Wild Kids

Two Novels About Growing Up

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by Chang Ta-chun,

Translated by Michael Berry

Columbia University Press

Due/Published March 2002, 280 pages, paper

ISBN 0231120974

New in paper (S02)

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 ‘rite 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