"Homoerotic stories were published in Taiwan as early as the 1960s"

Chi Ta-wei is a leading figure in queer Sinophone literature and author of influential essays on queer theory and literary studies. The Spanish version of his successful book, The Membranes (Membranas) (1996), translated by Alberto Poza, a Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) doctoral student on its Humanities and Communication program, has recently been published and is now in its second edition. Chi participated on June 5 in the doctoral seminar "Queer Taiwan in Translation: Academia, Creation, Activism" at the UOC as a guest of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities' Crisis, Identity and Creation (ALTER) research group.

Born in Taichung, Taiwan, in 1972, Chi's works combine fantasy and science fiction. He has translated authors such as Italo Calvino and Manuel Puig into Chinese. In academia, he has been a professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University in Taipei since 2010. His theoretical work culminated in 2017 with the monograph A Queer Invention in Taiwan: A History of Tongzhi Literature.

The Membranes foresees a dystopian future in which, at the end of the 21st century, climate change has destroyed the ozone layer and humanity has been forced to move to the depths of the sea. It is often listed as the first work of contemporary fiction in the Chinese-speaking world with a transgender character.

Your career has bridged academia, creation and activism. Can you explain more about these three lines of work?

In 1995, my first year in the MA program in English at National Taiwan University (NTU), I published my first story collection in Taipei, in which all the stories are about LGBTIQ+ lives. In 1996, I published my second story collection in Taipei, including The Membranes. In 1999, I left Taiwan for a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). During my years at NTU, I learned from European and American literatures that being non-heterosexual was possible, and sometimes laudable. The internet was new back then and Google was not yet available. So, I had to read the European and American texts on my own, diligently. But what I learned during these years has been very useful to me in the following years and decades.

During my MA years, I was also bold enough to submit book reviews and social commentaries which emphasized non-heteronormative views to the newspapers back then. The newspapers in the 1990s, newly liberated from the conservative 1980s, and prior to the threat of Yahoo News and Google News, were interested in new, bizarre, alternative authors like the younger me. Some might think my publications in newspapers were more or less activist, for most queer people in the 1990s chose not to be out. But my transient "activism" does not look activist enough in the new millennium, as more and more young people choose to be out on social media, with even more bizarre speeches and appearances. So, it is OK to say that I was briefly activist, but only in the 1990s.

My roles as a literary writer, an activist writing for newspapers, and a newbie academic were intertwined. But since 1999, in the US, I focused on my academic research, which remained very queer.

The monograph published in 2017 naturally contains a lot of what I had learned and written in the US until 2010 and what I read and thought earlier in the 1990s. Since 2017, I have wanted to resume my role as a writer of queer fiction.

The Spanish translation of The Membranes is now in its second edition. It is a complex and visionary book, which features climate change and addresses topics such as isolation, technology, memory, gender identity or sexuality. What was your inspiration and why did you choose science fiction?

I read an article on the famous Wired a while ago. It is interesting. It argues that 1994 was so good for creators of arts because creators were not yet fully threatened and coopted by the internet. It is a coincidence to me too, for I started to publish some stories in 1994.

The Membranes was made possible, and possible in the form of sci-fi, because it was written in the 1990s. Throughout the 1990s, the world was full of hopes and despair: on the one hand, the USSR was gone, the Berlin Wall was gone, Taiwan and China were trying to build friendship after decades of Cold War.

On the other hand, we all worried that in the year of 2000, all the data from the 1900s would be gone, what was called the Y2K crisis. And, by the end of the 20th century, we naturally recalled the end of the 19th century: fin-de-siècle Paris, Freud, the decadence of Vienna, or Victorian England.

With so many stimuli, many writers chose to write mind-blowing works. I was drawn to do the same. To choose sci-fi was natural, for I was overwhelmed by all the talk of the fin-de-siècle doom.

People talked about climate change in the 1990s with much gusto, for people worried that various disasters would happen to the Earth because of the end of the 1990s.

