Taiwan's Legendary Chu Family: Three Generations of Writers in One House — How They Get Along, How They See the World

"We're not that dramatic. We know exactly what literature weighs today, what state it's in, how much influence it has. Maybe all the Chu family can do is this: I am changing the world."

Measured by the density of their output or by its heights, Taiwan's Chu family is a literary legend.

Chu Hsi-ning was one of Taiwan's finest novelists. Eileen Chang said he would "always be the little soldier in the best of Shen Congwen's stories"; Mo Yan called him "my true forerunner." Chu Hsi-ning's wife, Liu Mu-sha, was a translator from Japanese who brought Yasushi Inoue, Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima into Chinese. Their three daughters — Chu Tien-wen, Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-i — are all writers, Chu Tien-wen and Chu Tien-hsin outstandingly so. Chu Tien-hsin's husband, Tang Nuo (born Hsieh Tsai-chun), is a fine critic, and their child, Hsieh Hai-meng, writes too, and was one of the screenwriters on the film The Assassin.

The writer A Cheng thinks "this is rare anywhere in the world," and once wrote: "Sometimes I sit in the Chu house watching them — old and young, men and women — and I'm simply dumbstruck. If you think the Chus carry an air of arrogance (they'd have the grounds for it), you'd be wrong. What makes this family so captivating is their plainness, their humor, their ease, their integrity."

Peking University professor Dai Jinhua puts it this way: "Beyond representing the highest achievement of Taiwanese literature — that isn't even up for debate — and beyond the fact that they trace out the very contours of that literature themselves, they are also, seen from another angle, a history of Taiwan, or a history of the Cold War. They don't carry that history only through the realism of their work, though of course they carry it that way too. They also carry it through their family's own story, through their own legend, passing on a historical narrative."

Huang Pingli, a literary editor at the publisher Imaginist, told QDaily: "From Chu Hsi-ning in the first generation to Hsieh Hai-meng in the third, their writing runs from Shandong a hundred years ago all the way to present-day Taipei, and it carries an extraordinary range of literary, aesthetic and historical material. Every one of them represents a hugely varied set of concerns; every one of them releases an enormous amount of energy. It's as if this family's writing were building a republic of literature. It's a small family, but trace it all through and it's really a microcosm of contemporary Chinese-language writing."

Three generations of the Chu family have all written, but differences of time, place, temperament, experience and reading have given each of them a different literary face, and writing hasn't meant quite the same thing to any two of them. And yet, running through all those differences, you can still make out something the family has passed down.

1.

What does writing mean to the Chu family?

When we put that question to Chu Tien-hsin and Tang Nuo separately, both said that for the Chus writing is simply natural — and also the most important thing in the family's life.

That naturalness starts with Chu Hsi-ning. As Chu Tien-hsin sees it, her father always placed literature above everything else in life. That, in turn, shaped his daughters.

Chu Hsi-ning's grandfather came from Linqu County in Shandong, in the Qing dynasty. Working in a German household, he converted to Christianity along with them. To win over more Shandong peasants to the faith, he took to explaining the Bible through Chinese legends, historical allusions and local custom. The local church called it heresy and drove him out of Linqu. After a long, unsettled journey, the Chu family put down roots in Suqian, Jiangsu.

Chu Hsi-ning was born in 1926, in the middle of the Northern Expedition. His older brothers and sisters were all away from home — "some joining the Northern Expedition or bandit-suppression campaigns, others off being educated, marrying, working; none of them came back." Left on his own, the young Chu Hsi-ning grew up listening to his parents tell stories and legends from the old home in Shandong. Those stories later became a crucial source and raw material for his fiction. He never once set foot in Shandong, yet he spent his whole life writing about it in one way or another.

In 2003, the Shandong-born writer Mo Yan read to page 18 of Chu Hsi-ning's novel The Drought Demon (《旱魃》, in the Sansan series edition) and had already guessed the ending. "That's not because I'm clever," Mo Yan wrote, "but because Mr. Chu and I drew our fiction from exactly the same well. The stories I heard back home, Mr. Chu had heard decades before me. The material I used, Mr. Chu had used decades before me."

Tang Nuo believes that "Chu Hsi-ning's literary self-awareness and literary education came out of the May Fourth movement and the 1930s; what drove his fiction wasn't the comfort of homesickness but literature's own tradition of writing." As a young man Chu Hsi-ning loved Lao She, and, following his sixth aunt's lead, read Eileen Chang, becoming one of her most devoted fans. Later, during the war, he carried a copy of Chang's story collection Romances (《传奇》) in his bag everywhere, and brought it with him from the mainland to Taiwan.

