Kaohsiung laurels its poets

Statue of writer Yeh Shih-tao stands beside the Kaohsiung Literature Museum. (Photo by June Tsai)



By June Tsai
Ten years ago, Kaohsiung City was known as an industrial wasteland, with a heavy concentration of gas storage tanks, chimneys and factory buildings filling the skyline, and the stinking Love River and piles of industrial waste befouling the metropolis.

Today, this southern Taiwanese community boasts a fresh scene—several interesting museums and a warehouse-turned art zone, efforts from both the public and private sectors to nurture culture over blind progress, and most importantly, a sense of cultural pride among its citizens.

“This sense of pride is new, and it has much to do with the latest development in spiritual life,” Cheng Chiung-ming, president of the Literary Taiwan Foundation, said Jan. 23. One important example is the weight the municipal government has begun to put on literature and on its own writers in recent years.

Kaohsiung now boasts Taiwan’s first city literature museum. Founded in 2006, the institute is somewhat belated for this major port, which has been home to many famous writers over a long period of time. Still, given that in Taiwan institutions dedicated to writers and literature can be counted on one’s fingers, for it to have been established at all was something of an accomplishment.

The museum turned the heads of Kaohsiung’s citizens when it opened. Located in a quiet corner of Central Park (near the Central Park metro station), with its elegant facade shaded gracefully by large trees, the Kaohsiung Literature Museum supplies spiritual nourishment in a city once seen as a cultural desert.

The museum has been a library since 1954. A 2003 renovation project turned the building into a multifunctional space. Reading salons began to take place in 2006, with different Kaohsiung-based writers invited each week to share their work with readers.

The museum’s permanent exhibition offers citizens a glimpse into the lives, work and manuscripts of a constellation of Kaohsiung authors, from members of the prewar Chinese-language poets’ society to a series of socially active postwar writers. This genealogy of writers is characteristic of Kaohsiung as a city of migrants, according to “Rambling through the Woods of Literature,” a city government publication.

During the Ching dynasty (1611-1912), Kaohsiung’s literary activities were based in the northern Zuoying area, where Ming dynasty (1368-1644) royalists stationed their troops, and the southwestern Cijin peninsula, one of the earliest developed areas in Kaohsiung, where Han Chinese fishermen settled.

Under the yoke of Japan’s colonial rule (1895-1945), publication of literary works continued, mainly in Japanese. Yet, while many at the time wrote and read in Japanese, use of the language was banned after Taiwan was taken over by the Kuomintang administration at the end of World War II following Japan’s surrender. Local writers became virtually silent, with new voices emerging only in the literary scene of the 1960s.

Filling up the lacuna were, notably, soldiers-poets who moved with the Nationalist government’s armed forces to Taiwan and were stationed in Zuoying—reviving the area’s military-based literature. In 1954, “Epoch Poetry Quarterly” was founded there by three of these poets, Chang Muo, Luo Fu and Ya Xian, who later styled themselves the “Parnassus” of Taiwan’s poetry. In 1964 the publication moved its editorial base north to Taipei, where it entered the mainstream postwar literary world.

In the same year, another poets’ group emerged in Kaohsiung surrounding “Li Poetry,” a bimonthly publication. Members included Chen Chien-wu, Chan Ping and other poets who had just began to compose in Mandarin, which for them was a new language.

The Li poets stressed the importance of literature articulating social and historic reality. They challenged the Epoch poets for what they said was their misuse of modernist techniques to produce abstruse lines that evaded the reality of their exiled land. The two groups engaged in debates that foreshadowed the “nativist literature debate” involving virtually every contemporary writer in 1977 and 1978.

Another poets’ society, known as “Amoeba,” was formed among verse-loving students of today’s Kaohsiung Medical University. The name, referring to the protozoa known for its changing shape, stressed a demand for literary responsiveness to social realities, as well as open discussions on all aspects of culture and art.

The young doctor-poets vowed to take care of people’s souls along with their bodies. The society is still active today, and many of its older members have become influential writers, including human rights activist Tseng Kuei-hai, psychiatrist Wang Hao-wei and aboriginal novelist Tuobasi Tamapima.

“Looking at it as a whole, the literary scene in Kaohsiung has been different from that in Taipei in that writers from the south tended to be socially engaged, both in word and in action,” said the LTF’s Cheng, a Li poet.

According to Cheng, local poets often took part in the opposition movement demanding democracy and in social movements championing environmental protection and human rights during the 1980s and 1990s. Tseng, for example, rallied members of cultural circles to push for the cleaning up of the Love River, the preservation of the city’s natural reserve of Mount Chai and the greening of the Ministry of Defense-owned compound of Wei Wu Ying.

“During the long period of martial law in Taiwan, mainstream writers tended to collaborate with the power center in Taipei, wittingly or not, while the efforts of southern grassroots writers were practically ignored,” Tseng said. This prevented the world from really getting to know the minds of Taiwanese people, he said.

“Thus when German Sinologist Helmut Martin read works by writers such as those involved with ‘Li Poetry’ in the 1980s, he was surprised to find a whole different world of representations of Taiwan,” Cheng said.

The diversity of Taiwan’s literary output as a whole proved “much more interesting” for Martin than literature written in other Chinese-speaking regions during the same period, according to Cheng. Martin later helped found the Research Unit on Taiwanese Culture and Literature at Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum in 2002.

A statue of writer Yeh Shih-tao is visible from the museum’s back door, facing Central Park. Yeh, who first wrote in Japanese, experienced the ban on that language and served a prison term for his political affiliation early in his career. He authored “An Outline History of Taiwan Literature,” published in 1987, which compiles an independent genealogy of literary development in the island’s 400 years of history—the first of its kind. Yeh’s death in 2008 was regarded as a great loss for the country’s literature.

Public art such as this statue of Yeh highlights Kaohsiung’s efforts to increase awareness of its literary heritage, with the administrative support of the city’s former cultural department chief, Wang Chih-cheng, a poet and writer. In addition, the city government published “A Literary History of Kaohsiung City” in two volumes in 2008.

Literature is also becoming part of the city’s tourism resources. In May 2009, a 517 meter-long literary walking path along the bank of Zuoying’s Lotus Lake, a favorite with sightseers, opened to the public. Art works along the path are inscribed with lines by important local writers and poets.

“This public art project is just a beginning. We look forward to more of such paths, corners and publications that honor our writers and their work and increase their visibility,” Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu said at the lakeside path’s opening ceremony.
“The responsibility of Taiwanese writers is to open our minds to the world, to which Taiwan belongs”—Yeh’s words seem to resonate with the lake view sparkling under a tropical sunny sky typical of this southern port city.





This article is published in Taiwan Today Feb. 12, 2010.