Li Ang

Appreciations

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Professor Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang currently is teaching at The University of Texas at Austin. She has done extensive studies on modern Chinese literature and films from Taiwan. She is the author of Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law, Transformations of a Literary Field: On Contemporary Taiwan Fiction, and Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan, and the co-editor of Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan.

 

The instant fame “Flower Season” won in 1968 may be partially attributed to its sensational topic, a young schoolgirl fantasizing about her chance of being raped by a florist. At the time she published the story, Li Ang was only seventeen years old. Her precocious literary talent is evident in the double-voiced narration, which renders vivid the little girl’s wavering back and forth between fantasy and reality, between a mocking playfulness and genuine apprehension.

A note of sophistication underlines the narrator’s cynical acknowledgment of the fact that, after all, the girl’s make-believe adventure is a product of her book-reading. The narrator warns us that the story may be “trite.” It is, however, precisely the author’s conscious play with the conventions of storytelling and the strongly self-reflexive nature of her narrative strategy that marked the crucial distinction between hackneyed sensationalism and the burgeoning artistic self-consciousness of Taiwan’s young modernists during the 1960s.

In a sense, the story can be taken as a grand metaphor for the modernist literary movement flourishing then in Taiwan. The sources from which the little girl’s romantic fantasy is constructed are mostly Western: a story about a white Christmas, a fairy tale about a prince on a white horse and forest nymphs, and scenes from French movies. Western cinema and fiction played a significant role in the popular culture of many Asian countries during the postwar years. In Taiwan’s modernist literary movement, Western influences were a source of the exotic.

Exoticism promised Chinese youths in Taiwan vicarious fulfillment and emotional escape from a sense of confinement resulting from cultural isolation and occasional political harassment. From the very beginning, the narrator of “Flower Season” invites the reader to indulge in a celebration of youth and the life force in a rejection of social restraints. The girl, as well as the reader, half expect that, after all, nothing will really happen. Yet the flight of the imagination that the bicycle trip allows is more exciting than a routine day spent at school. Unfortunately, however, the drab reality of this semi-open society, like the anemic-looking chrysanthemum bushes found in the florist’s garden, inevitably returns with even more disheartening effects.

 

We greatly appreciate the Feminist Press granting us the permission to post this appreciation here.