"I think that was really his innate literary instinct, plus the fact that being born into a missionary family gave him a different lens on things. Those two things — the instinct and the new lens — meant that when he came across Eileen Chang he thought, wow, this is an enlightenment in literature, and he carried it with him from then on," Chu Tien-wen told QDaily.

In 1947, Chu Hsi-ning published his first short story, Westernization (《洋化》), in the Central Daily News. Two years later he left school for the army, enlisting under the Nationalist government's general Sun Li-jen, and crossed to Taiwan with the troops. In the service he trained by day and wrote by night, under a 5-watt bulb inside his large mosquito net. In 1953 he published his first story collection, The Love of the Grand Torch (《大火炬的爱》), which won Sun Li-jen's admiration. Over the following decade or so he reached the first peak of his writing life, with his signature works Molten Iron (《铁浆》) and The Drought Demon.

Chu Tien-hsin recalled to QDaily that as a child, watching her father go to work in the day and write at night, pouring nearly all his free time into writing, she didn't understand it at all. "The house was small and poor. No study, no living room — just the biggest room in the house with one big bed, where the three of us girls slept, and right next to the bed was Father's desk. Whenever we got up to use the bathroom we'd see him there from behind, still awake, and we simply couldn't understand what he was doing. That was probably the first time you learned there was something in the world that could possess a person like that — and yet the state he was in was so plain, so devout."

To have more time to write, Chu Hsi-ning, then a 46-year-old staff colonel, took early retirement in 1972 and gave himself entirely to literature. Chu Tien-hsin says that at the time her father "had no savings whatsoever, was actually running a deficit every month," and the children were all still in school, which made the decision "incredibly bold." "I honestly have no idea how he pictured life afterward. At every major crossroads in his life he put literature above everything else — everything else could be given up, set aside, abandoned, dealt with later — but on this one point he never let go."

Chu Tien-wen said her father disliked being called a "military writer," and disliked "writer by trade" even more; the most he would accept was "writer by vocation." "He used to say: a writer by trade has to live off his fiction. Put it that way, and isn't that an insult to the fiction?"

Chu Hsi-ning died of illness in 1998, leaving an unfinished 550,000-character manuscript that had taken years of his life: The Family Chronicle of Hua Taiping (《华太平家传》). The book was planned to run to 3 million characters, telling a century of the Hua clan of Shandong, from the Boxer Rebellion up to the present.

Over more than a decade Chu Hsi-ning rewrote The Family Chronicle of Hua Taiping eight times. When the eighth draft had reached 330,000 characters and he felt he could keep going, he went to look back over the earlier drafts and found that the pages stacked on his desk had been hollowed out by termites, reduced to crumbs, with only the outer surface intact. Being a Christian, Chu Hsi-ning took it calmly, saying the termites might have been God's harsh and merciless critics, God's roundabout way of telling him the book wasn't good enough yet and had to be started over.

Chu Tien-hsin thinks The Family Chronicle of Hua Taiping is like a scroll of Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Hong Ying, the writer and Chu Hsi-ning's friend across a generation gap, told QDaily: "If you want to understand how Chinese civilization and art are handed down, I think you have to read The Family Chronicle of Hua Taiping. If there's one Chinese book that can stand beside In Search of Lost Time, it's this one."

Chu Hsi-ning's writing life ran more than half a century and left more than 30 books. On that count Chu Tien-wen feels that she and her younger sister Chu Tien-hsin both fall "far short" of their father. Tang Nuo believes that, purely as literature, Chu Hsi-ning is the finest novelist Taiwan has produced since 1949 — and even if you soften that to "one of the finest," not many others would be in the running.

By Chu Tien-hsin, Chu Tien-wen and Tang Nuo's account, Chu Hsi-ning was a modest, reserved man who never forced his daughters into anything; the family raised its children free-range. "When Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-wen had their first stories published, Teacher Chu didn't even know. They'd sent the manuscripts out themselves, just to earn a little pocket money from the fee. Only when the pieces appeared in print did they find out how pleased their father was that they were following the same path he had," Tang Nuo told QDaily.

