and in an active sense, using all our energy produced from the above-mentioned special environment and from this new outpouring of our heartfelt thoughts and feelings, we are committed to the creation of a new art that is truly what the Taiwanese need. Most of all we want to create anew the "art and literature of the Taiwanese." We will never submit to narrow political and economic limitations, but rather survey problems from a higher and broader perspective, thereby creating a new cultural life suitable to the Taiwanese. Taiwan as a place belongs to the Taiwanese, who are between the motherland on the Mainland and Japan, giving all the appearance of a bridge, and so it is necessary to introduce the culture of both sides to each other, thereby contributing to the enrichment of East Asian culture.

     In 1930 Huang Shih-hui promoted hsiang-t'u literature, while in 1931 Kuo Ch'iu-sheng sparked the debate over literature in colloquial Taiwanese. Such a development has its own internal logic: that is, since literature wants to represent the people that live on this piece of land, it surely follows that it would be done in Taiwanese, uniting what the mouth speaks with what the pen writes. In 1932 the magazine Nan-yin (Southern Voices) especially inaugurated the column "Discussing Literature in Taiwanese." Such members of the literature- in-Taiwanese camp as Kuo Ch'iu-sheng, Chuang Sui-hsing, Huang Shih-hui and Li Hsien-chang advocated "making writing conform to speaking," that is, making the spoken language the core element. Others like Liao Han-ch'en, Lin K'o-fu, Lai Ming-hung, and Chu Tien-jen felt that with all the various sub-dialects of the Fu-chien dialect, as well as the Hakka dialect, if everyone wrote using their own dialect, it would create confusion in literature and expression; thus they emphasized "making speaking conform to writing," so as to adapt to the Chinese-style vernacular. This stand was criticized as "sycophancy" by the literature-in-Taiwanese camp. This debate went on for almost a year, but what is worth remembering is that despite the different stances regarding language usage, both sides to the argument assumed "Taiwanese literature" as an integrated idea. At least the debate revealed that the New Literature expressed by a colonial Taiwan was neither an offshoot of Japanese literature nor some second-class form of Chinese literature. It was in these unique historical circumstances that an independent Taiwanese literature came about.

     This is an idea that had never occurred before among the Han people of Taiwan; naturally, during the Ming and Ch'ing periods there were the literary traditions of poetry and lyrics, but there was never any such notion as "Taiwanese literature."

  Prev   |8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|   Next