Taiwan Today

Wu Sheng's poems about his hometown, collectively titled Impressions of My Village, began appearing in the early 1970s. They were unique nativist poems, and far different from the dense, nearly incomprehensible aesthetic objects then being produced by the island's fashionable modernist writers. Wu's verses were neither abstract nor difficult: no dazzling imagery, no difficult language, no urbanity, no affected existential angst. Instead, he wrote about life in rural Taiwan—the sweat, the toil, the dirt, and even the boredom—the only existential drama he knew. And he wrote about it clearly and directly, without romanticizing. "The Soil" (1975) embodies all these qualities:

Barearmed, who cares about the latest fashions?
Barefooted, who cares about being poetic?
Wiping sweat away you chant your own poem
Intoning your own verse
Who cares for affected literary moods, much less
Becoming part of history?

Lines of awkward footprints
Are written on the honest soil
Along the broad fields our ancestors
Sweat over
Never contending, never arguing, silently waiting
If flowers blossom and bear fruit
Who can ask for anything more?
If blistering blights

Or violent storms come
Erasing those bitter footprints
There is no sadness, no sorrow they will continue

No swords or knives are worn
There are no learned discussions on virtue and wisdom
Be content today hoeing and plowing
For one day you'll be forced to stop
And lie down
A part of the broad earth

Wu's surroundings, life, and family history provided the raw material for his poetry. Taken together, the poems are a vivid personal account of Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s as it passed through profound and sweeping socio-economic changes. Upheaval and continuity are central concerns: What happens to an agricultural society when it undergoes rapid modernization? What remains of traditional values after industrialization, urbanization, and economic and cultural integration with the rest of the world?

Although his writings consciously acknowledge that the way of life he honors is threatened, Wu continues to cling tenaciously to the traditions and values of rural Taiwan while questioning and resisting the new. His poetic oeuvre as it stands today—Wu stopped writing poetry a decade ago—can also be read as a record of the development of nativist writing since Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule in 1945, from its early unpretentious, almost naive, beginnings to the conscious cultural resistance of the 1970s to today, when its very survival as a literary style is in question.

Just as Wu rejects modern urban values, which he sees as actually a lack of values, so he rejects literary fashion: Modernism has come and gone; Postmodernism has arrived and, no doubt, will soon be supplanted by something else. Meanwhile, Wu has remained stubbornly loyal to his nativist roots. He is not averse to moralizing. His writings are often pointedly didactic, an approach unfashionable in artistic circles but one that continues a long literary tradition in China. Wu's arch-conservatism is more than mere posturing—it is the expression, the aesthetic outgrowth, of a way of life. "I really don't have any well-developed theory for writing poetry," he has said. "My poems are just a record of my life and feelings."

"The Poems Father Occasionally Writes" (1978) is the closest thing to a poetic manifesto Wu has ever written:

The poems father occasionally writes
Are like the village we grew up in
Where no one puts on airs
No heroic declarations
No brilliant song
Just a few
Rough, awkward footprints

The poems father occasionally writes are
Like the soil we live close to
Despising all pretty talk
Never flashy or eye-catching
Never charming
Just the salty
Sweat of contentment

Children, the poems father occasionally writes
Never seek to win praise
Or applause
Like the people of our village we work with every day
They are strangers to profound truths

They lack marvelous thoughts
Just some hearty
Praise and a few anxieties about life

Wu Sheng-hsiung was born in 1944, the fourth of seven children in a farm family. His father received some. schooling and worked in the local Farmer's Association until his death in 1965; his mother is illiterate and has worked as a laborer in the fields since she was quite young. During Wu's formative years, Taiwan was still predominately an agricultural society. Like many children of his day, he worked long hours on the family farm in addition to attending school. His interest in modern poetry stems from the sixth grade. "The first poems I encountered were written in the early fifties or before and were relatively clear and easy to understand," he has said. "I read and memorized a lot of them." He read works by poets such as Yang Huan (楊喚), Li Sha (李莎), and others from the mainland who arrived with the Nationalist exodus to Taiwan in 1949. In those days, pale sentimental verse and anti-Communist poetry were the predominant styles.