Chu Tien-hsin added: "The reason for my first story was that my glasses broke. New glasses were expensive back then, and the only way I could think of to make money was — well, I remembered the grown-ups writing pieces and submitting them for the fee. So the motive was neither noble nor sacred. I just wrote it in secret, never showed it to my father, and it got published."

Tang Nuo habitually calls Chu Hsi-ning "Teacher Chu." From high school onward he often went to the Chu house to ask Teacher Chu for manuscripts. In his memory Teacher Chu lived simply; for all his standing in literature he rarely went out to public events, spending most of his time reading on the sofa, writing at his desk, or talking happily and as an equal with Tang Nuo and the others.

In this household writing has always come first. Everyone got used to living that way, and everyone still lives that way. "I think it really is a value handed down. We watched Father live like this from the time we were small, so by the time you'd finished school and had to go out and work, it was as if someone before you had already shown you it was possible, and you dared to live that way too. If they could live like that and still raise three children, why wouldn't I have the courage to choose the same life? So there wasn't much hesitation — I simply had no intention of doing what ordinary people do... Family life holds no appeal for me at all. In the end you realize it's only when you're writing that you feel most alive, that your whole self can be mobilized — so, that's how you live!" Chu Tien-hsin said.

It shaped the third generation too, Hsieh Hai-meng. "I think these attitudes didn't just shape us — they cut even deeper with Hai-meng. To this day Hai-meng has probably written several million characters and has never once wanted to publish any of it, or even show it to the rest of us in the house. Before he bought a paper shredder, he burned his manuscripts regularly, because he was afraid we'd sneak a look. When he writes, it never occurs to him to think about critics, readers or the market — it's as if he's taken my father's lifelong attitude toward literature to its extreme, into very strange territory," Chu Tien-hsin said.

Hong Ying thinks it comes down to upbringing. "There's direct education, and there's education by quiet, gradual influence. When every corner of your house — even the bathroom — is full of books, what do you think that child will become?"

And so it went. Chu Tien-hsin recalls that as children she and her older sister Chu Tien-wen both did very well at school, and their parents paid it no attention at all — indifferent, never a word of praise. By the time she was raising Hsieh Hai-meng, if he was off playing she wouldn't even ask whether he'd done his homework. "I think that over time it naturally teaches you what matters most. For the people in this family, writing is probably the most important thing, so everything else can be dropped, ignored or handled halfheartedly."

So for this family writing isn't just natural — it's their calling, "the main thing you do in life, and the thing that gives life its meaning." "It's like Weber said: at some point you have to make that choice, and once you've settled on your demon-god, you serve it single-mindedly. That's how Teacher Chu was — he wrote right up to the last moment," Tang Nuo said.

Hong Ying believes that "what all three generations share is that passion for art, that seriousness, that drive for perfection — they really are a family that huddles together for warmth through literature."

This attitude toward literature has shaped their way of life too. To this day they still crowd into the small, plain house Chu Hsi-ning left behind — "no car, none of the modern conveniences" — and ask less of material life than most people do. The Chus have always insisted on writing by hand. Chu Tien-hsin only started using a mobile phone in recent years; Tang Nuo still doesn't. And Tang Nuo sees this not as a "moral choice" but as a matter of "reason": "Only by keeping your life as simple as possible do you gain any real freedom."

To the writer Xu Zhiyuan, Tang Nuo is a hermit through and through. Chu An-min, chief editor at INK Publishing, thinks much the same; he once told Hong Ying that the whole Chu family are hermits — respected, but too proud and aloof to mix easily with others. Huang Pingli says they've "been writing under the same roof for decades — a bit like living as recluses in the middle of the city. For them, literature is something like what a craftsman keeps doggedly holding onto."

Still, Tang Nuo feels that neither Chu Tien-hsin nor Chu Tien-wen matches Teacher Chu's purity of devotion to writing. Chu Tien-hsin spends some of her time on politics — animal-rights work, for instance. Chu Tien-wen spends part of hers on film; she is Hou Hsiao-hsien's go-to screenwriter, and an important sounding board while he thinks his films through.

And although the Chu sisters grew up in the same house and their reading overlapped a great deal, differences of temperament and concern have made their writing different. "Tien-wen, for instance, has a cooler temperament, Tien-hsin a hotter one. Tien-wen's inner world is very steady, while Tien-hsin gets angry, furious, anxious at the drop of a hat... So when they are being true to themselves, honest with themselves, what they want to catch and what they care about naturally come out different. And it's that concern that pulls your thinking, your reading, your writing along with it — the difference follows," Tang Nuo said.

