Iowa, where he spends several months of the year.Michael Berry is a doctoral candidate in modern Chinese literature at Columbia University. He is the translator of several works, including the forthcoming novel
To Live by Yu Hua.
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