The political climate of the early 1950s tended to inhibit the growth of a strong literary scene, and poetry remained relatively undeveloped. The government was still jittery after the Communist victory on the mainland, the beginning of the Korean conflict in 1950, and the fall of Hainan Island to a Communist invasion in 1951. The political situation had cultural ramifications. Much of the mainland's recent literary heritage, as well as the portion of the island's own nativist literature that was written in Japanese, was officially proscribed as potentially subversive. The government specifically encouraged and supported anti-Communist literature. The only other poetic options at the time were either the sort of lyrical but innocuous sentimental verse made popular by well-known writers such as Hsu Chih-mo (徐志摩) or the models provided by schools of 20th century Western writing, such as Existentialism and Surrealism.

In the late 1950s, a number of important magazines began publication. These included Modern Literature, Modern Poetry, the Epoch Poetry Quarterly, and Blue Stars. In addition to promoting their own versions of Modernism, these magazines introduced modern Western literature to their Chinese readers through translations of and critical introductions to modernist writers. Inspired by Kafka, Joyce, Eliot, and other Western writers, Taiwan's Modernists wrote opaquely complex works of fiction and poetry. Existentialism and Surrealism were all the rage. Many writers, especially the mainland emigres, discovered in these schools of writing a peculiar resonance with their own tragic situation. The difficulty and obscurity usually associated with modem art seemed ideal for expressing the uncertainties of the time.

By the 1960s, Modernism had all but eclipsed anti-Communist poetry. When Wu was in junior high school, he came across a number of the newly published avant-garde journals, and he devoured all the issues that somehow made it to his rural hometown. Wu himself began writing poetry during the heyday of Modernism in the early 1960s, but his first poems must be considered juvenilia. Having just embarked on his vocation as poet, he had yet to find his voice. "The Tree" (1963) is an often-cited example of his early efforts:

And I am a cold insulator
Rooted here
—in this infinite vastness

After flourishing
Spring lies splashed all around me in pieces
And I am a cold insulator
Unaffected by the force of gravity

Shade. Coolness drips
From new leaves
A pillar. Glad green
Lifts the blue sky

And I am a cold insulator
Rooted here
In spite of the buzzing laughter
Which comes like the wind

The immaturity of this poem is evident, but it is worth noting the modernist influence in Wu's choice of singularly unpoetic words such as "insulator" and "force of gravity." He would spend approximately the next decade trying to find his own poetic voice.

Interestingly, although Wu was an insatiable reader of modernist literature, it had little impact on his style. "I can't say that I was not influenced by Modernism," he has said. "It's just that its influence was neither deep nor long-lasting." Wu attributes this to three factors. First, his initial exposure to modern verse came in the form of easy-to-understand lyric poems, written in the 1930s and 1940s. Second, since he lived in the countryside and worked on a farm, he had a difficult time understanding the "loneliness" and "alienation" so common in modernist works, which were largely written by and for educated urbanites. Modernist writing did not conform to life as he knew it. Finally, the tragedy of his father's death in an automobile accident in 1965 forced him at age 21 to face many harsh realities with a determination and pragmatism in advance of his years.

In 1966, Wu entered Pingtung Agricultural College in southern Taiwan, where he was active in campus literary circles and helped edit the school magazine. Summers, he worked on experimental farms in nearby Taitung city and also helped his mother in the family's rice fields. In his final years of college, he also had to work in a printing shop to help support his mother and siblings. The long, hard hours in the shop gave him an abiding respect for industrial workers. It took him five years to complete his degree. After graduating, like many other young people of his generation, he went to Taipei to seek his fortune. After, about a year, he decided that he didn't belong in a city. His place was on the farm. Wu returned home and has remained there ever since, working as a biology teacher at Hsichou Junior High School and helping his mother in the family fields.

