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Towards the end of last year, I reviewed a couple of pieces from the ká-sióng series of Taiwanese chapbooks published by Strangers Press (a project associated with the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia), and very interesting they were, too. However, having been busy with other things (mostly Japanese!), it’s taken me a while to find time to take a look at the others, but I’m back today to examine the rest of the bunch. Three stories, three very different approaches – and here they are, reviewed in reverse order of preference Image may be NSFW.
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*****
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Sabrina Huang’s Cloud Labour (translated by Lin Kang) features a spot of science fiction to kick us off. On the first page we’re introduced to Sky, a man who specialises in a pursuit called called Proxying, where someone enters another person’s mind and removes something, namely negative emotions:
The term ‘log in’ was a little misrepresentative, a bit of a misnomer, but language inevitably has its limitations. A more accurate explanation might be that the Proxying system would ‘translate’ the Vat Brain’s most concentrated emotions into a new virtual world.
p.9 (Strangers Press, 2024)
Sky learns the finer elements of the art under the wing of his mother, Peacock, and is later introduced to other exponents, some of whom have slightly different specialisations.
A story in four chapters, Cloud Labour has distinct Brave New World vibes, guiding the reader through a society of robot lovers, eugenics and post-climate-change reality. This is a world where having the ability to remove negative emotions is the privilege of the rich, with trauma removal coming with a hefty fee…
If I’m honest, I never quite got into this one, a tale with a lot of world-building and little real plot movement. Having read forty pages only to be confronted with a slightly abrupt ending, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all. In truth, it feels less like a story than the start of a novel, meaning I was left a little unsatisfied by our adventures in mind-washing.
*****
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By contrast, Lamulu Pakawyan’s Social (tr. Wen-Chi Li and Colin Bramwell) is a far more down-to-earth story. The focus here is on an indigenous Taiwanese woman who, having jumped from her bedroom window, is in a coma in hospital. We’re shown her social media pages, with comments she made and replies others have left, and the story slowly unfolds as we learn more about the poor patient’s history.
At its core, Social is a story of identity, and how we go about building it. Early on, we’re told of the woman’s decision to return to her tribe:
You used to feel like an outsider. You had always been troubled by the idea of needing to return to your tribe, but despite your misgivings you finally chose ‘surrender’. You became one of those who came back and stayed. You turned into who they described: the indigenous person who proves their indigeneity by returning home. (p.9)
As it turns out, the return proves to be a mistake as, little by little, her individuality is taken away from her by her family. She finds herself under constant pressure to conform, to comply with her parents’ demands and to give up her rights for her dead-beat brother.
It’s a story showing that returning to your roots isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The woman crumbles under the pressure of balancing her responsibilities to the tribe and her family with her desire to live her own life. It’s by no means a unique phenomenon (there’s a *lot* of this in Korean fiction, for example), but it’s no less disturbing for that. By the end of the story, the reader will understand just why the woman felt she needed to take that step out of the window…
*****
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My favourite of the three this time around was Lulyang Nomin’s Mountain Rat (tr. Yu Teng-wei), in which a man working hard in the mountains is bitten by, well, you know. Returning home, he prepares to isolate himself in a nearby hut in case he has a disease that might be contagious, shutting himself away to suffer in peace.
As it turns out, though, what confronts him is a slightly more serious issue:
The soft glow of the incandescent lamp cast muted light onto my limbs. My toes and toenails were no longer blunt but tapered instead into sharp points. The soles of my feet were slowly twisting and shrinking and my palms were wrinkled as if they had been soaked in water for too long. (p.11)
That’s right – our Taiwanese Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself turning into something slightly more menacing than a lousy insect!
In an enjoyable story, we experience the man’s struggles to stop his metamorphosis, both internal (trying to hold onto his humanity while a voice inside urges him to give it all up) and external (with a certain visitor doing his best to reverse the transformation process). What’s it really all about? Well, I’m sure there’s a deep meaning to it all, possibly connected with traditional versus modern life. but you can just read it as a fun story of a bizarre metamorphosis, too.
*****
Five interesting stories, then, in vividly coloured and illustrated chap books, for anyone looking for something slightly different. This series, like the others, is a nice coffee-table set of stories, perfect for a quick read when you have a little free time. Strangers Press have brought out several of these sets now, providing vicarious trips to South Korea, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Switzerland, so if you fancy a quick holiday, but not the hassle of international travel, you could do worse than take a quick break with one of these collections Image may be NSFW.
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