Chang Kuei-hsing as Sinophone Sarawakian Writer

Abstract

AbstractThis paper seeks to establish Chang Kuei-hsing as a Sarawakian writer, or better still, a Sarawakian Taiwanese writer, rather than a Malaysian writer. Chang was born and raised in Sarawak before it was incorporated into Malaysia in 1963, and he left to become a Taiwanese citizen in the 1980s. All of his major novels are set in Sarawak, and several of them express a distinctively self-critical perspective that implicates Chinese settlers and their descendants in their exploitation of the Borneo Rainforest and the dispossession of indigenous Dayak peoples. A Sinophone ethic emerges from these moments of self-critique that does not shy away from confronting history in its place-based specificity and, within this specificity, the historical actors’ complicity within it. Notes1 Chen Yuxin, “The Hidden Ambush of Words in Chang Kui-hsing’s Novels,” Chang Kuei-hsing’s Wild Boars Crossing the River, ed. Hong Kong Baptist University Faculty of Arts (Hong Kong: Huizhi chuban, 2022), 95. All translations from the Sinitic texts in this essay are my own.2 Gao Jiaqian, Woo Kamloon, and Chang Kuei-hsing, “Beasts and the Grand History of Borneo: Questions and Answers about Chang Kui-hsing’s Fictional World,” in Chang Kuei-hsing’s Wild Boars, 22–29.3 Bai Yixuan, “The Old Literary Youth Who Focuses on Writing Good Novels: An Interview with the author of Wild Boars Crossing the River, Chang Kuei-hsing,” in Chang Kuei-hsing’s Wild Boars, 13–21.4 Chang Kuei-hsing, Elephant Herd (Qunxiang群象) (Taipei: Shibao chubanshe, 1998), 41.5 Ibid., 215.6 Chang Kuei-hsing, Monkey Cup (Houbei 猴杯) (Taipei: Linking Books, 2000), 35.7 Both quotations are from Chang, Monkey Cup, 179.8 It is interesting to note the parallel that these three types of businesses were the “three voices” of San Francisco Chinatown as seen by outsiders at the turn of the nineteenth century, which Marlon Hom notes as typical of frontier towns in general. See Marlon Hom, “An Introduction to Cantonese Vernacular Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown,” in Songs of Gold Mountain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 3–70.9 Chang, Monkey Cup, 181. Note how the natives are placed on the same list with snakes and beasts, as is typical of settler colonial mentality.10 “Sex safaris” and “sex peditions” originally in English, Chang, Monkey Cup, 244.11 Édouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 105.12 Chang, Monkey Cup, 262.13 Chang Kui-hsing’s Wild Boars, 25.14 Ibid., 75.Additional informationNotes on contributorsShu-mei ShihShu-mei Shih is the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair of Humanities, with a joint appointment in the departments of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was the president of the American Comparative Literature Association (2021–2022) and holds an honorary chair professorship at National Taiwan Normal University, from which she received her bachelor’s in English and where our Newman laureate Chang Kuei-hsing was her upperclassman. She has been a big fan of Chang Kuei-hsing’s writing since her college years.Among other works, her 2007 book, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press) has been attributed as having inaugurated a new field of study called Sinophone Studies. The book has been translated into Mandarin Chinese and Korean. She works at the intersection of area studies, ethnic studies, and comparative literature, and has published a total of three monographs and seven edited books on topics ranging from transnationalism, critical theory, comparative racialization, indigenous knowledge, Taiwan studies, and Sinophone studies. Her forthcoming titles include two volumes in Taiwan: Theorizing across Borders (跨界理論 monograph), Theory Taiwan (理論台灣 edited volume), and two volumes in the United States: Sinophone Divergences (monograph) and Sinophone Studies across Disciplines (edited volume).