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Writer Wu Ming-yi's talk at a Huatan bookstore sparks local independent bookstore buzz with his new pandemic novel

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Wu Ming-yi's literary walk to Huatan to discuss his new pandemic novel; independent bookstore "You Ci Yi Shuo" stirs up local sparks

On April 3, 2019, writer Wu Ming-yi posted a farewell notice on Facebook announcing his departure from social media: "For no particular reason (perhaps because there are too many reasons), after this post, this Facebook page will no longer publish new articles and will become ruins... From now on I should no longer use any social media." Because it came without warning, it struck many readers like a thunderbolt, and they expressed shock and regret. The post received hundreds of comments, all expressing gratitude, reluctance and blessings toward Wu Ming-yi, and the regret everyone shared was: where can we still meet the writer in the future?

Fortunately, Wu Ming-yi left a glimmer of hope in the final paragraph of his farewell post: "In the future, whether or not I publish books, every year (starting from 2020) I will give five to six free talks at various independent bookstores (the bookstores only need to cover transportation costs, and I won't interfere with whether the talks are ticketed), talking about fiction and essay writing, or my recent reading and thinking, until no one asks me anymore, as a small repayment to the world of 'books.'"

This small repayment to books is currently booked all the way to 2023. Wu Ming-yi records the order of invitations from each bookstore, and after one store's event ends, he contacts the next bookstore. At his own pace, the writer practices the measuring of literature. This path wandering through independent bookstores does not lead to any destination; the path is the destination.

Wu Ming-yi makes appointments with independent bookstores and readers who share a affinity with him, practicing literary walks for as long as he lives. (Provided by Wu Ming-yi)

An invitation from a foreign publisher: writing fiction about Covid-19

Following the first three talks (Shi Ce café bookstore, on the theme "Convection: On the Possibility of Combining Literature with Other Arts"; Ubang Bookstore, on the theme "Book Travel: Literary Festivals I Have Been To"; and Xiaoxiao Shufang, on "A Writer's Daily Life: Self-Discipline from Youth to No Longer Being Young"), this year's fourth talk brought Wu Ming-yi to the "You Ci Yi Shuo" bookstore in Huatan, Changhua, where he shared two short stories he had recently been invited to write by foreign publishers but would not be published in Taiwan.

One of the invitations came from Restless Books in the United States. Facing the storm of Covid-19, this publisher invited writers from around the world to freely create works about the pandemic, with no restriction on genre. The title of the collection, "And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again," is taken from the final line of Dante's "Divine Comedy: Inferno," describing the beauty of the protagonist seeing heaven again after leaving hell.

Wu Ming-yi said that before the theme of "pandemic," he thought of keywords such as parting by death, alienation, the general situation of the times, and a person's life history, and then traced back to rummage through the plots or fragments already in his pocket that had a "sense of fiction" and the potential to develop into a novel, resulting in the work he eventually submitted, "The Descent."

"Soldier crabs always die when kept" and "someone walking a soldier crab on a leash" - these two dusty childhood memories of Wu Ming-yi - were polished bright by the invitation on the theme of "pandemic" and became torches leading the novel forward. The novel features as its protagonists a father who specializes in studying soldier crabs and his daughter A-le, the father having gone to the United States before the Covid-19 outbreak to look for crabs and visit friends; after the pandemic spreads, he not only cannot return to Taiwan but also becomes infected with pneumonia. A-le, who remains in Taiwan, is also quarantined because of the pneumonia, but she does not dare let her father know.

Wu Ming-yi uses such a plot to construct a daily life distorted by the pandemic. Father and daughter are not only separated by distance but both are quarantined; the general situation of the times rewrites a person's life history, and the more lightly the writer touches on the willful absurdity of fate, the more sorrowful it feels. Add to this that the various crabs being kept cannot know who decides their fate, and these become the three axes supporting this short work.

During the talk, Wu Ming-yi also shared the craft of fiction writing. For example, soldier crabs are "forward-moving" social animals, and when they act collectively they feel very much like an army on the march; this hazy symbolism can be concretized into the novel's imagery, letting readers feel that the plot seems to convey certain meanings.

"The Descent" was translated by translator Tang Chieh-lan (Jenna Tang) as "The Descent" and included in the collection "And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again." (Photo from Amazon.com)

An invitation from an art museum: a story of art inspiring one another

The second invitation came from the art museum established in Barcelona by the Dutch Han Nefkens Foundation, whose collection and exhibitions focus mainly on audiovisual art. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, they selected twenty works by artists and invited twenty writers from around the world to each create a two-thousand-word literary work inspired by one of the works.

Wu Ming-yi chose Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan. During the talk, after screening her video work "Becoming Alluvium," he briefly described the film's three-part narrative set against the Mekong River: past life, present life, and myth. The film is woven from mixed media including video, artworks and animation. Wu Ming-yi mentioned that all art is changing its media and forms, and only the weapon of text remains unchanged, so of course it is very difficult to face the challenge of readers who have undergone qualitative change.

From the film, Wu Ming-yi felt the relationship between water and culture, the poetry, and the sorrow (feeling) of environmental change. The novel of the same name, "Becoming an Alluvial Fan," is a story he had kept in his heart for a long time that could converse with the film. He said that years ago, while taking students stream-tracing, he met a painter holding an exhibition in Hualien while sheltering from the rain, who told him many things about her past life. What attracted Wu Ming-yi most was the story of how she had once run a hotel in Heping, Hualien. Later, when the writer visited again, the painter seemed unwilling to revisit the Heping past, and instead told other hard-to-verify, confusing experiences of mountain poachers and jade pickers.

Wu Ming-yi's "Becoming an Alluvial Fan" uses displaced chronology to weave the life of the heroine, Yuzi. Precocious, after the hardships and torment of family affection and love, she drifts into becoming a mountain poacher and jade picker: "With her own strength she could haul away giant trees weighing hundreds of kilograms, and she had an almost magical judgment about stones." Afterward, Yuzi settles at the Heping hotel, because "with money you don't have to rely on men."

The prosperous era of Heping ends, and at 45 she returns to a mountain hut and begins to paint. Due to the word-count limit of the novel, the text is like boarding an express train, rushing Yuzi's life suddenly to its endpoint. She takes 16 paintings of Hualien's 16 streams, along with a huge driftwood log of hinoki cypress, to the river mouth and returns them to the earth. "Because of aging, her movements were so slow that by the time the delivery was complete, the sea was already pitch black. There was no moon that day."

Similarly, Wu Ming-yi also discussed the techniques of fiction writing. He said that because he had interviewed the painter, he was able to describe in detail the process of collecting driftwood in "Becoming an Alluvial Fan"; and because of the painter's memories, "having sucked the breast milk of an Amis woman, Yuzi's features could appear as deep as an indigenous person's" - this became a subtle detail in the novel that carries heavy meaning.

Wu Ming-yi said that if you only want to sit in your study, it is impossible to become a writer who can write for twenty years. He himself is not good at socializing, but in order to gather material, he has no choice but to cast a crude net in the bustling world and fish out from the vastness the abstract fragments of a sense of fiction that move him. Because "there is still the creativity and ability to turn experience and thought into something transmitted. I still want to climb over a mountain, sail without hesitation toward the direction of a typhoon, or go deep underground." This passage, written on the last slide, made the deeply moved readers in the bookstore once again confirm that because there is a writer like Wu Ming-yi, literature has always been our greatest love.

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