The beauty and sorrow of Taipei

Author: Pei Zaimei / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: The Beauty and Sorrow of Taipei – winner of the Time Weekly Literature Short Story First Prize The Child Jesus Loves, and recipient of the Time Weekly Literature Million Novel Best Popularity Award Doubt and Temptation. This is another milestone in the works of author Pei Zaimei. It is a novel about exploitation and suppression in both sexuality and politics. Through two intersecting and overlapping real-life stories spanning fifteen or sixteen years, it refracts and overlays an image of urban life that is rough, anxious, and tense, both in its external appearance and inner reality. This is also a novel about a woman's pursuit and recognition of self-worth. Through the journey of a woman's body and desire, it echoes the truths of marginalization, justice, humanity, and morality. Trapped in an inescapable urban confinement, she endures the suffering of plunder, attack, injury, and despair, as well as the simple beauty and sorrow of life. The author uses the situation of a woman to shadow the vast and complex, enigmatic politics, and then, following the explosion of 319, which ignited high political and ethnic opposition, anxiety, and confusion, returns to an extreme individualism. This is both a sharp and fiery novel like a psalm, and a work reflecting on Taiwan's reality, fate, and the struggles of its people. This book is the first selected collection of Pei Zaimei's works to be published in mainland China. The author has won the Time Weekly Literature Short Story First Prize and the Time Weekly Literature Million Novel Best Popularity Award. It includes her award-winning works and new short and medium-length masterpieces. With a delicate and incisive pen, the author portrays characters struggling between desire and guilt, reality and memory. Her depiction of Taiwan's urbanization process since the 1960s and 1970s is particularly outstanding. New works span Taipei, mainland China, and the United States, men and women, hope and despair, the exhausting life of the day and the indulgent dreams of the night, with the melody and rhythm of a symphony, cinematic visuals and language, and elegant, transparent prose, reinterpreting the interplay, tension, and conflict between hope and reality, illusion and truth.
Our next-door neighbors were wealthy. Their walls were covered with pink roses fluttering in the wind, behind which a bamboo fence was thickly covered with morning glories, blooming with star-like purple trumpet flowers. Tall pomelos, guavas, lychees, and mangoes grew in the yard. In spring and summer, the branches were filled with fragrant, promising bountiful fruit. The garden was planted with osmanthus, gardenia, azaleas, peonies, daylilies, gladioli, hibiscus, and cannas, and their lush beauty often peeked through the gaps in the bamboo fence. In the morning mist, by the shallow bank of the small river, wild ginger lilies bloomed, their white spikes emerging from clusters of lush green leaves, releasing a sweet fragrance into the mist. My mother would always send me to pick some, risking falling into the river, to soak them in water.
The neighbors were surnamed Ye. Just one fence separated us. A tall hibiscus in their back garden leaned over the fence, its tender blossoms leaning into our yard. If it weren’t for the unpleasant incident when my father, under the guise of repairing the fence, encroached on a strip of land belonging to the Ye family, I could still have moved around their front and back halls like a monkey, climbing trees to eat the ripest fruits. Now, even my mother rarely visited the Ye family’s Yang Aunty, let alone going over there. Ye Lao was a government official in the party and the head of our hometown association. According to Yang Aunty, when my father first came to Taiwan with no connections, it was Ye Lao who helped him build a (shelter) in the Ye family’s adjacent land, which has since expanded into three rooms. He even enclosed the path in front of the house, turning it into a courtyard. However, according to my father, he bought the land from the Ye family for several silver dollars. But I remember he repeatedly claimed he came to Taiwan with nothing. Regardless, the Ye family felt my father was greedy, and later built a brick wall, clearly intending to have nothing to do with us. Before the wall was built, one Sunday afternoon, why do I remember it was a Sunday? Because every weekend, Ye Ma would take her children to bustling places like Ximen and Dongmen to watch movies, shop, or dine, enjoying all the luxuries of the wealthy that our family could never afford. So, when I saw Ye Lao’s shiny green three-wheeled cart, painted with white “Private Use” characters, roll out of the garage that day, I knew it was their weekend outing.
In the afternoon, my two older brothers were usually cooped up in their small room studying. The only difference was that this day, my father didn’t go to Gulingshan to discuss business—he deliberately took time off to discipline his sons. My father was extremely strict with their studies. If they slacked off, dozed off, or didn’t achieve the grades he expected, he would mercilessly whip them until they were admitted to national universities, only then stopping this long period of corporal punishment. My father sat on the edge of the bed with a grim face, wearing a ragged old tank top, facing the backs of my poor brothers. On the side table, there was the intimidating thin bamboo cane, a cup of strong tea, and a stack of old newspapers. From this scene, I knew their monthly exam results must not have been good, which meant I could no longer dream of pestering my brothers. They wouldn’t be able to leave the table until after midnight. I crouched low and slipped past the window, just to see my mother sweeping the chicken coop. Fortunately, the dust and chicken feathers made her squint, so I darted into the alley behind the house, grabbed a loose bamboo fence pole, and squeezed into the Ye family’s yard. At this time, Ye Lao wasn’t home (he was almost always out late at night) or taking a nap at noon. Since I didn’t hear his loud snoring, he must have been out. Yang Aunty had gone home early with a small bag, not returning until late at night.
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