Beyond temperament and concern, writing is bound up with changes in the era and the society. Tang Nuo feels that in Chu Hsi-ning's day literature was "everywhere." "Literature used to belong to everyone. Whatever line of work you were in, you'd read a few literary books and talk about literary topics. Literature is no longer a basic fact of people's lives."

Many of his own generation of friends in literary circles are unlike the Chus, Tang Nuo said: in the end they do everything they can to keep their children off this path, thinking it "too hard," and steer them toward finance or architecture. "The thing that matters most in your own life, the thing you in some sense value above all else — and you're afraid to have your children follow it. That's a rather sad verdict on a life, but in Taiwan today it's simply the fact of the matter."

2.

Looking back over Chu Hsi-ning's half-century of writing, Chu Tien-wen, Chu Tien-hsin and Tang Nuo all say his work was always answering the present and facing reality head-on. He watched the world with a burning, engaged eye, always full of interest, observation and curiosity about the real world — and that quality shaped their writing too.

In the 1990s the Harvard professor David Der-wei Wang wrote an essay comparing Chu Hsi-ning with Ssu-ma Chung-yuan, arguing that both belonged to a so-called "literature of homesickness" that filled in a gap left by the mainland's decade of turmoil, or by the years before it, carrying forward the Republican tradition. The view proved highly controversial.

In 1994, Chu Hsi-ning — a man who "never discussed his own work" — unexpectedly published an essay called You Cannot Speak of Ice to a Summer Bug (《岂与夏虫语冰》) in the "Renjian" literary supplement of the China Times: you cannot discuss ice and snow with an insect that lives and dies inside a single summer. "That essay stated in black and white that Molten Iron was about 'a family dynasty that comes to a bad end.' The 'family dynasty' was the two sides fighting for the right to monopolize the salt trade in Molten Iron. My father even said outright that you only had to think of the Sun Li-jen case to understand it. He laid the whole riddle bare," Chu Tien-wen said.

The Sun Li-jen case (the alleged Sun Li-jen coup plot) refers to events in 1955, when the Republic of China government accused Major Kuo Ting-liang, a subordinate of Army General Sun Li-jen, of plotting a mutiny, and used that as a pretext to declare that Sun had "condoned an armed rebellion by his subordinates, harbored Communist bandits and conspired against his superiors." Sun was stripped of his rank and placed under house arrest, and in the end more than 300 of his subordinates were caught up in it and jailed. The Sun Li-jen case is a famous political frame-up from Taiwan's White Terror; behind it lay the Chiang family's purge of Sun Li-jen's faction.

As one of Sun Li-jen's own subordinates, Chu Hsi-ning was full of indignation, and in the 1960s he wrote Molten Iron, an oblique satire on how "a family dynasty comes to a bad end." He also rejected the labels others pinned on him — homesickness literature, anti-Communist literature, war literature. "To use the time and place a work draws its material from as the sole basis for placing and naming a writer and his work is plainly unsound. To ignore any analysis of the ideas expressed, and to be incapable of reading what the work's imagery reveals, can only reflect a critic's laziness and crudeness — and above all it exposes a poverty of learning and a shortsighted eye," Chu Hsi-ning wrote.

For that reason Tang Nuo also thinks Molten Iron is written in "heavy ink" — not about "the beauty of the ancestral homeland" but carrying "a fierce self-scrutiny, even a whipping kind of criticism" — and so could never be homesickness literature. Set aside the real-world politics Molten Iron confronts, and its literary value may well outlast them. A Cheng calls Molten Iron "a formidable representative work of modern Chinese-language literature," with a naturalist flavor. Hong Ying thinks Molten Iron is "carefully built," its "language has real bite," and it's "not driven by theme first" — rather, "it says what he wants to say through the story itself."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Taiwan's economy took off; the whole society changed fast, modernizing and urbanizing, and people's lives changed with it. Chu Tien-wen says that faced with Taiwan's modernization and urbanization, Chu Hsi-ning realized the old language no longer worked — he needed something new to express this new era.

