Novel
Orphan of Asia
アジアの孤児
Wu Zhuoliu · 1946
Synopsis
Hu Taiming, son of a peasant village in Taiwan under Japanese colonisation, learns the Chinese classics from an old scholar, then goes through the Japanese school and becomes a schoolteacher. An unrequited love for a Japanese colleague decides him to go and study in Japan, where Chinese students suspect him of being a spy. He then makes his way to China, teaches in Nanjing and marries there, without finding his place there any more.
Context
Wu wrote this novel in Japanese between 1943 and 1945, drawing on his own time at school in Nanjing, and hid it from the Japanese police. It appeared in 1946 under the name of its hero, Hu Zhiming; this name, too close to that of Hồ Chí Minh read in Chinese, became Hu Taiming in the 1952 reissue, with the title by which it is known. Ioannis Mentzas translated it into English for Columbia University Press in 2006. There is no French translation.
Who it is for
A novel spanning an entire life, in English only; for those who want to understand what Japanese colonisation was like as seen from Taiwan.
Prizes and reception
Yeh Shih-tao saw in it the whole of Taiwanese society; critics have made it a key text of the island's identity.
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