Writing Taiwan
Chen draws on a rich language that alternates between sarcasm, playfulness, exaggeration, and sorrow, presenting vivid accounts of the Ghost Festival, when masses of joss paper whirl about in the hot air, and of the small town’s ridiculous penchant for pomposity. Strippers, gay porn videos, an open-air cinema at a local temple, and Daoist priests performing rituals all arrive on the scene, in a world that pushes the limits of our imagination. The story overflows with a thick brew of descriptive flamboyance. Chen’s word pictures give Taiwanese readers a comforting feeling of déjà vu, and encourage foreign readers to delve deep into Taiwanese culture.
Reading Green Island, we are overwhelmed by the waves of stifling heat characteristic of tropical islands. Ryan, who lives in Hawaii, says that while it is hot and humid enough there, she cannot forget the smoldering heat that engulfed her when she first visited Taiwan. The experience prompted her to explore the connections between physicality and psychology. In Green Island, the sultry climate “adds to the oppressive air of the prison,” and Ryan explains that “including those sensory details helps underline that feeling in the reader.”
Giving her impressions of Taiwan, Ryan tells us that her mother came from Taichung, and that she used to be struck by how “history seemed to layer” in Taiwanese towns. That was something she never intuited in her native California: “It was like you could see multiple timeframes co-existing.”
From conception to completion, Green Island was a 14-year labor of love. For this project, Ryan learned Chinese, consulted scholarly literature, watched old films, and interviewed relatives of victims. She also accessed historical photographs to collect visual details absent from existing verbal records. Ryan’s meticulous research has endowed her novel with a fabulously rich texture, showing readers the highways and byways of Taiwanese history.
Literary tours in Yongjing invite Taiwanese readers to step into the magical world of Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town. (courtesy of Luko Changhua Travel Library)
Yongjing’s deserted swimming pool has become a tourist attraction. Kevin Chen’s admirers, including Japanese readers, visit Yongjing to look for places described in his novel.