English Translation of Membranes and Other Works Prefatory Material
Preface to the New Edition
This new edition of Membranes collects a number of my previous works:
Membranes, first published by United Daily News in 1996; Fetish Stories, first published in 1998 by China Times Publishing Company; the never-before collected very short story Breakfast, written in 1999; and the never-before collected novella L’
Annèe dernière à Marienbad: In Imitation of a Webpage Novel, written in 1997. Thus there is almost double the amount of content in this new edition of Membranes than in the original edition.
All of these works were written before I went to study in the US in 1999.
Fast-forward to 2011, and “android,” “clone,” and “replicant,” are almost ubiquitous concepts: movies, video games, and mobile phones all feature android models. In the academic world, “posthumanism” has been in fashion for more than a decade now. But in the 1990s when I was in my early twenties, “android” was still a fresh concept. Back then my e-mail address was [email protected]. In 1999, after I flew to UCLA in California to read for my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, I used the e-mail address [email protected].
Life finds its way; “the Other” also finds a way to enter our lives. Almost everyone is an android, bearing man-made parts either inside or outside their bodies: stents for internal organs, prosthetic limbs, contact lenses, protective talismans obtained at temples, tattoos on the back, and the smartphones that never leave our hands, to name but a few. Without these man-made parts, our bodies would cease to function.
Then there are the countless “friends” from Facebook (or Twitter, MSN, etc.) who accompany us to work and school: they are also parts of our android nature, since people believe that through Facebook they can extend the reach of their lives, even as Facebook extends its reach through them. Facebook is an external organ of the human body, even as each member of Facebook is a part of its inner workings. In the works collected here, I wrote of “virtual kinship”—in the web of our android-like lives, even kinship can be virtual (this is already an established fact, even though we are never willing to admit it outright). Blood may be thicker than water, but information is thicker still than blood.
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This new edition of Membranes, in collecting several short stories, is also like an android body and is composed of several different parts. The most important of these parts are the internal and external references and allusions in the text, most of which come from foreign films, literature, theory, painting, and music. Without these
imported foreign parts, the stories would cease to function. This tendency to rely on foreign imports is a relic of “history” (of the Taiwan of the time in which the works were written, and of my own age during that time). “Colonialism,” “internationality,”
“modernity,” and “postmodernity,” long ago became the parts of which Taiwan and my generation were composed. Because of “historical” forces during the years in which these works were written, I studied in the Foreign Languages and Literature
Department in college and graduate school in Taiwan, then later went to study in the US “as a matter of course,” and after spending six years in the Western part of America subsequently spent another five in the Eastern part of the country. But
“history” had already moved on by then.
As soon as a photo is taken, its subject dies; as soon as a sci-fi novel is written, the fantastic parts of it go out of date. As modern readers read these old stories, they may feel that they are hard to understand because the technology of the era has disappeared. Some examples: the characters in the stories use BBS to receive e-mails, but today’s readers may not use BBS or even need to use e-mail to communicate internationally; the characters in the stories need a phone line to connect to the Internet and can’t use their phones for as long as they are online, but for today’s readers a wireless Internet connection is par for the course; the stories make no mention of mobile phones because at the time I wrote the stories mobile phones had not yet become widely available, but today’s smartphones are so versatile that at times they can even replace computers. I myself had only a pager and no mobile phone until 1999. I brought my pager with me when I went to the US, and stared at its red light going out on the flight over, as though it represented the life force of an android slowly fading away, as if it were the end of an era.
But I still look at old photos and read old stories. Even if the subjects of old photos are no longer with us and the frames of the old novels have grown rusty, I still rummage among the ruins of my thoughts and words for the shattered radiance that has continued to shine during the more than ten years from the time the stories were first published until today. As I looked over my old drafts at school in preparation for republishing them, I reread most of the works collected here for the first time in more than ten years—it was like walking in a daze to the old address of an abandoned hotel, or finally reacquainting myself with and looking again, for the first time in more than ten years, at the old photographs of myself.
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I was reminded of one of my motivations for writing Membranes in the first place.
Before I went to the US I frequently rode a motorcycle. Once, when I took it in for repairs, I noticed a dismantled motorcycle split neatly into two halves lying on the floor of the shop, and I immediately thought of the cut strips of beef and pork hung out for sale in the meat markets. My thoughts then abruptly shifted to thinking about cutting open the human body. The motorcycle that I had sent in for repairs was just like an android.
