Zhong Lihe. From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan.

Zhong Lihe. From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan. Trans, and ed. T. M. McClellan. Foreword Zhong Tiejun. Columbia University Press, 2014. 293 pp. Cloth: $35.00.

Even within the often insular world of modern Taiwanese fiction, Zhong Lihe stands out as a writer bound to a very particular piece of turf. Most of his fiction and essays consist of semi-autobiographical accounts of life as a Hakka, a Chinese minority with a history of migration and discrimination analogous to that of the Jews, in rural Meinong county in southern Taiwan--a subculture in a backwater of a province that, until sixty years ago, was on the margins of the Chinese cultural world. Yet in Zhong Lihe's case, insularity is another word for specificity: the specificity that is the soul of narrative. Like James Baldwin--although, as reflected in T. M. McClellan's translation, not the prose stylist Baldwin was--Zhong's marginality made him a keen observer of the painful irony that accompanies the distance between who we think we are and where life places us. Park Shin-jun in "In the Willow Shade" is a typical Zhong character: a Korean patriot and romantic, fluent in Japanese and an admirer of Tolstoy, Park ends up a student at a driving school in Manchuria. And in his works set closer to home, Zhong always retains an awareness of how the macrophenomena of politics and history can manifest themselves within the personal lives of even the most isolated villagers. In his novella "Rain," Taiwan's post-war land reform policy serves as the catalyst for a tragic cascade of private resentments in a Meinong farming hamlet. The global scope of his local stories--particularly his own story, which saw him driven by war, politics, and his own romantic convictions from Meinong to Manchuria to Beijing and back--sometimes reminds the reader of the tale of another native of a tiny island. Zhong was a twentieth century Odysseus, pushed onto an epic journey by the great winds of his age. [DYLAN SUHER]