WILD KIDS: Two Novels about Growing Up
By CHANG TA-CHUN
Translated by Michael Berry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 280 pages, $22.95

Eva Shan Chou

Wild Kids is the fifth publication in a new and outstanding series of translations of modern literature from Taiwan. Actually made up of two novellas, "My Kid Sister" and "Wild Child," published in 1993 and 1996, respectively, Wild Kids is not anything like most people's idea of Chinese literature. Abrupt, smart-alecky, full of slang, and utterly disrespectful, it shows us the young protagonists' chaotic world of self-devised rules, teenage sex, abortion, and, in the case of "Wild Child," an underworld of hoodlums and gangsters. Meanwhile, in the background, the self-centered parents lead recognizable and upmarket lives-the father in "Kid Sister" is a journalist and artist, and the mother in "Wild Child" is a prominent advertising executive. This is a picture of modern Taiwan that in presentation and emotional impact is on the vanguard of literature from anywhere in the world. The translation by Michael Berry successfully conveys the work's edgy nature, while the cartoon-like illustrations at the head of each chapter, retained from the original Chinese edition, add to the mood of youthful defiance.

There is a kind of plot to each story. "My Kid Sister" uses flashbacks to trace the life of the narrator's younger sister from her birth to the moment, nineteen years later, when the two siblings publicly expose their father's hypocrisy. Like Holden Caulfield's younger sister in The Catcher in the Rye, the sister's actions and questions as she strives to learn and to grow up make her older brother sad and protective. In "Wild Child," the fourteen-year-old protagonist runs away from trouble at school and finds himself in the middle of a gangster war. Annie, a woman about ten years older than he is, tells him her story. The two of them and various others run from shadowy enemies and threats of betrayal through a series of junkyards and hotels.
The plots of both novellas, however, matter less than the stories' characters and atmosphere. From the very beginning, the reader is plunged into a view of the world from the bottom up, a view that is at once comic and painful. An ordinary event like being fed chicken soup for a cold is transformed from the child's viewpoint into "the strange sight of Grandma's gold-plated front teeth as she blew on the hot soup and lectured me" on the virtues of chicken soup. The eight-year-old narrator describes being fed so much of the soup that "even in my dreams I was coughing up chicken necks." And this is just the first page of "My Kid Sister."
Ultimately, through the cartoon-like exaggeration, the stories present to the reader a world of arbitrary suffering, casually inflicted and unthinkingly endured. These two novellas, along with a third, somewhat different, one entitled "The Weekly Journal of Young Big Head Spring," formed a trilogy that catapulted their author, Chang Ta-chun (born in 1957), from an already established reputation as an inventive, experimental writer to pop-culture fame. In Taiwan in the 1990s, the jackets of his books, along with his picture, were widely advertised on the sides of buses, in store windows, and on television; he also produced and hosted two television shows. The two novellas included in Wild Kids have remained in public attention: in 1999, "My Kid Sister" was staged as a play and "Wild Child" was made into a TV movie.
As is often the case with celebrity, one wonders as much about the culture and forces that produce it as about the person or work that is famous. Chang's career seems to epitomize the rapid changes that have taken place in Taiwan in recent decades. The popularity of Wild Kids is an example of a certain international post-industrial phenomenon, in which a style and message of alienation interacts with a consumerist culture of promotion to mutual benefit. It would be of great interest to have translations of some of Chang's many other works, so that more light can be shed on this and other aspects of the revved-up culture of Taiwan today.

Eva Shan Chou is an assistant professor of Asian studies at City University of New York, Baruch College. She writes frequently on Chinese literature and is the author of Reconsidering Tu Fu, a study of the eighth-century Chinese poet.