current cleaning lady’s daughter is a graduate and works for a foreign company, so her finances aren’t a problem, but she likes to keep busy, likes to work. While she’s cleaning, she tells me all about her daughter and her boyfriend. Such details as how much her daughter spends at the hairdresser, or that her daughter’s boyfriend might be transferred to Shanghai. She also tells me all the Taiwanese news that she sees on Fujian’s Southeast Satellite Television. I just sit there working at my computer and listening. Sometimes it gets a little irritating, but sometimes I’m grateful to her for keeping me in touch with ordinary folk.
The second type is made up of media reporters. Most of them are young and dynamic, and they know everything worth knowing in China: who’s hot and who’s not, which nightclub is in and which one’s out, which year-end blockbuster film is great and which one is a dog, and where to go on holiday if you want to be cool. When they write a special report that needs an outsider’s opinion, they may well call on a famous Taiwanese cultural personality who lives in Beijing like me. Hey, it’s convenient. I’m also happy to talk with them so that I can get to know what the young people are wearing, what’s on their radar. You know, so I won’t get passé.
The third type is made up of publishing-house editors. Some of my books have been published in simplified-character editions and have sold pretty well, so editors often approach me wanting my next book. The problem is, I’ve not been able to write a single sentence for the last couple of years now; the best I can do is market a few of the older works I wrote in Taiwan that haven’t yet been published on the mainland. I’ve repackaged a couple more of them and they’re due out soon in simplified characters. Sometimes they take me to meet their editors-in-chief—who used to be nobodies, but who have become managing directors. Most of the time they’re not interested in my books; they’re concerned just about market share and the next big thing. Once in a while, as a major figure in the Taiwanese cultural world, I get to meet some officials of the Chinese News Service, the Ministry of Culture, the Taiwan Affairs Office, or the United Front Work Department. It’s terrific to be an official in China today. They all cut quite a figure and, no matter what rank they occupy, when they talk they’re all very impressive.They treat the Taiwanese like their little brothers, and all they ask is that we treat them like our big brothers.
I’m not being immodest when I say I’m a major figure in the Taiwanese cultural world. I was born in Hong Kong, and it was only after I finished elementary school inTiu Keng Leng refugee camp that I followed my parents to Taiwan. Still, I have always genuinely thought of myself as Taiwanese. I’ve always loved to read, and I decided I wanted to be a writer while still at secondary school. While studying journalism, I came second in a short-story competition. I know it was because I went to Cultural University instead of National Taiwan University that I didn’t win the first prize.
It made me so angry that I wrote a satirical story called “I Want to Go Abroad” in the style ofChen Yingzhen, but I didn’t dare get it published. I circulated it among my classmates, who really liked it. Some dissident students tried to enroll me in their group, which made me both excited and anxious. I was just a student, my parents had worked their fingers to the bone so that I could go to university, and I had to watch out for my future. I didn’t publish that story until after the media controls were lifted many years later. It came out in the
New Life
evening paper, but by then it was no longer topical and young people didn’t understand what I was satirizing.
After graduation, I got lucky with a scholarship to a Catholic university in Jamaica. I practiced my English every day and devoured novels in the library. I
Mari Carr and Jayne Rylon