You have analyzed the origin of the term "tongzhi", which has been used in communist China as "comrade", and later as a synonym for "gay". Among the gay Sinophone community there is some controversy over whether the term "tongzhi" appeared in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

It is true that the usage of "comrade = gay" emerged in Hong Kong in late 1980s, and the usage was learned in Taiwan in the early 1990s. But it is also true that the usage of "comrade = gay" was first proposed by a Singaporean writer in the 1970s. He emigrated to Hong Kong later. In any case, the first interpretation of "comrade = gay" did not take place in Hong Kong but in the "broadly defined" Chinese diaspora. I state: whereas "tongzhi cinema" might be a Hong Kong invention, Taiwan is inspired by Hong Kong and develops "tongzhi literature" as a Taiwanese invention.

For this, I can mention a landmark writer from Taiwan. Crystal Boys by Pai Hsien-yung is widely considered to be the most influential gay novel in Chinese. It was published in 1983 in Taiwan, when Taiwan was still very conservative politically and sexually. Moreover, Pai had already published explicitly homoerotic stories as early as in 1960s, in Taiwan. For decades in the 20th century, LGBTI+ people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and the Chinese diaspora relied on Pai's 1960s stories and his 1983 novel for guidance, inspiration, and comfort.

In 1994, you were also the first to translate the term "queer" into "ku-er", which can be translated as "cool kids". How did this translation develop?

The "queer / ku-er / cool kids" terms did not exist in Taiwan until 1994. Before 1990, "queer" was once pejorative in the US and the UK. But the queer activists in the US and the UK tried to reinterpret "queer" around 1990. In 1994, we in Taiwan tried to introduce not one single word "queer" but a series of acts of verbal transformation (from "queer = bad" to "queer = cool") from the Anglo-American contexts to Taiwan. It is true that we meant to argue for alternatives to normality when we proposed "ku-er" because we found many in Taiwan chose to make homosexuality more acceptable to the Taiwan society by normalizing it.

In mainland China, homosexuality and bisexuality existed in dynasties such as the Shang or Han. Has this tradition influenced Taiwanese gay literature? You have also mentioned the influence of news events from the 1950s onwards.

The homosexuality we are talking about now is a very new concept. It was first conceived in Europe by the end of the 19th century. Bisexuality emerges later than homosexuality. Thus, I choose not to talk about the dynasties in China, for most of them existed prior to the notion of homosexuality.

In my own research on queer literature in Taiwan, as you kindly note, I do consider that the newspapers in the 1950s in Taiwan enabled the residents of Taiwan, wittingly or not, to imagine homosexuality. It is because with the onset of the Cold War, the US chose to shelter Taiwan from the aggression of Beijing. As the American ideologies loomed large in Taiwan, the newspapers in Chinese in Taiwan naturally reported the news highlighted in the US, and transmitted the homophobic and rampant McCarthyist values in the US, therefore teaching Taiwanese readers how immoral homosexuality was. Although the depictions of homosexuality in the media were quite negative during the Cold War, people in Taiwan were, after all, educated about homosexuality. The biased understanding of homosexuality was an imperfect but useful foundation for future understandings of sexualities.

You have publicly positioned yourself on the #MeToo movement. Can you explain how this movement has been experienced in Taiwan compared to Western countries?

I choose to encourage discussions of #MeToo in my undergraduate and graduate courses. I also encourage my younger friends to express their opinions on #MeToo. For instance, I often recommend Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise, a novel written by Lin Yi-han in 2016 and translated by Jenna Tang in 2024 for international readers. This book is one of the seminal texts on #MeToo in Taiwan. Lin Yi-han killed herself, sadly, in 2017.

The #MeToo movement in Taiwan is inspired by the Western countries, and it did not become local in Taiwan until 2023. However, I do not think Taiwan simply copies the lexicon and thoughts of #MeToo from the West. Instead, I believe people in Taiwan have already talked about abusive sex and love, [as can be seen] with the popularity of the aforementioned 2017 novel Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise.