Oh how we desperately wanted to like Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (2003, ISBN 0-8248-2661-2). It had all the markings of a winner, ten short fiction stories told from a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender perspective (referred to in Taiwan as the tonqzhi and ku’er wenxue movements). Here at WoWasis, our problem was that the stories had few compelling characters. There was a lot of whining. And a common idea voiced in several of the stories was the disgust with older men paying younger lesbians for sex (the writers felt, apparently, that they themselves would never grow old, never be alone, and would have the luxury of free sex with beautiful people forever).

OK, we’re a bit spoiled, having immersed ourselves in John Rechy’s City of Night and a few others, fiction with gay themes where plots were intriguing beyond navel contemplation and  characters evolved beyond teen angst; in short, playing with the big boys (and girls) of the hetero fiction world on their own turf. Compelling stories and characters never go out of style, regardless of the sexual or social politics. Part of the problem here may be in the criteria used to choose these ten works for inclusion in the volume, about which translator Fran Martin writes:

“It would be impossible in a volume of this length to include every work classifiable as tonqzhi or ku’er wenxue, expansive as this field has become. Inclusions here are limited first by the date of their publication: Ten stories have been chosen that appeared between 1989 and 1998, roughly demarcating the decade of the 1990s. This is partly in order to describe the outline of the tonqzhi and ku’er wenxue movements that took recognizable shape only with the publication and reception of this material in the 1990s. Partly, too, the decision to omit earlier gay- or lesbian-themed fiction (most obviously that of Pai Hsien-yung) is due to my desire to present the work of authors whose writing has not been extensively translated into English before now. Another factor restricting what appears in this volume is length: Since this is a collection of short fiction, I have not been able to include work by writers who have to date only published novels, such as the young author of popular lesbian fiction, Du Xiulan. Inclusions are limited to one story per author, and individual stories have been chosen either for their exemplification of an author’s style, or for their special popularity with tongzhi readerships.”

Style and popularity don’t always a compelling tale make. We did like Fran Martin’s comprehensive 28 page introduction describing the history of the gay literature movement in Taiwan, which does a fine job of putting the movement into a historical and social context, and this, we believe, is the real strength of the book. Although Martin sails perilously close to the bane of scholarly writing (we never again want to read anything using the word hegemony), she manages to somehow avoid the rocky shoals of didacticism in providing a history that’s important to the literature. Any reader of queer fiction from Taiwan would find her introduction to be of value.

Our favorite story was Chen Xue’s Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel, a somewhat abstract reading of the relationship between a mother and a daughter that we found ultimately fascinating. We also enjoyed Wu Jiwen’s tale of sexual transformation, Rose is the Past Tense of Rise, although we found that the constant back-references to geographer Sven Hedin’s 1934 expedition, embedded periodically througghout Wu’s story, broke the flow of the narrative. Particularly for Martin’s the history of this literary movement, we are thankful for the book, and are looking forward to reading more queer fiction from Taiwan as it continues to evolve. Buy it here at the WoWasis eStore.