![]() The presence of queer literature in the 1990s was a direct result of this military exit, as Taiwan was opened to global trade and cultural cross-pollination. ![]() The novel is being reprinted in May by NYRB Classics, with a new translation from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie. Notes of a Crocodile was written on the heels of China’s martial law rule in Taiwan. Her prose is in turns satirical, obsessive, and devastating, and explores “closetedness” amidst consuming romantic love, isolation, and crippling mental illness. ![]() In an article for Kyoto Journal, however, Huie writes that the novel is “intended to be a survival manual for teenagers, for a certain age when reading the right book can save your life.” It is in part this paradox that’s made Miaojin a counter-cultural icon, and her experimental work a cult classic in Taiwan. ![]() ![]() In a 2012 article in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop series The Margins, translator Bonnie Huie describes Qiu Miaojin’s style as containing “traces of real-life suffering that one can’t help reading into the work.” She’s right it’s hard not to see Miaojin’s protagonist Lazi’s depressive and suicidal musings as ominous and foreboding, as the author committed suicide at the age of 26 soon after completing Notes on a Crocodile. ![]()
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