Home for Wu Sheng is Chenliao village in west-central Taiwan, one of the island's prime agricultural regions. The rich, fertile soil produces a wide variety of crops, including rice, sugar cane, and peanuts, Wu's home sits amid green fields in a landscape crisscrossed by streams and watched over by mist-shrouded mountains. Only after his return from Taipei was Wu able to tap fully into the spirit of the place, awakening all his latent emotions. His poetic voice is intimately linked with his home—its light, climate, and geography—and it is his sense of place that gives it authority. As a poet, he speaks not only for his own village, but for all rural areas in Taiwan, His verse has validity because he is able to capture in words the specific changes Taiwan was undergoing by focusing on the immediate and commonplace. At the same time, the archetypal simplicity of the situations he depicts allows him to transcend the merely regional and explore universal truths.

Wu never joined a literary association and his style developed independently of organized movements. But his own brand of rural poetry did coincide with the rise of nativist writing. His first truly significant work, a series of sixteen poems written between 1972 and 1974 and entitled Impressions of My Village, set the pattern for his poetry. His language is plain and simple, even colloquial, in stark contrast with the Modernists of the day, who were obsessed with developing highly individualistic styles often based on deliberate syntactic distortions of the Chinese language. "I never really thought about my style," Wu once pointed out. "I probably write the way I do for two reasons: First, I'm not well read and it shows in my writing. Second, I live in the countryside and the people I deal with every day are farmers and their families. We speak Taiwanese, and that also affects the way I write."

Readers found Wu's poems a breath of fresh air after a decade of difficult and obscure modernist writing. In theme and content, the poems haye a number of characteristics in common. They are vignettes of rural life and are never idealistic. In fact, the life they depict is often quite dismal. "Rainy Season" (1972), with its strong colloquial diction, is a good example:

Have a smoke
Have some thin' to drink
Damn this miserable weather

Shoot the bull
Makin' jokes about somebody else's wife
Damn this miserable day

Bitch and grumble
Figure your wages and what it costs
Damn this miserable life

When it ought to rain it don't
When it ain't supposed to
It rains without lettin' up
Does as it pleases
pourin' down rain
Damn, just gotta go on livin'

Although the emotional range of the poems is fairly limited, they are emotions that most people can understand. There is a mingling of stubborn pride and genuine sadness. Life in the country might be difficult and lackluster, but the speaker seems to take pride in the fact that he is able to grit his teeth and go on living the hard life the way his forbears did, and to do so in conscious acceptance of all its limitations and shortcomings. This attitude is evident in "Preface," the prefatory poem to Impressions of My Village:

Long, long ago
The people of my village
Began to look up with hope
The sky of my village
Is so indifferent
Indifferent blue or gray

Long, long ago
My village lay in the mountain's shadow
A vast ink painting
Dark and troubled
Pasted on the faces of the people of my village

Long, long ago
For generations on this piece of land
Where no wealth or prosperity grows
Where no miracles are ever produced
My ancestors wiped away their sweat
And brought forth their fated children

The three stanzas of this poem conform neatly to traditional Chinese cosmology, the great triad of Heaven, Earth, and Man. In the first two stanzas, the primal configurations of Heaven and Earth are shown as being indifferent to the plight of mankind. But Man, the final component of the great triad, is traditionally considered to be a combination of the two basic forces of Yin and Yang that permeate the universe and are manifested as Earth and Heaven. Thus, Man is often referred to as "the mind of Heaven and Earth." Although generations of people have worked through their fates unaided and unsolaced, and in spite of hardship and suffering, there is still a sense of continuity as each generation in turn works the land. Man exists in harmony with nature, and men exist together by following the laws and patterned way of life handed down from their ancestors. Therein lies the perceived strength of humanity and the sense of stubborn pride evident in Wu's poems.

