On the Equator -- Wu's novel 赤道上 讀後 (英文)

Wu was my husband's buddy from high school and a highly achieved scientist and engineer with broad interests in arts, history and literature. He died from lung cancer at an early age of 64 and left behind an unpublished novel On the Equator. It is a heart-breaking love story between a Taiwanese comfort woman and a Taiwanese military doctor in the Japanese army during the Second World Warand a legacy of Wu's creative talent and humanitarian sentiments.

Yenlin Ku 顧燕翎

            In my mind, 嘉林's work possesses many elements that have the potential of developing into a full-fledged novel or even a masterpiece. As mentioned previously, it has a well-built, balanced structure. Literary symbols have been put to good use. The many ironies and paradoxes in the story make the plot intriguing to the point of being bewildering. It is exactly the bewilderment, the puzzling nature of life that captivates the reader and provokes her/him to think.

       In the writer's scheme, I believe, Mei Chun has to die in the end. For many reasons, Mei and Chen's love was strictly prohibited despite their mutual attraction. It only became possible when, for a short period of time, all the ruling forces were pulled out and Chen became the temporary ruler of the emptied military camp. Mei put on a pretty dress and loved Chen as an equal.  That chapter is named "Paradise" not without reason.

       Ironically, their love is doomed from the very beginning because it will find no blessing outside the temporary and, in fact, illusionary paradise. Returning to Chen's home together would perhaps be the beginning of more tragedies for Mei. Building a life in defeated Japan with the crippled schizophrenic captain would be equally humiliating for Mei as an ex-comfort woman. To survive in either place would mean surrendering her dignity.

       A brave and smart young woman sold into slavery by her close relative, Mei first tried to protect her dignity by going on a hunger strike when the nursing job she expected turned out to be prostituting. Then refusing to return to prostitution after she had a chance to work as the doctor's assistant, she threatened to kill herself with a knife. In a worn military uniform, she worked harder than any man in the effort of saving lives and won herself respect.  Mei survived hell but was cheated by the illusions of paradise.

       Desperate love for a undeserving man has taken the lives of many literary heroines: Madame Bovary, Anna Karonina and Madame Butterfly, to name the best-known few. Chen, the well-educated gynecologist, set his mind on returning home to resume his business and family life, which included an imagined son. Absent-minded, he failed to notice Mei's symptoms of pregnancy and rudely brushed away her appeal for not leaving the island (abandoning the paradise). In contrast, Chen's assistant, the aboriginal fisherman, less-educated but enjoying more freedom in life, was much more caring and sensitive. He discovered Mei's embarrassing pregnancy and felt for her. Furthermore, he made the choice of staying on the island to build a family with a local woman who happened to be pregnant at the same time.

       Mei did not want to die. But she had no "lakes and rivers" to return to when the paradise was lost.

       Fate did not offer Mei many choices (in the setting of the mid-20th century), did it?

       (And that is why we needed a feminist revolution. For your information, this last statement is made over the objection of Pei-yuan, my husband. And it proves that the movement still has a long way to go.)