In the 1970s Chu Hsi-ning wrote The Metallurgist (《冶金者》) and What Time Is It Now (《现在几点钟》), among others. Many literary critics later came to see these as his modernist period. The writer Chang Ta-chun was one of the earlier critics to notice it. In Chang Ta-chun's Literary Views (《张大春的文学意见》) he discussed Chu Hsi-ning's modernist qualities repeatedly, arguing that he could be called Taiwan's first novelist with something of the spirit of the French nouveau roman. Chang Ta-chun wrote, for instance:

"I was lucky enough to hear him teach in person at a judging session for the Fiction Award for Malaysian Students Studying in Taiwan — he said fiction 'with something happening' is easy to write, while fiction 'with nothing happening' is hard. Only then did I begin to grasp how his abandonment of the traditional devices for engineering 'something happening' — characterization, plot construction, scene design, thematic symbolism and so on — quietly echoed the nouveau roman writers' deliberate emphasis on narrative form. And only then did I gradually understand: by daring to break the mold with fiction 'where nothing happens,' Chu Hsi-ning had already quietly completed his own novelistic revolution sometime between the 1960s and the 1970s."

Chu Tien-wen says Chen Fangming, a professor at National Chengchi University, finds this modernist turn in her father puzzling, since unlike Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Wen-hsing or Yu Kwang-chung, Chu Hsi-ning had no training in a foreign-languages department or in the academy, and it isn't clear how he came across modernism at all. "You can only say that, as a novelist, it was his sensitivity and his honesty, facing the present with such a burning eye," Chu Tien-wen said.

Chu Hsi-ning kept up his experiments. Between 1973 and 1983 he wrote four works he called "serial novels": The Book of Non-Rites (《非礼记》), Flowers Fly Everywhere in the Spring City (《春城无处不飞花》), The General's Command (《将军令》) and Seven Ill-Matched Couples (《七对怨偶》). By "serial novel" he meant that although these books are made of short stories, they "gather and combine the scale of the short story to grow the spirit of the full-length novel," in answer to the changes and currents of the times.

Chu Tien-hsin says these works were, to a great extent, about the young people of Taiwan at the time, and young readers embraced them in turn. "I remember Tang Nuo and people like him were still high schoolers then. The moment something ran in the newspaper everyone read it with real fervor — it was about that generation of young people. I myself wouldn't have thought to write it; I'd have thought, you go write about your own era, I've got plenty to do! I still have so many subjects of my own I care about or haven't finished. But Father never set limits on himself that way. He'd think, wow, young people see the world so differently from me, they even treat and remember the world differently — and he'd write about that."

At the same time, in the late 1970s, Chu Hsi-ning got to know Hu Lan-cheng. Chu Tien-hsin says that for the next decade her father barely wrote fiction at all; like a disciple of Hu Lan-cheng's, he devoted himself to promoting, in the form of theory, the idea he'd always been preoccupied with — the "sinicization of Christianity." "He found support in some of Hu Lan-cheng's theories about Chinese rites and music, and he was in a hurry to set them out and spread them."

In the last decade-plus of his life, Chu Hsi-ning's work on The Family Chronicle of Hua Taiping was in some sense also an answer to the great question of how China should face Westernization, or modernization — only cast as a novel. "He benefited his whole life from the Western body (Christian civilization), and in the end he wanted to pour the Chinese body back into it, to bring in a new reading, a new force — but he never finished," Chu Tien-wen said.

Like her father, Chu Tien-hsin writes to answer the present and face reality head-on. Of the whole Chu family today she is the writer most engaged with the present.

Chu Tien-hsin found fame young: at 17 she wrote The Ballad of Hitting the Earth (《击壤歌》), a bestseller in Taiwan at the time, praised by Hu Lan-cheng. But she feels that "at that stage it was purely an outpouring of feeling." Trace her later writing and you'll find she gradually moved past that early outpouring, and her work turned more and more to Taiwanese society, reality and history.

By her own account her writing has always been bound up, one way or another, with the political correctness of the moment. "Over the long course of my writing, political correctness has worn different faces at different times. I'm extremely sensitive to it — I keep asking why a society, a literary establishment, gets to tell you what to write or how to write it. I think that's precisely the opposite of what creation is. Creation is supposed to see what others haven't seen, say what others haven't said. Whether what's said is good or bad is a separate question — if everyone already agrees on everything, why bother writing? So for a long stretch, writing was for me even a principle, a duty — like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, who simply has to speak, has to say the truth I've seen."

