Notes of a Corcodile
Feb, 18/2021 also in: Taiwanese Literature | 20th century
I decided to read this book given my recent move to Taiwan. I wanted to learn more about the country I was going to be part of for a while. If the history of Taiwan was somewhat known to me, this was not true of its literature. Qiu Miaojin 丘妙津 seemed the perfect starting point, and it was recommended to me by a friend who loves Taipei.
Qiu Miaojin 丘妙津 (1969–1995) has been, and still is through her writings, a loud, sincere voice of what is now the LGB movement in Taiwan. While Taiwan and Taipei are now very welcoming and inclusive of the LGB community, when Qiu Miaojin was growing up and trying to find her place in the society that surrounded her, her country was not as warm towards people who did not conform to the logic of a heteronormative society.
This is what Notes of a Crocodile is about. It follows the life of the protagonist, nicknamed Lazi 拉子 (non-derogatory term for lesbian in Taiwan. The equivalent term 拉拉 used in Mainland China comes from this term), during her college years. Multiple people enter the scene through the eyes of Lazi, and they all share a sense of discomfort and uneasiness about their relationships. Love, or rather the struggles with understanding how to love without hurting oneself and others, is a red thread in this book. All the characters are entangled in situations that would hardly be defined healthy relationships; but at the core, this comes from the difficulty in feeling safe about who they are.
The crocodile in the title appears in a sort of parallel story, in which the animal tries to be human but is not seen as such. This is the metaphor chosen by the author, who tries to be herself in all her young, raw, lesbian nature, but is not seen as such both by the people who surround her and by herself. In several passages, Lazi voices her reflections about herself (in the form of notes, dialogues, or letters addressed to her lovers), and her inability to self-soothing emerges strongly. It comes to no surprise then to know that Qiu Miaojin killed herself when she was just 26, after years of struggles with her own identity.
"Tun Tun, I have been lost all these years. How come it never gets better for me? No matter how hard I try to improve my life, everything falls apart. There's a saying: 'By the time a man celebrates his creation, it has already half turned to dust.' I always end up back at square one. This is a hateful, dog-eat-dog world."
This is perhaps what I liked most about the book: the clear sense of struggle, sadness, and discomfort that emerges from all its characters. They behave in ways that could be easily deemed reproachable. For example, they hurt others as a way to express their own hurt. Yet, Lazi and her friends are just frail creatures who need support. And they do not have it. Even Meng Sheng, the most ruthless among them, uses aggression as a way to compensate for his insecurities.
"On HOW to love well: instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard."
At the same time, it is not a fully transparent book. While the writing is smooth, many aspects, jokes, and satirical moments are lost without a clear knowledge of the historical moment lived by the author. The lifting of the martial law in 1987, for example, is a critical moment that marked the beginning of change for LGB people, and it therefore significant for understanding the struggle depicted in this book, which is by no coincidence set in Taipei in the 1980s. Some background of the language would help too: at one point the protagonist refuses the nickname Lazi assigned to her, and tries to change it do Ladu: once you add the "zi" at the end as a way to personify the name, you get Laduzi, which is homophone with "diarrhea, 拉肚子".
Still, it remains a book that intrigues the reader, invites to learn more about Taiwan and its history, as it happened in my case. Not to mention that the memory of Qiu Miaojin is still very present in the country. Its translation into English arrived pretty late (2017, when the book was published in 1994), but it finally meant access to this world for a non-Chinese speaking audience.
Qiu Miaojin 丘妙津 (1969–1995) has been, and still is through her writings, a loud, sincere voice of what is now the LGB movement in Taiwan. While Taiwan and Taipei are now very welcoming and inclusive of the LGB community, when Qiu Miaojin was growing up and trying to find her place in the society that surrounded her, her country was not as warm towards people who did not conform to the logic of a heteronormative society.
This is what Notes of a Crocodile is about. It follows the life of the protagonist, nicknamed Lazi 拉子 (non-derogatory term for lesbian in Taiwan. The equivalent term 拉拉 used in Mainland China comes from this term), during her college years. Multiple people enter the scene through the eyes of Lazi, and they all share a sense of discomfort and uneasiness about their relationships. Love, or rather the struggles with understanding how to love without hurting oneself and others, is a red thread in this book. All the characters are entangled in situations that would hardly be defined healthy relationships; but at the core, this comes from the difficulty in feeling safe about who they are.
The crocodile in the title appears in a sort of parallel story, in which the animal tries to be human but is not seen as such. This is the metaphor chosen by the author, who tries to be herself in all her young, raw, lesbian nature, but is not seen as such both by the people who surround her and by herself. In several passages, Lazi voices her reflections about herself (in the form of notes, dialogues, or letters addressed to her lovers), and her inability to self-soothing emerges strongly. It comes to no surprise then to know that Qiu Miaojin killed herself when she was just 26, after years of struggles with her own identity.
"Tun Tun, I have been lost all these years. How come it never gets better for me? No matter how hard I try to improve my life, everything falls apart. There's a saying: 'By the time a man celebrates his creation, it has already half turned to dust.' I always end up back at square one. This is a hateful, dog-eat-dog world."
This is perhaps what I liked most about the book: the clear sense of struggle, sadness, and discomfort that emerges from all its characters. They behave in ways that could be easily deemed reproachable. For example, they hurt others as a way to express their own hurt. Yet, Lazi and her friends are just frail creatures who need support. And they do not have it. Even Meng Sheng, the most ruthless among them, uses aggression as a way to compensate for his insecurities.
"On HOW to love well: instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard."
At the same time, it is not a fully transparent book. While the writing is smooth, many aspects, jokes, and satirical moments are lost without a clear knowledge of the historical moment lived by the author. The lifting of the martial law in 1987, for example, is a critical moment that marked the beginning of change for LGB people, and it therefore significant for understanding the struggle depicted in this book, which is by no coincidence set in Taipei in the 1980s. Some background of the language would help too: at one point the protagonist refuses the nickname Lazi assigned to her, and tries to change it do Ladu: once you add the "zi" at the end as a way to personify the name, you get Laduzi, which is homophone with "diarrhea, 拉肚子".
Still, it remains a book that intrigues the reader, invites to learn more about Taiwan and its history, as it happened in my case. Not to mention that the memory of Qiu Miaojin is still very present in the country. Its translation into English arrived pretty late (2017, when the book was published in 1994), but it finally meant access to this world for a non-Chinese speaking audience.