At the beginning of autumn, when the papayas are ripening in this southern land, a chilly wind fills Ch'en Yu-san's dark and empty heart as he stares at a boundless sky of a deep celadon hue. While all living things betray a gradual waning in their expressions, most young people with tuberculosis, hastening to an early grave, throb painfully with life, heated with a passion that does not seem possible in the sick. Without money for medical treatment or the means to purchase books, all the while hoping to follow the movements of society by purchasing back issues of the journal XX (very likely Kaizô), hoping to read Lu Hsün, to be moved by Engel's works on the family, private property, and the origin of the state, to read Gorky and Morgan [Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), American anthroplogist and sociologist] . . . .

     Until the instant my body and soul vanish into the void of eternity, I shall pursue the truth. . . .  Our benighted and hopeless age, with the view ahead obstructed, will it last forever like this?  Or is the happy society we imagine as Utopia going to appear as an inevitability?  Only rigorous scientific thought unadulterated by sentimentality or fancy is going to answer this for us.

     This is the faith of a young man suffering from tuberculosis "moved by the nearness of death." Even Ch'en Yu-san's ambition to make a name for himself and establish himself in the world gets bogged down bit by bit in an ashen reality, and his dream is nothing more than to "wear Japanese clothes and always speak Japanese, to burn with idealism and feel a kind of self-consolation in finding himself in an existence different from that of their people." Outward happiness is also only an "act of self-consolation"by a subject people made to swim within the confines of a colonial society.

     Now we have endless dark sadness, but eventually a beautiful society will arrive. . . .  While calling to mind the different aspects of an earth overflowing with that happiness, I will pray that I may go to an everlasting sleep in the cold ground.

     In the innermost depths of the author's heart, perhaps two things existed simultaneously:  this wish that the elder brother of Ts'ui-o just stated and the cherishing of a vain hope:   "If I'm lucky, I'll fall in love with a girl from the mother country and marry her,"while living in the midst of a reality where everything is gloomy and oppressive.  This probably does not misrepresent the state in which the unfortunate common people of Taiwan found themselves.  The Taiwanese Chen Yu-san, who "frowned darkly and frankly expressed his displeasure"when addressed by a Japanese with "Hey you,"unconsciously let this contradiction sneak into the depths of his consciousness.

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