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Michael Taylor

Chinese did not come easily to Lin Wen-yueh.

 Born in Shanghai's Japanese concession in 1933, she was ethnically Chinese. Legally, however, she was considered a Japanese national.

  Ms Lin, now professor emeritus at National Taiwan University, and her younger sister attended the Japanese school, where they were the only Chinese pupils on campus.

   'In Shanghai, I thought I was Japanese. I was a child so I didn't understand why my name was different from everyone else's. My classmates all thought I was somewhat odd. While my surname, Lin, could be pronounced in Japanese, my given name sounded strange when pronounced in that language,' she said.

  Compounding the problem - as is often the case with immigrant children - were her parents' 'foreign ways'.

  'My mother spoke Japanese with a funny accent. She dressed differently and wore different make-up. I really hated it when she visited the school,' Professor Lin said.

  With World War II ravaging much of Asia, students at Shanghai's Japanese school were instilled with anti-American and Chinese propaganda.

 So it came as a shock when students and teachers were gathered into the assembly hall one day to hear an important broadcast from Tokyo.

  'We heard the emperor announce his decision to surrender. Everyone cried, including me,' she said.

  'A few days later, I realised that I was on the winning side. Nonetheless, you can't change your way of thinking overnight. It was a difficult time.'   As friends and classmates started leaving for home, the mood in Shanghai's Japanese concession changed.

  'The Taiwanese in Shanghai were in a pitiful state. We were looked upon as traitors, running dogs of the Japanese. After the war, Shanghainese students came to our house and stole things, calling us traitors. We didn't feel safe there so we decided to go home,' Professor Lin said.

  It was not until returning with her family to Taiwan in 1946 that she undertook the study of what should have been her mother tongue. She was 11 years old.

  'Most difficult was the cultural context. I knew nothing about Chinese culture or history. I had never heard of the revolution of 1911. I had memorised Japanese poetry but knew nothing about the poetry of the Tang Dynasty. I had never heard of the Three Character Classic,' she said.

  After 50 years of Japanese colonial domination, Mandarin was to replace Japanese as the medium of instruction in Taiwanese schools. Since teachers were forbidden from speaking Japanese in the classroom, they had to use the local dialect.

  Although Professor Lin's parents were born on the island, she did not understand a word of Taiwanese.

  'I was both excited and repelled by having to learn Chinese. Mostly I was envious of the other students returning from the mainland because they could speak such good Chinese and were so knowledgeable about Chinese culture,' she said.

  In Shanghai, Professor Lin had demonstrated considerable literary promise.

  'The same thing happened when I was learning Chinese. The language had changed but the interest in literature survived,' she said.

  Soon her writings were winning inter-school competitions. By the time she was finishing secondary school, she was an accomplished writer of Chinese prose.

  'Because I wanted to become a writer, I decided to study Chinese literature at university,' Professor Lin said.

  It was only after entering National Taiwan University in 1952, that Professor Lin discovered that majoring in Chinese meant studying classical Chinese literature.

  It was not intended as a training ground for those with literary ambitions.

 Even contemporary writings - such as those from the 1930s - were given short shrift.

  'Owing to political considerations, the courses offered by the Chinese Department were all in classical Chinese - in other words, in pre-Qing Dynasty literature or thought,' she said.

  'Writings in baihuawen, or the vernacular, were often related to socialism so the Education Department didn't allow these kinds of courses to be offered.'   While studying for her bachelor's and master's degrees, Professor Lin encountered such subjects as literary theory, philology, phonology and critical interpretation of ancient texts. Between term papers and dissertations, she slowly mastered the techniques of scholarly research.

 'Without the help of the department and staff it would have been difficult for me to have achieved all of this on my own,' she said.

  Initially, Professor Lin found neither the time nor the inspiration to engage in what she had enjoyed since childhood.

  While preparing her dissertation, however, she further developed an ability to think independently - something she does not believe comes naturally to students here.

  'Asian students are especially weak when it comes to participating in class discussions, getting more from meetings with professors after class than they do while sitting quietly in the lecture hall,' she said.

  Without the freedom to engage in creative writing, she was starting to develop a taste for scholarship.

  Professor Lin received a master of arts in Chinese Literature from National Taiwan University in 1959.

 Ten years later, she was selected by the National Science Council as the first scholar from Taiwan to further her studies in Japan.

 'Taiwan had withdrawn from the United Nations so, at the time, Taiwanese scholars were not very welcome in Japan, which had recognised the Chinese communists as the only China,' she said.

  'Scholarly and cultural exchanges had also stopped,' she said, adding that she was still unsure why the invitation was made. During her year as a research fellow at the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, Professor Lin wrote a paper comparing Tang Dynasty literature with that of Japan's Hei-an period.

  'This indirectly led to my translation of The Tale of the Genji and three other literary works on the Hei-an period.'   The experience rekindled Professor Lin's interest in creative writing and a collection of essays, The Year in Kyoto, followed.

  Professor Lin laughs when looking back at her first collection of essays because her training as a scholar was so evident.

  'Some of the 13 essays [in the collection] even included footnotes, which now seems rather silly. At least you can't say they were without substance,' she said.

  Professor Lin's year in Japan had a profound impact on her development as a writer. Since then, in addition to teaching and writing academic papers, she has translated and written prose.

  'I have three selves and I still can't say which one is the real me. If I do scholarly work, I'm not satisfied. If I do creative writing, I'm not satisfied. If I translate, I'm not satisfied. So if I do good scholarly work, that side of me is quite happy, but the other two selves are not. So I have to do different things at different times,' she said.

   Her life, while complicated, seems to have benefited from these contradictions.

  'Somehow I feel that if I hadn't been interested in creative writing my scholarly research would have suffered. Without my training in scholarly research, however, my translating would have been looser. So the three selves have complemented one another.'   Professor Lin often mixes Chinese with Japanese when she runs into childhood friends.

 'Fate chooses who you are. One day you're Japanese, the next day you're Chinese.' Professor Lin Wen-yueh delivers a lecture at the Chinese University. At the age of 11, she had to begin learning her mother tongue after moving to Taiwan following Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. She had been forced to deny her Chinese heritage while being raised in Shanghai's Japanese concession.



Creative writing provides boost for scholarly research