A New Phase of hsiang-tu Imagination: Place, Gender, and Memory in Chen Shueh's The Child on the Bridge and Chen Chuen-tien

Taiwan women's hsiang-tu (or homeland) fiction since 2000 presents a new phase of hsiang-tu imagination, which is characterized by a reflection on the complicated relationship between place, gender, and memory, and usually from the vantage point of one who has moved to Taipei and who is familiar with the mechanism of capitalism. This paper deals with Chen Shueh's semi-autobiographical collection of short stories The Child on the Bridge (2004) and novel Chen Chuen-tien (2005). Although these two works do not intend to deal with the grand narrative of Taiwan's history, their portrayals of a family which aspires to social advancement by a series of investments but which ends up in a night market in central Taiwan trying to pull itself out of debt, as well as the female narrator who knows how to manipulate the media, can be seen as a reflection on the highly capitalistic Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper applies Chiu Kuei-fen's views on Taiwan women's hsiang-tu fiction and Arif Dirlik's “place-based imagination” to explore Chen Shueh's hsiang-tu imagination in The Child on the Bridge and Chen Chuen-tien. The two works not only present vivid memories about two places--the night market in Fong-yuan and the village in rural Shen-kang--but portray how a lower-class woman experiences gender and class oppression in the two places and how after she has become an established writer in Taipei she negotiates between the country and the city. Through rememory and critical reconstruction, it then becomes possible for her to identify with her (home)land again. And, she shows that she is both complicit with and resistant to capitalism.