Chu Tien-hsin's first brush with political correctness in Taiwan came during the Nativist Literature Debate of the late 1970s. She felt the "politically correct" voices of the time held that a writer like Eileen Chang, who wrote about "the urban petite bourgeoisie," was "a singing girl who knows nothing of a fallen nation's grief," that her work was "concubine literature," and that the correct way to write was to write peasants, workers, the laboring masses. Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-wen didn't write that, so "however well you wrote, it meant nothing in that climate. They cared what you wrote, not how well you wrote it." Tang Nuo said outright that the literary debate was, in substance, a political action. "Because the Kuomintang held such overwhelming one-party power at the time, direct political action would have been crushed, so people used something else to talk about it."

But facing the present, writing honestly and putting literature above all else have always been this family's values. So Chu Tien-hsin feels: "If you can't honestly face who you were at seventeen or eighteen — even if that self was impoverished, petit-bourgeois, even a little dull and narrow — how could you face who you are at fifty, at sixty? We can only choose to write honestly, even if the subject is a small one."

By the 1980s and 1990s Taiwan was completing its democratic transition, a native Taiwanese consciousness was rising, and there was a need to "build a nationalism." Chu Tien-hsin believes that at that point politicians needed to invent an enemy in order to rally public feeling — and that enemy was people like her, the mainland-born émigrés and their families. So the "political correctness" of the day held that writing about native Taiwan was good and writing mainland-related subjects was not.

Chu Tien-hsin, as always, honestly wrote what she saw, thought and felt, and at the end of the twentieth century published her trilogy about Taiwan — Remembering My Brothers from the Military Village (《想我眷村的兄弟们》), The Old Capital (《古都》) and The Wanderer (《漫游者》). It remains the high point of her writing to date.

In 2018, in a new preface for the mainland edition of the trilogy, she wrote: "In the final decade of the last century, with the lifting of martial law in Taiwan and the release of social and political energy, forces of every kind — those that should be mobilized (progressive values) and those that shouldn't (premodern tribal ethnic consciousness) — were mobilized on every front, as if Pandora's box had been thrown open. Among all that, I of course strongly disagreed with the ethnic mobilization manipulated through politics and elections... I was born and raised in a military dependents' village until I was fifteen, and I felt that, rather than let others dissect me carelessly — whether deliberately or out of ignorance — I would rather do the dissecting honestly myself. That is how Remembering My Brothers from the Military Village came about — a book that in the end neither Taiwan-born locals nor mainland-born émigrés forgave me for."

"Twenty years on, that ethnic mobilization, escalated further by the authorities' political maneuvering, has turned into 'opposing China' and 'hating China'... In the 1996 Taiwan presidential election, when even the head of state could at last be chosen one person, one vote, I thought Taiwan should have the confidence to face its own past in a healthy way, glory or shame alike, and that we ought to be able to tolerate every kind of language of identity, rather than only the politically correct language handed down by those in power. I naively hoped that, amid the island's soaring chorus of identity, I could carve out a little space of freedom for not identifying — or for each person to state things their own way. That is the background and the context in which The Old Capital was written... If one day Taiwan arrives at the kind of chapter — one dominated by the collective, by the nation — that recurs throughout human history and that I most dread seeing, I could probably meet it with equanimity. From that, the flavor of self-exile in The Wanderer isn't hard to understand."

All three books date from about 20 years ago and are about Taiwanese society, but Huang Pingli thinks they wouldn't feel dated in mainland China today either. "Taiwan entered a modern society maybe twenty or thirty years ahead of the mainland — cities going up fast, traces of history erased, a consumer society arriving, people living inside the logic of commodities. Mainland cities right now are also going through an especially violent moment of change. Who is manufacturing memory? Who is producing new memories? Who is wiping the old memories out? Her novels are in essence writing about historical memory — including the condition of urban life, the emptiness of modern people — and set against the present, I think they'd resonate strongly in the mainland context too."

Where Chu Tien-hsin runs hot, Chu Tien-wen runs cool. Deeply shaped by Chu Hsi-ning, Eileen Chang and Hu Lan-cheng, her writing carries something of Chang's cool, detached observation. Many critics, David Der-wei Wang among them, like to call Chu Tien-wen an "heir to the Chang school." We won't dwell here on Chu Tien-wen's relation to Eileen Chang; what this piece is after is her sense of the times.

Take her milestone Fin-de-Siècle Splendor (《世纪末的华丽》, 1990), which portrays the social scene of 1980s Taipei — the loneliness of city dwellers, the waking of desire, the joy, exhaustion and pain people sink into. Or Notes of a Desolate Man (《荒人手记》, 1994), written as a personal notebook, narrated by a middle-aged gay man named Xiao Shao living in 1990s Taiwan, who calls himself "a desolate man." Or Words of the Witch (《巫言》, 2008), which uses a method like field research to collect living specimens from present-day life, recording in a realist mode the countless scenes of an era...

