Orphan of Asia

In 1943, as the fires of the Pacific War swept across the South Seas and censorship on Taiwan reached its height, in the corner of a Taipei newspaper office a Taiwanese reporter past the age of forty spent his days writing copy that glorified the "holy war." By night, however, he returned to his rented room and, by the dim glow of a lamp, secretly filled sheet after sheet with a novel he knew could never be published. He understood that if the patrolling military police ever uncovered the manuscript, prison — or something worse — awaited him. This man was Wu Zhuoliu, and the manuscript he hid in drawers and in the gap above the ceiling would later be hailed as an immortal classic of Taiwanese literature: Orphan of Asia. The word "orphan" was the annotation he wrote for the inner life of an entire generation of Taiwanese.

Wu Zhuoliu, born Wu Chien-tien in 1900 in a Hakka village in Xinpu, Hsinchu, was steeped from childhood in classical Chinese learning and poetry. After graduating from the Governor-General's National Language School, he returned home to teach at public elementary schools, a calling he pursued for nearly two decades. From the lectern he saw with his own eyes how Taiwanese teachers, however diligent, were always paid and promoted below their Japanese colleagues, and he witnessed the arrogance and contempt with which Japanese inspectors treated both Taiwanese children and their teachers. In 1940, a clash sparked by an inspector's discrimination became the final straw: he resigned from his secure post and turned his back on half a lifetime of teaching.

After leaving teaching, Wu crossed the sea to Nanjing in China to work as a reporter for the Continental Daily News. He had carried with him an image of the "motherland," imagining he might find there a sense of belonging as a Han Chinese; yet the realities of wartime China, and the suspicion with which locals regarded "Taiwanese" as neither Japanese nor purely Chinese, gave him a taste of yet another kind of rejection. He soon returned to Taiwan and made his living in journalism. The experience showed him plainly: in Japanese eyes the Taiwanese were second-class colonial subjects; in Chinese eyes they were outsiders stamped with the mark of Japan. Acknowledged by neither, belonging to neither — this was the most painful core of the "orphan of Asia."

Orphan of Asia lays this condition of belonging nowhere bare through the life of its protagonist, Hu Tai-ming. A Taiwanese youth with a modern education, Hu studies in Japan, where he is dismissed as a "slave of the Qing"; he travels with high hopes to mainland China, only to be guarded against as a Japanese spy; and back in Taiwan he is ground down by colonial discrimination and the crush of war until his mind gives way. Hu's tragedy is not death but the impossibility of finding any land, any community, willing to say to him without reservation, "You are one of us." Through this character Wu gave voice to the silent cry of a whole generation struggling in the cracks between empires.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, Wu, like many Taiwanese, briefly brimmed with hope at the return to the "motherland." But the chaos of the takeover that followed, the bloody suppression of the February 28 Incident, and the long White Terror that came after quickly shattered that hope. He poured his firsthand witness and his disillusionment into the autobiographical works The Fig Tree (無花果) and Taiwan Lianqiao (臺灣連翹) — both banned for a time after publication for candidly touching on the February 28 Incident and other political taboos, and not fully released until around the lifting of martial law. A different flag had been raised, yet the orphan remained an orphan: this was the heaviest question Wu bequeathed to post-war Taiwan.

Though he tasted the margins under both regimes across his life, Wu did not choose silence. In 1964 he single-handedly founded the magazine Taiwan Literature (臺灣文藝), holding open a space for the long-suppressed nativist writing of the post-war years; and in 1969 he donated his personal savings to establish the Wu Zhuoliu Literary Award, encouraging writing centered on Taiwan itself and nurturing generation after generation of younger authors. He died in Taiwan in 1976 at the age of seventy-six. Today he is widely regarded as a pioneer of Taiwanese nativist literature, and Orphan of Asia has transcended the novel itself to become the most representative emblem of the identity dilemma of colonial Taiwan — a reminder to every generation that knowing who you are remains this island's deepest, and most necessary, question.