Wu's poetry answers a basic human need for centeredness and meaning in the flux and chaos of existence. This is particularly true for those who lived through the extraordinary economic and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, when the economy shifted from agriculture to an orientation toward exports. The shift was accompanied by a substantial portion of the rural population moving to urban areas, and the resulting breakdown in the structure of rural society has been blamed for the decline of traditional values. Wu's recourse to the landscape and people's place in it evokes a sense of stability and permanence in the face of the comparatively impersonal human relations found in cities. His poetry functions as an antidote to modernist and industrial "dis-ease." For everything that gives meaning and structure to life in traditional society seems to dissolve in the urban context. Order and light fall into chaos and darkness.

While the speaker in each of the poems proclaims an allegiance to the old ways, he does so with an awareness of fighting a losing battle. Progress cannot be stopped; all resistance is ultimately doomed. The rural villager is being marginalized, shoved to the periphery of society. "The Road" (1972), for example, deals directly with the onslaught of modern industrial culture:

Since the roads from the city, lined with telephone poles
—Spies sent from the city—
Reached, one after another, into the countryside
Unscrupulously offering luxuries
The rural roads have slowly grown dazzling

Since the country roads grew dazzling
The clamoring din of machines
Has slowly blotted out the simple light
Of moon and stars in the countryside

Since the simple light of moon and stars
Grew dim in the countryside
The leisurely walks of the people
Were mortgaged for television sets

But a road is still a road
Muddy or deserted
One step can lead to so much misfortune
A road is still a road, as always
Leading each one to a common grave

The fatalistic tone of his poem is purposeful—all the luxuries and vanities of the world will not save a person from the grave. While the message may appear trite today, Wu's position, given the mad scramble for the new in those days, raised an important consideration: Although change and progress are facts of life, people still have a choice over which direction to take. The speaker in the poem, extolling the simple pleasures of a leisurely stroll on a quiet evening after dinner, can disparage what is seen as the more vulgar aspects of modern felicity—luxuries such as TV sets—as well as the willingness to mortgage one's freedom to obtain them.

Any reader of Taiwan's nativist literature must wonder if its didactic success necessarily guarantees a corresponding aesthetic one. In the case of Wu Sheng's poetic series Impressions of My Village, the answer is an unequivocal 'yes.' The poems are arguably his best work; for the didactic and the aesthetic achieve the finely tuned balance encountered only in later nativist writing.

Besides its tendency to be overtly didactic, nativist poetry is often criticized as being merely a reaction against Modernism. But such a view fails to take into account the historical roots and development of the nativist position. While it is true that some urban-based writers adopted a nativist pose, Wu Sheng's poetry is an outgrowth of his own way of life and sense of values. It cannot be reduced to being nothing more than a reaction to Modernism. In fact, the emergence of nativism in post-retrocession Taiwan is better described as a re-emergence. The movement's roots stretch back to the Japanese occupation period and even earlier classical antecedents.

As the Japanese colonial authorities pushed for cultural assimilation, Taiwan writers and artists resisted and sought to shape their own identity by a return to the old customs and culture of rural Taiwan. In the 1970s, an analogous situation developed in response to the influx of things American. The pervasive political, economic, and cultural (including pop culture) influence of the United States was quite strong and was considered just as threatening in its own way. Modernism was viewed by many local writers as an aesthetic sell-out to the West.