Chu Tien-wen said to QDaily, with feeling: "This is the thing our father most passed on to us — staring at reality, watching it with a burning eye, always full of curiosity, full of passion for the world, wanting to see, wanting to observe. You're not writing fiction inside fiction — you have to face your own reality. Observe, discover, stay locked on reality. You can't lose your grip and let it get away. I read a lot of new fiction, and what I most want to see is the air of the times, the contemporary moment — and I don't see it. I feel a lot of people nowadays can't hold onto reality; they stare at it for a second and then it's gone, whether they wander off into plotting or their minds drift elsewhere — maybe thinking this would adapt well into a screenplay, and so on. Without observation that's fully present, there's no discovery, and nothing can move forward."

On how the Chu family's writing answers the present, Tang Nuo goes further: "What a writer can really write is only his own present. And that present isn't what we usually mean by acknowledging present-day reality — it's your reflection on reality, your thinking about it. Put another way: literature is an undertaker. Once the dust of reality has settled, once everyone has left and lost interest, that's when the novelist starts picking up what he wants. So it's only your concern for the present that gets your novel started — but the form it takes, the shape, the path, can vary without end."

3.

Over the decades, three generations of Chus have not only left a great body of outstanding work but nourished many young people who loved literature, raising a whole crop of writers.

The Taiwanese poet Ya Hsien once said: "The Chu family became the literary world's famous 'Bach family of literature,' a tale told with admiration everywhere. Chu Hsi-ning, moreover, in the manner of an old-style academy taking on disciples, cultivated even more budding young writers — his contribution there was enormous."

Hong Ying feels that "Mr. Chu opened his home for the sake of literature, reaching out to generation after generation of young people who loved it, and spending far more time and energy on it than most would. He was a North Star, lighting the way for everyone. That's exceedingly rare."

The most famous of them was of course Sansan, the literary group made up of Chu Tien-wen, Chu Tien-hsin, Tang Nuo, Ma Shuli, Ding Yamin, Xianzhi, Zhong Xiaoyang, Jiang Xiaoyun and others. Beyond the group's core members, a whole crowd of high schoolers made their way to the Chu house on its reputation, including Yang Zhao, Lin Yaode and Lin Junying. Most went on to become writers themselves, an indispensable part of Taiwan's literary world.

"That cramped Chu family living room, forever moving from one address to the next, was nonetheless the single most important site of Taiwanese literature for half a century, witness to the shifting landscape of Taiwan's literature and society — livelier, even, than Lin Huiyin's living room once was," Huang Pingli wrote in her essay "The Chu Family's Literary Club in Taipei."

Sansan was deeply influenced by Eileen Chang, Hu Lan-cheng and Chu Hsi-ning, and its activities included a magazine, a publishing arm and reading groups. From 1977 to 1981 the journal Sansan put out twenty-eight issues. Sansan Books published Hu Lan-cheng's Historical Tales of Chinese Literature (《中国文学史话》) and What Day Is This (《今日何日兮》), Chu Tien-hsin's Days Aboard the Ark (《方舟上的日子》) and The Ballad of Hitting the Earth, Chu Tien-wen's Chronicle of Tamkang (《淡江记》), and Zhong Xiaoyang's Stopping the Carriage to Ask the Way (《停车暂借问》), among others. Its final titles were the Taiwan-Hong Kong and Hollywood volumes of Peggy Chiao on Cinema (《焦雄屏看电影》) and Yasushi Inoue's The Roof Tile of Tempyō, in Hsieh Hsien-sheng's translation. Trusting their good friend Jan Hung-tze, Chu Tien-hsin and the others later folded Sansan Books into Yuan-Liou Publishing.

Times have changed, and as noted above, critics offer no end of high praise and interpretation of the Chu family's influence and meaning, calling it a "legend," a "story told with admiration," "unique," and so on. Many people are also curious about how the Chus have managed to live the way they do. The writer Ng Kim Chew, for instance, thinks one person writing is like a high-voltage pylon — nothing grows in the ground around it. With five or six such pylons standing in one family, how could they possibly not affect each other?

