"Orphan of Asia" -by Wu Zhuoliu

Wu Zhouliu (1900-1976), one of the most renowned Taiwanese writer was born of Hakka parents, worked as a journalist and started his literary career writing in Japanese. He is the author of short stories and novels, among them The Fig and Formosan Weeping Forsythia.

He wrote his autobiographical novel Orphan of Asia in secret between 1943 and 1945. It was first published in Tokyo in 1946. It was then translated into Chinese in 1962 and into English in 2005.

The story recounts the conflicting emotions of its hero, Hu Tai-ming, as he travels between Taiwan, Japan and China.

Born in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, raised in the scholarly traditions of ancient China by his grandfather but forced into the Japanese educational system, Hu Taiming ultimately finds himself estranged from all three cultures.

Japanese rule in Taiwan had made him look to Japan as the center of modernity and progress, but when he arrives there he is all too conscious of not being a "real" Japanese. Indeed, a fellow Taiwanese recommends that he pretends to come from the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, rather than admit to being from Taiwan.

In China, he has to lie about his origin as well, and is later arrested on suspicion of being a Japanese spy. At any event, he is not a "pure" Chinese either, so he is kept in prison. And, in a novel replete with irony, he then escapes on a boat to Shanghai only after asserting that he is in reality a Japanese national.

It is hardly surprising that this book was banned in Taiwan by KMT. For them, Taipei was the interim capital of the whole of China. Manifestations of a specifically Taiwanese identity were prohibited, and only mainstream Chinese literature could be disseminated. Small wonder, then, that a book that presented an archetypal Taiwanese as so confused that he didn't know who on earth he really was found itself banned as well.

The truth, of course, was that overnight the inhabitants of Taiwan had been asked to change from being model, though never fully equal, citizens of the Japanese empire to being unquestioning citizens of a greater China.

Orphan of Asia is obsessively concerned with geographical movement, and as a result with feelings of displacement, dislocation, alienation and, finally, despair. China and Japan, he points out, were both real and imagined places, and the book's protagonist finds it impossible to locate himself in either of them.

(partly from Taipei Times)