Wild Kids

Two Novels About Growing Up

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by Chang Ta-chun,

Translated by Michael Berry

Columbia University Press

Due/Published September 2000, 280 pages, cloth

ISBN 0231120966

These two funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan´s most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun´s intricate narrative and ironic sense of humor convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth.

Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator´s younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the breakdown of a family.

In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an odd assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. Chang´s teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.

"On the surface, this fully engaging novel written by Chang Ta-chun, one of the most critically acclaimed and popularly successful writers in Taiwan today, is a fantastic adventure story featuring a middle-class teenage boy of divorced parents in Taipei´s underground criminal circle. The narrative delights with its many twists and turns at the textual level, consisting of ingeniously crafted plot and disarmingly pungent and witty commentaries. While the universal Îrite of passage´ theme of the adolescent quest for the wisdom of life is rendered with Chang´s hallmark postmodern cynicism, the author has simultaneously registered his deep sense of disillusionment with the degenerating social and political life in post­martial law Taiwan."--Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, coeditor of Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan

"Chang Ta-chun is Taiwan´s most talented, unruly, and ultimately playful writer. Like the mischievous Monkey (who makes a mockery of Heaven) in the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, Chang has repeatedly created quite a ruckus on the contemporary literary scene. He has always been able to tap into a dynamic youthful energy while, at the same time, possessing the rare ability to offer insight into the nature of what it means to be alive. Combine these two qualities and you have Wild Kids, an addictive little literary treasure."--Mo Yan, author of The Republic of Wine and Red Sorghum

Review

Novelists will probably always return to stories of teenage rebellion and angst. After all, we’ve all experienced it and infuse it with a sense of nostalgia, triumph, or melodrama. It also gives the writer the opportunity to exercise his writing chops by delving into the mindset and speech of a teenager (Catcher in the Rye, etc.) The writer can also step back a bit and look at the teenage years from the perspective of an older and wiser narrator and attach some meaning to the whole experience. Chang Ta-chun applies both techniques, though with refreshing originality, in each of the novels included in Wild Kids. The narrator in the first novel, "My Kid Sister," now in his twenties, looks back to his teenage years and his close relationship with his unpredicatable little sister. As he tells stories of his girlfriends, an increasingly Westernized Taiwan of the 1980’s, his parents' divorce, and his sister’s maturation from young girl to a somewhat troubled teen, clarity is not found and he struggles to make sense of it all, the teenage years more confusing now perhaps than it was at the time. In the title novel, Wild Kids, the fourteen-year-old narrator Hou Shichun tells of his life on the streets of Taiwan. After dropping out of school and running away from home, he finds himself amidst a gang of fellow teenagers, where violence, nihilism, and moral and cultural bankruptcy are described in stark terms. The novel expertly mixes the distinctive voice of Hou Shichun with elements of hard-boiled pulp novels and pop culture giving it a stylized humor amidst the harsh surroundings. These two novels, are the first English translations of Chang Ta-Chun, the most popular novelist in Taiwan, and are hopefully the first of many to come.