Wu's poems from the early 1970s deal with rural life in a generalized way; they evoke a mood without addressing specifics. In the years following, his poems gain in stylistic maturity and thematic focus as he writes about his father and mother and specific aspects of the rural environment. An element of satire also begins to appear in his work and a new sense of lyricism. Nearly a decade after his father died, enough time had elapsed for Wu to develop an emotional distance from the event, allowing him to begin exploring the relationship. "Embankment" (1976) is one of the best poems written for his father:

Father took my small hand in his
   as we walked along the embankment
The paddy fields of home to the left
To the right the muddy water flowed
Like time for the people of my village
Sadly the water flowed away
Father said: At times like this
Grandfather'd put his tools aside for the day
And take me by the hand....
I kept asking: Where's grandfather now?
Father gazed at the slowly setting sun
And said nothing

I take my son's small hand in mine
   as we walk along the embankment
The paddy fields of home to the left
To the right the muddy water flows
Like time for the people of my village
Sadly the water flows away
I say: At times like this
Grandfather'd put his tools aside for the day
And take me by the hand....
My son keeps asking: Where 's grandfather now?

I gaze at the slowly setting sun
Saying nothing

This poem, and others written for his father, including "Wheels," "The End of Autumn," and "A Decade," deal with a common theme: the continuity of life. The nearly identical stanzas of this poem provide the reader with a vivid sense of continuity; experience is repeated, but the actors change. From father to son, generation after generation, a way of life and a set of values are passed on. The flowing water symbolizes the passage of time, alongside which father and son, in their turn, till the same land and raise their families. The reader can sense behind this poem the changeless aeons of peasant labor that form the foundation of Chinese civilization. The Chinese perception of time as a cyclical process and the value of tradition over innovation are evident throughout. Here lie the philosophic underpinnings of Wu's writing.

In the mid-1970s, Wu Sheng also began a series of poems dealing with plants common in rural Taiwan. In each poem, he emphasizes a specific aspect of each plant, giving it a connotation symbolic of some rural characteristic such as stamina or honesty. Most, if not all of them, have a didactic purpose and can be read as moral homilies, as is the case with "Rice" (1974):

Wind and rain kill slowly
Insects eat too much
The unpredictable sky
Teases the people of my village
With its many moods

For a thousand years, the people of my village
Have wiped away their sweat in silence
Watering you with the sweat of exhaustion
They have looked after you
With so much loving anxiety

Too busy to think about it or discuss it
Generation after generation for a thousand years
Your roots have bitterly penetrated the soil
Your stems and leaves
Have quietly absorbed the sunlight

When scythes and threshers busily
Begin to sing in unison
And the birds flutter
Above your heads
Only you know how much hardship
Has gone into every grain of rice

The thrust of this poem is perhaps best summed up in the traditional adage: "Every grain of rice is the product of bitter toil." During the same period, Wu wrote a series of poems on various domestic animals. Some of his animal poems, like those about plants, resemble homilies. Others depict traditional custom and belief, such as "Animal Spirit Tablet" (1977). The poem is preceded by the epigraph: "At the head of a street in my village there is a slaughterhouse at the entrance to which is a spirit tablet for the animal spirits." The poem:

The tablet says: "Spirits begone!
Do not come back, do not return
Each one hurry
Find a new abode
Do not come back, do not return"

Every festival day the butchers come from all around
To fearfully burn incense and make offerings
Your mothers must accept that
You are beasts born for slaughter
Why not resign yourselves?

Oh, pigs, dogs, and beasts
There's no need to cry, to accuse, or
Be surprised—on one hand they worship
On the other, they butcher
There's nothing wrong with seeking peace

There's no need to cry, to accuse, or
Be surprised, they butcher
They worship, they fear
The return of your ghosts demanding life pigs, dogs, and beasts
Spirits begone!

Wu continued writing poems about rural Taiwan even as it seemed to be disintegrating around him. During the 1970s, the demographic movement to urban areas continued, where economic prosperity remained the rule as wages shot up; 50 percent of the population was now considered "middle class." Education was also improving, with 37 percent of the population completing secondary school as opposed to only 19 percent in 1968. The demand for new types of entertainment was shaped in large part by television, which nearly every household could afford. People, especially in urban areas, were exposed to many new ideas from abroad.