After going to the US, I became one with my car. When I was in Los Angeles, my favorite pastime was driving fast on the freeway in the middle of the night. Seeing the doors to Universal Studios on the Hollywood Freeway was like seeing the doors of my own home, since the room I rented was nearby. When I moved from the Western part of the US to the Eastern part of the country, I drove all the way from Los Angeles to New York, then turned and drove up to New England. When I had to send my car in for repairs, I felt again and again how closely I had bonded with the machine. Later, I started having to send the dogs I had raised to the vet, one after another. Dogs grow old, too. As the dogs’ bodies lay on the stainless steel examination platform, the circumstances felt all too familiar to me. People are like machines and machines are like people, but pets are like both. After I had come back and resettled in Taiwan, I went to the hospital to visit a sick friend. This man, after having endured numerous invasive medical checks, pretended to sit peacefully on his bed. At the head of his bed lay the thick, heavy foreign novel I had sent him, while our forthright friend did his best to put on a brave face, laugh, and encourage us all to eat imported cherries, since it was after all the Night of the Sevens.1 Android-like lives can be seen everywhere, flashing into view one moment and vanishing the next.
The life lesson hidden in these old stories is: “How to return home after a life spent wandering.” What I mean by “home” is not just the home of our parents or the home we build with our partners, and isn’t even necessarily restricted to the island of Taiwan. “Home” is a space where people can rest easy for a moment or contentedly settle themselves for a lifetime. Even if it’s just another person’s palms, shoulders, or scent, so long as they can enwrap another person and make him or her feel at ease, then they, too, are home. An American saying holds that “home is where the heart is.”
During the first six years I spent living in the US, I often went to the beaches of
California to look at the sea, but at the time I never thought of gazing toward my home country across the Pacific Ocean; during the next five years, I saw the sea from the Eastern part of the US. In Connecticut, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, New York City, Boston,
1 So called because it is the seventh day of the seventh month on the Chinese lunar calendar; it is roughly equivalent to Valentine’s Day in the West.
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Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Highway 95. Only as I faced the Atlantic Ocean with my back to East Asia did I begin to see Taiwan. I wonder if what I saw was a mirage. But if it was, why did it appear so vivid to me? My thanks to all of my elders in the academic and literary world who called me back to Taiwan, to my forthright friends, and to everyone I love.
Chi Ta-Wei, National Cheng Chi University Institute of Taiwan Literature, December 2011
87 Preface: A HIGH Place for Writing
In my acceptance speech for the award for Membranes, I wrote: “Thank you to the judges and to United Daily Publishing for giving me the strength to keep up the HIGH which enabled me to write. “HIGH” is a slang term originally denoting the rush of happiness brought on by drugs rather than “high level” or “surpassing.” For me, the act of writing simultaneously brings both great joy and great suffering, hard as an itch to resist, and always plunges me deep into an abyss: this is when writing becomes a high, or a HIGH place.
I have no wish to lock myself and my writings in my study, since this is only a way or torturing or comforting myself—what I hope is that my works can climb out of the study and jolt into a high the ostensibly open and tolerant but actually very
conservative social order and thereby bring it to a HIGH place. Only such a
stimulating challenge could give me the motivation to rashly continue writing and turn my flesh, blood, heart, and mind into a shaved katsuboshi fish into which I dug in and tore out my work page by page with my teeth. If the world outside my study were calm and clear, my writing would probably dry up. I am twenty-three this year, and perhaps the itch was too great; for in addition to working myself to the bone to finish Queer Senses, I also churned out a novel of around 100,000 characters. Membranes is the work born of these labors begun in the beginning of autumn in 1994 and finished at the end of summer in 1995.
The novel for which I won this award, Membranes, is a science fiction novel about the virtual sexual desires of lesbians. In Taiwan’s literary sphere, science fiction is neither considered good writing nor does it draw a large audience, but I believe the genre has spaces worth cultivating and is especially suitable for exploring issues of sexuality (European and American feminist science fiction is a shining example of this fact). So I plucked up my courage and set my pen to paper. The content of the novel centers on the interactions between women (there are no human male
characters)—this was a challenge I set for myself and also an homage to feminist literature. It was also a dangerously presumptive gesture, but I believed that the danger lay more in the necessity of the act of writing—since writing that is safe and takes no risks has no reason to exist. I began to take this risk on Children’s Day (April 4) in 1994, and finished the weighty computer-typed draft in time to send it out in the middle of May. For a month during that time, between my work on the novel and my heavy course load in graduate school, I was incredibly hard on myself. During the writing process, my companions were the movies of Almodovar and Atom Egoyan, Ito Junji’s horror manga (the character Tomie in the novel is an homage to Mr. Junji), the Internet, the music of Nino Rota, Vangelis and Ute Lemper, tongzhi theory, and the
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endless dog hair and incessant dog barking that I could never stop. It was a miracle that I didn’t get sick after turning in the draft; and at the end of May I re-energized my spirits and busied myself with amusements and preparing for the GLAD….
