However, this work should be remembered as the first embodiment of the sense of resistance to appear in Taiwan literature. What engages my interest is the creative intention that Yang K'uei, despite his immaturity, tried so hard to realize in words. Not only did he understand the oppressed people of Taiwan simply by their being oppressed, he also brought on stage village headmen and police officers in order to understand how from the same Taiwanese population people could emerge who truckled to the Japanese ruling powers, people who turned themselves into the running dogs of oppression;

     and he depicts a mother who promptly disowned her eldest son, a policeman-the elder brother of the "I" of the story-when he bullied a villager and was shunned by the rest of the villagers, endeavoring in this way to see from all possible angles the condition of a people as they exist in a colonial land. It is a pity that the characters are not well-rounded. In a few casual lines the author Yang K'uei will give us a peek at a somewhat cerebral consciousness, but that rather strikes me as proof that he cannot depict what he wants to and is marking time with artless expression, unable to do anything else.  Let me cite some examples.  "Now when I think of it, if there had been an opportunity to have mother read . . . , it would have had the kind of effect that Old Lady Tse To-kin had." "It is because in everyone's memory there remains fresh as ever the bloody spectacle of the suppression of Yü Ch'ing-fang, Lin Shao-mao, and the others who plotted against the government."

     The names of Yü Ch'ing-fang and Lin Shao-mao are the same for the Taiwanese as the names of the communists Ichikawa Shôichi and Watanabe Masanosuke are in Japan.  More than that, perhaps it would be better to refer to them as fallen heroes in the struggle to liberate their people. For the Japanese people, both Lin Shao-mao and Yü Ch'ing-fang are vaguely familiar names, but even if some of them know who they were, they would only know enough about them to recognize that they were the ringleaders of "rebels"who opposed Japanese rule.  During the fifty years of Japanese rule, there were many incidents of resistance to Japanese control; they were especially fierce during the first part of the Meiji 30s [1897-1906] and first part of the 40s [1907-11].  Upon entering the Taishô era [1912-26], resistance did not take the form of direct armed uprisings, but, influenced by the Taishô Democracy movement in Japan and the May 4th Movement in China, it became educational and was switching to a movement to establish a Taiwan National Assembly. The Wu-she incident of Shôwa 5 [1930] was an armed uprising of nearly a thousand tribal aborigines against Japanese rule;  even so, there was no direct connection to the Taiwan Democratic Party or the Taiwan Communist Party.

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