To the Chus themselves there isn't much to interpret — they simply "have their own way of living." Ordinarily each of them writes alone; they talk about literary topics but never about the state of their own work. So Tang Nuo says every member of the Chu family is an "island," and Chu Tien-hsin says every one of them is a "lone wolf." Rather than call them a family, it might be better to call them all good citizens of a "republic of literature," or a "republic of the written word," "together writing one big book."

"We're all engaged in the same work. Of course we were each born into a slightly different era, each facing a slightly different world, and each of us struggles on our own to answer what the world asks of us. Borges loved a line from Don Quixote — that when we all die and go to heaven, each of us bears his own sins. What have you done? How far have you taken it? How far can you write? How much of a small, tiny meaning can you make in this world? That's each person's own affair," Tang Nuo said.

As for why he writes at all, Tang Nuo feels every writer must be a reader, and a reader first, living inside a shared "republic of the written word." Having taken something out of that republic, he feels obliged to put something back. And, he says, "writing is the one purest form of thinking I've been able to find. Ordinarily, like everyone else, when I try to think something through my mind wanders off. Only when I'm writing can I keep going for one hour, two, three, four — and with this pen I can stay on the same line of thought for months, a year, two years."

Chu Tien-hsin added a detail for us: "When we were courting, Tang Nuo was doing his military service and we were apart. He told me, even when I try really hard to think of you, it probably doesn't last three minutes before my mind wanders off. But when I write, I can go three or four hours without wavering, my thinking unfolds, and I sink into very deep thought. If we're honest with ourselves and think about it calmly, that's probably true of most of us — but he's only like that when he's facing his writing."

Like Tang Nuo, Chu Tien-wen feels she needs writing: "total, undivided concentration is a state you can only reach when writing fiction." And, she adds, "I'm still, to this day, full of passion for the world — I don't want to stop observing it."

For Chu Tien-hsin, "for a long stretch, my own motive for writing was to fill in the existences and memories that I felt shouldn't be left out of the mainstream account, or out of the version of history that's already been settled and sealed. That has always been my greatest driving force." She has also quoted, more than once, a line from Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual: "The intellectual's duty is to remain in a state of constant alertness, never letting himself be carried along by specious or conventional ideas... to prefer being outside the mainstream, resisting being absorbed, resisting being co-opted..."

In 2017, Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-wen's mother, Liu Mu-sha, died. After sorting through her belongings, the Chu sisters decided in the spring of 2018 to accept an invitation from the makers of the Taiwanese literary documentary series The Inspired Island (《他们在岛屿写作》) to film a documentary about the literary Chu family. It will come in two parts, with Hou Hsiao-hsien as producer; Chu Tien-wen directs the first part and Lin Junying the second.

In October 2018 the Chu sisters traveled with the film crew to Suqian, Nanjing and Beijing, interviewing Mo Yan, Zhang Yihe, A Cheng and others. That same month saw the first mainland publication of Molten Iron and The Drought Demon, the classic works of Chu Hsi-ning — Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-wen's "senior colleague in the trade," and their father.

In Taiwan, as the times and the society have changed, literature has grown ever more marginal, and the Chus — because of the stance they write from and the era they came out of — barely register with young people in Taiwan today; they sit far out on the margin, and some consider them out of step with the times. "When we were courting, Tang Nuo never once asked me whether I loved him. These days in Taiwan we get asked all the time whether we love Taiwan," Chu Tien-hsin said. Tang Nuo says that every book he publishes in Taiwan now loses money. And when they publish books on the mainland, some young people in Taiwan assume they're there to cash in. They clearly don't care much about these misunderstandings and complaints; they hold to their values — literature above all, face the present, write honestly — and go on treating their own writing seriously, earnestly, with hard work.

"Calvino said death is you plus the world, minus you. Borges, out in the Sahara, once scooped up a handful of sand, walked a little way off and set it down. He said, 'I am changing the Sahara Desert. That sentence looks perfectly ordinary, but it took a whole lifetime's experience to be able to say it.' We're not that dramatic. We know exactly what literature weighs today, what state it's in, how much influence it has. Maybe all the Chu family can do is this: I am changing the world. Only once you have had you, and then subtracted you, do you find what's left. Maybe it's just that little bit — I don't know. Then each of us bears his own sins. It's really nothing more than that," Tang Nuo told QDaily.

The portrait cover image is of Chu Hsi-ning; the cover image is a Chu family group photo. Cover and in-article images courtesy of Imaginist.