Distinct societies, similar transformations
Taiwan Panorama: Have recent social changes in your country impacted your writing plans?
Bao Ninh: In recent years, Vietnam has undergone increasingly quicker and more radical change. On the one hand, development drives economic prosperity; but it also brings problems such as changing mores, urban chaos and a breakdown in social order. From a writer’s point of view, I feel rather sad.
Fang Hui-chen: Taiwanese society has also changed greatly. My first job ever was as a feature writer for Next, a weekly magazine. During my four years there, Taiwan’s media environment underwent drastic changes, such as the increasing influence of investors, paid product placement within news, and blind pursuit of scandal and higher click-through rates. This has been followed by the efforts of mainland Chinese capitalists to gain entry to the Taiwanese media scene via investment. My new book, A Journalist Like Me, chronicles this transformation.
Ayu Utami: In recent years, Indonesia has experienced freedom of the press, but nowadays it may be too free. The media is flooded with fake news items, manipulated by certain ethnic groups or religious figures that select solely the news they wish to hear, while ignoring objective facts. This “autocratic” atmosphere is altering the nature of Indonesia’s formerly tolerant society.
So I now believe that freedom of the press does not suffice; people must acquire the “freedom to think.” For my next project, I intend to write a book around the theme of “critical spiritualism,” in the hopes that Indonesia will become a more inclusive and tolerant society.
Writers reveal their favorites
Bao Ninh and Ayu Utami: We would like to know more about Taiwan. Could Fang Hui-chen recommend some books that might be helpful in understanding Taiwanese literature and history?
Fang Hui-chen: I’d recommend five books: The Great Flowing River: A Memoir of China, from Manchuria to Taiwan by Chi Pang-yuan; The Steelyard by Lai Ho, the father of Taiwanese literature; Collection of Short Stories by Lü Ho-jo; Taipei People by Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai; and Taste of Apples by Huang Chun-ming.
Bao Ninh: Two contemporary Vietnamese prose writers worthy of recommendation are Nguyen Huy Thiep and Nguyen Binh Phuong. A representative poet would be Nguyen Du [1765-1820]. For readers who are keen to delve further into traditional Vietnamese culture, I recommend his epic poem Truyen Kieu.
Ayu Utami: Indonesian works I’d like to recommend include Letters of a Javanese Princess by Raden Adjeng Kartini, a women’s rights activist born into an aristocratic family in the then Dutch East Indies; This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer; Indonesia: Social and Cultural Revolution by Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana; Ahmad Tohari’s The Dancer; and “Me,” a poem by Chairil Anwar.