Huang Shih-hui was a member of the New Culture Association of Taiwan after the break-up [caused by increasing influence of the proletarian membership in 1927] and also participated in the publication of Taiwan taishû jihô (The Taiwan Mass Review); among the political movements, he belonged to the Taiwanese leftists. The hsiang-t'u literature that he promoted had as its audience the toiling masses, representing the vanguard of leftist literary theory on Taiwan. In the article quoted above, he considers questions from the perspective of a "Taiwanese." As everyone knows, this identification with the role of being "Taiwanese" was formed under Japanese rule. Basically Taiwan is a society that has Han Chinese culture as its core, and the great majority of people would consider themselves Chinese with a strong Chinese national consciousness; and yet these unique historical conditions generated within them a self-identity as Taiwanese. There occurs in Wu Cho-liu's Fig Tree the following thought-provoking passage:

     The Taiwanese never looked upon the Ch'ing dynasty as their homeland. . .    In the back of the Taiwanese mind there was their own nation. That nation was the Ming dynasty--the country of the Han people. This, then, was the homeland of the Taiwanese.

     This derives from the cultural identity of the Han people. Having experienced the foreign dynasty of the Ch'ing Manchus and the foreign rule of the Japanese, the people of Taiwan developed a modern sense of nationalism. From the time of the New Literature Movement onwards, the expression "Taiwan is the Taiwan of the Taiwanese" can often be found in the speeches of those Taiwanese with foresight. Having as its basis the Han consciousness, such statements are simply not the same as the Han consciousness of the early modern period. The Republic of China was founded in 1912, and yet Taiwan was under Japanese rule and the nationality of the Taiwanese fell under Japanese jurisdiction. Even if the Northern Plain, the native land of the Han people, was recaptured and there existed emotional bonds of the motherland with the Nationalists, the people on Taiwan would still be "Taiwanese." Quite a few Taiwanese returned to the motherland in order to fight the Japanese, but they all had to assume a false identity as being from Fukien or Kwangtung--such is common knowledge and I need not cite examples. In brief, China at that time was incapable of trusting the Taiwanese. Wu Cho-liu in Asia's Orphan presented through literature the crisis in identity experienced by the Taiwanese during the Japanese occupation as they hesitated between China and Japan; the protagonist Hu T'ai-ming of the book eventually goes insane, a thoughtful reflection on the plight of the Taiwanese.

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