Native Soil of Postmemory and Affective Archives in Wu Ming-Yi's The Stolen Bicycle

Abstract:This article focuses on Wu Ming-Yi's 2015 novel, The Stolen Bicycle, and examines the way individuals' storytelling is interwoven with scientific and historical facts to construct cultural memory and reinscribe the meaning of native soil. The novel unfolds with the narrator's search for vintage bicycles, which are at once commodities, war vehicles, objects of expertise and connoisseurship, and most important, fetishes that allow characters to articulate strained, alienated, colonial, and communal relationships. The bicycle as a legacy of coloniality and a memento of affection connects human and nature, embodying the symbiotic relationship among the people, animals, objects, and natural environment of Taiwan. In this sense, historical trauma is articulated in each character's memory about the generation before in relation to the bicycle. In scrutinizing the way the war generation's trauma is received by the generation after in the form of family tales, journals, recordings, strained parent-child relationships, invested sentiments in family bicycles, and even supernatural experiences, the article discusses the way the historical past is invoked as "affective archives." As the bicycle serves as an index of the past, "native soil" is delineated in The Stolen Bicycle as shared, adopted, and recast intergenerational and interspecies memories.