As the urban standard of living began to improve, people scorned low-paying, back-breaking farm work, opting for easier, better-paying factory jobs and the promise of greater opportunity. And as the government devoted more of its finances and resources to make urban industrial areas the productive center of Taiwan's economy, rural areas seemed to fall through the cracks of social and political concern. In response to this trend, "Grandma's Not a Poet" (1978) stands as a rebuttal:

Grandma is illiterate
She's not a poet
She knows nothing of poetic images
Working hard all her life
All she knows is the silent offering of love

Grandma has rough hands and big feet
She's not a poet
She knows nothing of metaphor
In her simple life
All she has known is simple talk

Grandma is busy and hard-working
She's not a poet
She knows nothing of poetic moods
In her bitter life
All she has known is labor and sweat
Nourishing the fields with every drop
Children, have you carefully read
Each and every one of Grandma's footprints in the soil?
—unpoetic Grandma
She is the real poet

All the stigmas attached to rural life, including illiteracy and hard work, become emblems of virtue in this poem. Wu is not advocating illiteracy, of course, but rather traditional values, substance over appearance. The grandmother possesses a depth of character produced by a long life of toil. She has no time for luxuries. Her life stands as a kind of poetic testament to honesty and truth. Through the poetic equation of truth and beauty, her life takes on the qualities of a poem or work of art. But the poem also can be read as a metaphor for the conflict between nativist and modernist writing. In this reading, modern poetry is mere artifice compared with the plain truths in nativist writing.

The closing years of the 1970s proved momentous for Taiwan as political and literary issues dovetailed. With social and economic well-being came increased demands for political reform and power-sharing. On August 29, 1977, the government held a three-day Symposium of Literary Workers. The meeting, held in Taipei, was called to celebrate the freedom of speech in Taiwan. But as it turned out, the real objective was to attack nativist writing, which the government believed was veering radically toward the left. The symposium was chaired by General Wang Sheng, and conservative writers like Yu Kuang-chung (余光中) were paraded out to scold nativist writers for their liberal attitudes. The symposium gave way to extensive debate over the ensuing months, shattering the political innocence of the nativist writers. As a result, they became more conscious of their socio-political responsibilities and a number of them even ended up entering politics. On the whole, however, nativist writing lost some of its endearing naivete as its aesthetic concerns were increasingly subordinated to ideological purposes.

Wu Sheng, for his part, tried to maintain a balance between message and style. Nevertheless, the didactic tone of his work increased, perhaps a result as much of his work as a schoolteacher as of the political climate. The inroads of progress, and the slowly crumbling resistance to it, tended to inject a defensive tone into his poetry. From 1977 to 1983, Wu wrote a series of twenty-nine poems entitled "Speaking to the Children." The narrator in these poems tends to be an authority figure—a teacher, father, or older brother—addressing his children, his students, or future generations. The poems are principally concerned with the effects of urban commercial culture on the countryside, especially its impact on traditional values and the work ethic. "Love" (1977) gives some indication of the didactic tone found in these poems:

Don't hide your eyes
Behind sunglasses
Kids raised in the country
Like to greet the spreading light of the sun

Don't walk away covering your nose
With a pretty handkerchief
Kids raised in the country
Like the rich smell of compost

Don't cut yourself off from the heat
With an air conditioner
Kids raised in the country
Like the natural cool of a breeze

Don't raise yourself up
With eye-catching shoes
Kids raised in the country
Like the thick soil
Sunlight, compost, breeze, and soil
Although some people dislike them Kids raised in the country
Love them deeply

