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 He died from lung cancer at an early age of 64 and left behind an unpublished novel On the Equator.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.)