Here are twelve moving short stories about Taiwan and its people by one
of the island's most popular writers, Cheng Ch'ing-wen. Focusing
primarily on village life and the effects of modernization on Taiwan in
the postwar years, Cheng is one of the most respected of the island's
"nativist" writers, yet this is his first book to be translated into
English. This anthology represents the best of his fictional efforts
across a forty-year span and encompasses his major themes: the tensions
between men and women, parents and children, city and village, tradition
and modernity. Taken individually, each story presents a moving portrait
of paralysis, frustration, or self-realization. Together, they weave a
complex tapestry of life in a rapidly changing country.
Cheng Ch'ing-wen's stories tell of men grappling with their fears and
frustrations, from "The River Suite," in which a ferryman-championed
throughout his small town for twice saving a drowning person-lacks the
courage to confess his love to a young woman before she dies, to "Spring
Rain," in which a man struggles to come to terms with his seemingly
rootless life as both an orphaned child and an infertile husband. Here
too are illustrations of the changing place of women in Taiwan, as they
take on more powerful roles and awaken to a sense of their own
sexuality: a woman forcibly separated from her husband by her jealous
mother-in-law walks for hours through the night to see him on his
birthday, only to turn back and go straight home before her absence is
noticed; a disappointed young female scholar with a deformed hand comes
to realize--after many painful rejections--that loneliness is not reason
enough to become intimate with a man. And generations clash in "Thunder
God's Gonna Getcha," as a mother's cruelty is repaid years later by a
son's coldness.
Death reverberates throughout these stories as characters recall
deceased spouses, lovers, relatives, and friends in vivid detail. The
focus, however, is not on the dead but on the living. In the title
story, an old man carves exquisite lame horses as both a penance for
having terrorized a town as a police officer during the Japanese
occupation of Taiwan in World War II and a memorial to his deceased
wife, who was nobler and more courageous than he. This book is a kind of
gallery of three-legged horses: portraits of people maimed and
transformed-for better or worse-by the suffering that life brings.