At the heart of this poem is the marginal relationship of the countryside to urban centers. Each of the stanzas can be broken into two parts contrasting city and country. Sunglasses, handkerchieves, air conditioners, and eye-catching shoes are all consumer goods associated with urban areas, but they are finding their way into rural villages. Accompanying such commodities is an attitude of urban superiority; the scarcity of the latest goods in rural areas implies backwardness. But the speaker turns the new consumerism and its associated values on its head. Compared with the natural boons of sunlight, soil, and refreshing breezes, consumer goods come off looking superficial, lifeless, sterile. Other poems in the series, such as "Father Firmly Believes" and "If," are no less rhetorical and are equally concerned with maintaining a sense of dignity. But there are a number of other poems, less didactic, which depict honest and often tender emotions. "Don't Be Afraid" (1977) is a good example:

When father and mother fight
It's just to let this hard, heavy life
Brew a little sweetness
Children, don't be afraid

Father is dissatisfied with many things in this world
But he doesn't dare show it
It's better to lose his temper with your mother
Father is not a brave man

Father loves many things about the world
But doesn't dare say a word
For fear of being hurt
It is best
To say these things to your mother
Father is a weak man

Children, don't be afraid
Each time your father and mother fight
It's a way of protesting the world's hardships
It's a way of demanding more love

Father and mother are two
Timid people
With such a hard, heavy life
They can only fight
To brew a little sweetness

These poems stand as simple but honest statements of the fears, hopes, and emotions of the people who live and work in the country. In the late 1970s, Wu also wrote a series of poems entitled "Stupidly Honest Letters." These criticize the trend among gifted university students of going abroad to study, mostly to the United States, and the consequent brain drain. The poems all have the tone of letters from home. The speakers are apparently farmers or workers who are trying to understand why their talented friends and relatives have moved overseas and, in some cases, have become citizens of their adopted country. Each of the poems tells a story, and they tend to be long. "The Homecoming" (1978) is ostensibly a letter written to a friend after his recent visit to Taiwan:

Summer and the island is filled with
News of returning scholars
I heard you were among those coming back
Anxious of heart, I put aside my farm work
Went to Taipei to see you
A day doesn't go by that I don't think of you
    My friend
We tended cattle and spaded potatoes together

Through the traffic at dusk
Through countless crowded streets
To your fourth floor room
On Roosevelt Road
Greetings exchanged, there's talk of old times
Then I eagerly ask
If you've come back to stay this time

.....

You say you've been away so many years
You're already a stranger
To many customs here at home
Some things you just can't bear
Besides, you've got foreign resident status now
You hint you'll leave again

The speaker takes the news as a betrayal. The demographic process re-enacts that of an earlier day. First, young people forsook the countryside for the city, and now, the best and the brightest are forsaking the island for a foreign country. Rural life has been pushed further toward the periphery. The entire island stands in a marginal relationship to the global center of the United States. The final stanza is an admonishment of sorts to his friend:

I can never forget
How the land I plant
And the paddy fields of home
Were once desolate rocky ground
Subject to countless disasters
It was our forebears
Who transformed it with sweat and blood
Who passed it on with so much determination
I can never forget
Their noble sentiments
It must be passed on, must continue

Wu Sheng's poem "American Citizenship" (1978) is an even stronger rebuke to those who leave Taiwan. In this poem, the speaker is a farmer who is writing to an older brother who has become an American citizen:

Out here in the sticks
You rarely encounter such genius:
"Come, come, come to Taiwan U
Go, go, go to the USA"
Words passed with envy from mouth to mouth
Giving the hometown high hopes

Then I heard you had become an American citizen
You are very busy
What with house payments
The credit cards
You rarely have time to write home
You must know unspeakable hardship
At home, mom
Is busy as always
For our tuition
Doing never-ending farm work season after season
For you to study abroad and
Leave the family in debt

.....

I heard you became an American citizen
You are very busy
You must have suffered great hardships
I don't know if you miss mom the way she misses you
She is getting older thinking about you
Do you ever think about
The potatoes we ate as kids? They were cheap and tasty
I don't know why
You are so busy in that foreign land
And for whom?

