Bamboo Shoots After the Rain
Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A short story collection hailed as a “welcome and valuable addition to our growing knowledge about the inner lives and literary talents of Chinese women” (Amy Ling, author of Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry).
This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of fourteen writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, and political perspectives.
It is filled with unexpected gems such as Lin Hai-yin’s story of a woman suffering under the feudal system of Old China, and Chiang Hsiao-yun’s optimistic solutions to problems of the elderly in rapidly changing 1980s Taiwan. And in between, a dozen rich stories of aristocrats, comrades, wives, concubines, children, mothers, sexuality, female initiation, rape, and the tensions between traditional and modern life.
“This is not western feminism with an Asian accent”, says Bloomsbury Review, “but a description of one culture’s reality. . . . The woman protagonists survive both despite and because of their existence in a changing Taiwan.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These tales travel through emotional time, from the nearly feudal values of the 1920s and '30s to the alienated, questing attitudes of contemporary Taiwan. Several stories explore the pain of women under the old system: in ``Candle,'' a forlorn wife retreats into illness when her husband brings home a beautiful concubine; a woman is raped in the story ``In Liu Village,'' and her husband must wrestle with the traditional response of discarding her and his own feelings of love. The paranoia of the Maoist years is elegantly captured in ``Chairman Mao Is a Rotten Egg,'' in which a young child's playful taunt leads his parents into a nightmare. Moving to the present day, tragedy results when a naive teenage girl tries to convince a boy that she is sexually sophisticated in ``The Aftermath of the Death of a Junior High Coed.'' Unfortunately, the didactic summaries that precede each story detract from their impact. With its vibrant, tumultuous energy and its evocation of the contending lifestyles of a society in transition, this collection is best left to speak for itself. Carver is professor of English at the University of North Carolina, and Chang is assistant professor of Oriental languages and literature at the University of Texas.