The other works in this book were written at various times both before and after Membranes and are both a warm-up and a cool-down for the main work (since that worrisome itch demands to be scratched). These short stories appear at first glance to be quite different from Membranes, but they are all animated by common feelings and scope of thought. Of these, I feel that the stories published in the China Times under the title of 11 Songs for Percussion are especially unique; although each of these pieces is no more than 500 characters long, the cold process of drumming them out on the computer made it quite difficult for me to sleep at night. As I wrote those stories, the roof covering my apartment was powerless to keep out the winter chill, and I could only wrap myself up and pour all the warmth left in my body onto the keyboard, but I had absolutely no idea where my readers might be….In short, to be able to see these mini stories that almost never saw the light of day collected here helps relieve at last some of the sense of being lost I felt then.
Membranes and Queer Sexualities were anthologized not far apart from each other; and I do not deny that Membranes is a continuation of Queer Sexualities. This kind of continuation is proof that I maintained the sincere perseverance of my queer writing—but doesn’t this imply that I ought to take a change of pace and use some different method to keep up my HIGH, lest I continually trod over the same ground?
With a little distance between the worries and the youth of my twenty-third year, I hope that I can leave the chalk circle of Queer Sexualities and Membranes, wash my face, and continue to explore the endless possibilities of sexuality, politics, and literature.
Thanks to my friends at United Daily Publishing and the United Daily Literary Supplement for all of their help in getting these crazy, boyish works of mine published.
I spent a lonely part of my boyhood working at the company, and I never imagined that I would later have the chance to be published by it. My grateful memories and feelings are thus so complex that I may need to write another science fiction novel just to explain them clearly. Finally, thanks to MO for keeping me company and
lending me his shoulder to lean on. Its sweet warmth and almost ephemeral character gave me the courage I needed to face the cold depths of every new day.
Written at Yung-Ho in Taipei during the 1995 Golden Horse International Film Exhibition
Award Acceptance Speech: Keep Up the HIGH
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Thank you to the judges and to the United Daily Literary Supplement for so boldly affirming this young man’s work and allowing this queer to keep up the HIGH.
Membranes is a novel of sexual politics, a queer science fiction novel, a work done from a false female perspective: since the writing is not true to life, it is both unnatural and immoral. But whose “morality” do those works which we are now forced to recognize as “natural” follow? When it comes to the matter of “the closet,” my works can’t help but raise both their voice and their anger.
Just like Momo in the story, I send and receive e-mails. Readers from both within and outside of the closet who are interested in developing the novel’s fantasy world with me can write to this address: [email protected]. Queer games have no ending, and the rainbow can stretch on forever.
I have only provided a skeleton in the novel, but MO provides both its soul and its flesh (I would even go so far as to say that the title of the novel comes from the name
“MO”). I dedicate this work, therefore, to MO.
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Judges’ Comments: Cruelly Stabbed in the Heart by the Author (Wu Nianzhen)
Although the real world is already facing extinction from pillaging, wars, and pollution, yet in another, man-made world, she employs her unique professional skills to create or recreate youth and beauty; or, we might say, hope and self-confidence.
She conceals herself from beginning to end in an almost impenetrable world, and her only contact with the real world is through “reading”—reading the limited,
disparate information taken from the skin of her clients, analyzed by computer, and transmitted to her.
Reaching this point in the novel, you get the impression that the author is watching you as he coldly smiles—yes, watching you, dear intellectuals.
From here, the author never stops cutting away, spreading out the truth before your eyes and telling you that your body, your memories, and even the things you say to others, no matter whether you yourself believe that they are well-meant creations or recreations, none of them are yours; all of it is transplanted, copied, or even a virtual reality that can be added to or deleted from at any time. The real meaning of all this is that you are very likely one of the people who help the real world along its path to destruction.
By using a science fiction setting, the author manages to imperceptibly sneak past our feelings of happiness in reading to stab us cruelly in the heart, a reading experience all too rare in recent years. I believe that this is the main reason why Membranes deserves to win this award and be read by more people.
Of course, the author’s insistence on maintaining the structure proper to a novella in preference to the popular MTV-style narratives employed by the other works presented to our panel makes his work even more endearing.
After our deliberations for the awards were over and learning that the first prize winner was both a Taiwanese and a young creative writer, I felt very happy; thinking about it now, I feel I will not escape censure for indulging in feelings of national pride.