A tone of muted anger and cynicism fills the poem. Much has been sacrificed so that a son might study and bring honor and wealth to the family. But what happens if the son rejects the values and toil that made his new life possible? And what if he also rejects the very ground of his identity—Taiwan? He is unfilial, and also disloyal to his roots. Wu is writing from personal experience. The trend to emigrate from Taiwan in the 1970s had a profound impact on his own family and helps to explain why he focused so much energy on the topic. Wu's own older brother moved to the United States and became an American citizen. His two younger sisters also left the island, one to the United States and the other to Chile. And his wife's siblings also moved abroad.

In September 1980, Wu Sheng accepted an invitation to participate in the International Writer's Program at the University of Iowa. He stayed in Iowa for four months. The product of his visit is another series of eight poems, in the form of letters home to his wife, titled, naturally enough, "Letters from Iowa." Not surprisingly, the speakers in the poems have all realized the dream of going abroad only to find that once they have arrived in the States they want only to go home. His poem "At the Breakfast Table" (1981) is fairly representative of the series:

At the breakfast table I never felt so lonely
Hurriedly I slurp down some instant noodles
Then sit staring into space
Thinking about our dinner table at home
And the wonderful aroma

Your letter said that
The vegetables in the garden
In front of the house are ripe
I think of you each morning
Stooping to pick them
Under the newly risen sun
I can almost smell the freshness

I loosened the soil with a shovel
And carefully planted the seeds
Before I left
They may not be the finest
But they've had a share of my sweat
I'm sure you will prize them

At the breakfast table
I never felt so lonely
Hurriedly I slurp down some instant noodles
The chatter of the children
Around the dinner table
Lingers in my ears

Homesickness, the feeling of being cast adrift, predominates in the Iowa poems. Short as his stay was in America, it seemed to have a profound impact. His way of life and sense of values literally ceased to exist, or existed solely in his memory. Did this experience presage Taiwan's future? Was all he stood for slowly being relegated to memory? After returning from the States, Wu wrote only a few poems to fill out his earlier series and edited three volumes of past work for publication in 1985. Since then he has written no poetry. The same period, however, saw the publication of two collections of essays: Farm Woman (1982) and The Village Store (1985). Both books deal with the same themes treated in his poetry. His poetic silence could be interpreted as a sign that he has at last seen the light and given up his quixotic quest to roll back time.

But might not the hiatus in Wu's poetic work be related to the emergence of what is being hailed as a global postmodern culture? In contemporary Taiwan, a position such as that taken in Wu's poems is generally seen as a nostalgic yearning for an era that will never return. Today, nativism is no longer a form of cultural resistance. This sort of nativist nostalgia now serves different purposes. Television commercials, for example, lift snippets of the past out of their original context for commercial ends: A traditional rural wedding banquet in the courtyard of an old-style country home is re-enacted for the camera; the scene is washed in pastels, except for large plastic bottles of a brand-name tea, highlighted in full color. Trendy Taipei teahouses are decorated with antiques from pre-industrial days; restaurants are done up to recall the Japanese occupation period; and in one extreme case, radical chic is literally projected on the wall of one establishment in the form of a film about the politically tumultuous 1940s by Hou Hsiao-hsien, "A City of Sadness," which serves as the backdrop for customers sipping imported cognac.

The past has become a confused collage of cultural scenarios, a world of signs unmoored. Periphery disappears behind its own media image, gobbled up and sold by an omnivorous commercial culture. Wu's message, which is as valid today as when he began writing, has been appropriated and devalued by commercial use. The finer aspects of Taiwan's rural past-the perceived simplicity of an agricultural society replete with the traditional virtues of hard work and honesty—that Wu writes about and advocates are now being marketed as part of mainstream commercial culture for selling everything from junk food to political candidates. In such a world, it is difficult for nativist writing to retain its significance.

John Balcom, formerly an editor at the Free China Review, holds a Ph.D. in Chinese and comparative literature from Washington University (St. Louis). He currently teaches Chinese and translation in Monterey, California.