Pai Hsien-yung Research Articles

A Study on the English Translation of “Taipei People” from the Perspective of Adaptation Theory

The collection of short stories, Taipei People, is one of the representative works of the famous writer Pai Hsien-yung. In this book, Pai portrays characters from different regions and fields vividly, displaying a contrast between the past and the present. The stories in this book are rich in Chinese culture and customs, which is concerned in this paper. This paper compares and analyzes the English translation of Taipei People from four aspects from the perspective of the adaptation theory, namely, contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, salience of the adaptation processes. It is found that the translators consider the differences in language, culture and social environment between China and western countries, and make translation choices of different degrees of salience of adaptation. They adopt different translation strategies to dynamically adapt to the original book and target readers, make flexible choices according to different contexts, which show the salience and purpose of translators in the translation process. In view of the literary value of Taipei people, this paper hopes to provide some reference for more translators to translate and disseminate Chinese literature.

Radiant Reflections: Crystal Boys, Rose Boy, and Taiwan's Queer History

“The essay delves into Taiwan's queer history through the lens of two pivotal events: the "Rose Boy" Incident and the publication of the groundbreaking novel, Crystal Boys. It explores the interconnectedness of these events and their lasting impact on Taiwanese society's perception of LGBT individuals. Crystal Boys, authored by Pai Hsien-yung in the repressive era of martial law, dared to depict the lives of gay men in Taipei's New Park, challenging societal norms and censorship. The New Park emerged as both a refuge and a perilous space for the gay community, where they formed bonds amidst societal oppression. The essay also discusses the subsequent activism sparked by Crystal Boys, leading to milestones like the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Conversely, the tragic death of Ye Yongzhi, dubbed the "Rose Boy," exposed the harsh realities faced by LGBT youth in Taiwan, igniting societal outrage and calls for change. Through literary analysis and historical context, the essay illustrates how art and activism intersect to shape queer narratives and propel the fight for equality in Taiwan and beyond.”.

The self-referentiality of two kinds of people --Character Types and Their Psychological Analysis in Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People

Two distinct types of people are featured in Pai Hsien-yung's novel "Taipei People": the ‘Root Breakers,’ who have severed their ties to the past, and the ‘Root Seekers,’ who are deeply rooted in their memories. This essay delves deeply into the inner lives of the characters from the author's perspective while also providing a detailed analysis of these two categories of characters and examining the interactions and collisions between various characters in Taipei People.

Exploring the Image of Hometown in the Eyes of Exiles

Pai Hsien-yung wrote in "Taipei People" about a number of cities that are the so-called hometowns of the group of "Taipei People" who are actually "foreigners". They are in Taipei, but their hearts are always thinking of their hometown in mainland China. For them, their hometown is not only a space where they used to live, but also a carrier of their fond memories, a symbol of their hometown culture, and even a heterotopian space with fantasy. In the eyes of people living in Taipei, their hometown is actually a spiritual space representing their hometown culture. Whether it is nostalgia for their hometown or remembrance of the past, it is nothing but a manifestation of cultural identity. Taking Pai Hsien-yung's Taipei People as an example, this paper explores the image of the hometown in the eyes of exiles by combining textual analysis and cultural research. By analysing the characters and emotional expressions in the novel, it is found that the hometown is not only the space where these "Taipei people" used to live, but also the carrier of their beautiful memories and the symbol of their hometown culture. In their eyes, the hometown is characterised as a fantastical heterotopian space. Through their nostalgia for their hometowns and their memories of the past, these displaced persons express their identification with their hometown culture. Therefore, in the eyes of the exiles, the hometown is a kind of spiritual space, representing the intrinsic value of the hometown culture.

A Companion to The Story of the Stone. A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide, written by Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-Yung

A Companion to The Story of the Stone. A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide, written by Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-Yung

Homotexualizing Niezi: From Sinful Sons to Crystal Boys

In 1990, Gay Sunshine Press published the English translation of a Taiwanese novel titled Niezi [Sinful Sons]. The novel, written by the modernist author Pai Hsien-yung and translated by Howard Goldblatt as Crystal Boys, became such a sensation among Anglophone American readers that the publisher later put out a paperback edition. Blatantly marketed as the first modern Asian gay novel, the paperback edition features on its cover a half-naked jock in jeans against a dark chartreuse backdrop. Such marketing schticks—highlighting the theme of queer erotics and picking a cover image that looks like a 90s Calvin Klein advertisement—attracted many queer readers who were curious about cultural uniqueness and universal experience of being gay. Yet, little did they know that when the original novel first came out in 1983, it was not even considered by mainstream Taiwanese critics and readers as gay-themed fiction.
 In this paper, I investigate the homotextualization and canonization of Niezi, with an emphasis on the shaping force of translation on the reading and reception of Pai’s novel. By synthesizing a select few representative pieces of scholarship on Niezi published in the 1980s, I demonstrate the connection between early critics’ evasive interpretations of queer motifs in Niezi and Taiwan’s conservative sociocultural milieu. Next, I present a historicized, comparative reading of Pai’s original work and its English translation Crystal Boys, with special attention to paratexts, the reconfiguration of untranslatables in the English translation, and the politics of anglicizing non-Euro-American, non-normative sexual landscapes. I argue that translation added to the complex production of meanings, facilitated the interactions between the text, the critic, the reader, and the author, and contributed to the queer iconization of Niezi.

As a Cultural and Spiritual Homeland: Pai Hsien-yung and His Kunqu Peony Pavilion: The Young Lovers’ Version

As a Cultural and Spiritual Homeland: Pai Hsien-yung and His Kunqu Peony Pavilion: The Young Lovers’ Version

同志文學翻譯之叙事建構：以白先勇作品《孽子》的英譯爲例

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 一直以來，同性戀都是一個敏感話題，甚至是社會禁忌。中文“同志文學”的書寫和翻譯在在於文化與意識形態紛繁衝突的語境下進行。雖然近年國際翻譯研究學界愈來愈關注同志文學翻譯議題，相關研究在中文學界卻並未得到重視。蒙娜•貝克（Mona Baker）於《翻譯與衝突：叙事性闡釋》中指出，透過建構策略（framing strategies），“譯者、出版商、編輯以及參與到整個翻譯出版過程的相關人員，在譯文中對原文叙事進行强調、弱化或者改變”。基於此，本文透過分析白先勇小說《孽子》的英譯本，討論各種語言及非語言符號資源如何被運用，從而實現標示等建構策略重構譯文，並最終對譯文進行凱斯•哈維（Keith Harvey）提出的“同志主題强化”（gayed translation）。
 Homosexuality has always been a sensitive topic and even a social taboo. Translation studies in the West have witnessed an increase in academic attention given to the translation of gay literature in the past two decades. In contrast, it has remained largely unheeded in the Chinese scholarly world, where the writing and translation of gay literature has always been closely associated with cultural and ideological conflicts. In her Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, Mona Baker points out that through framing strategies, “translators and interpreters-in collaboration with publishers, editors and other agents involved in the interaction-accentuate, undermine or modify aspects of the narrative (s) encoded in the source text or utterance.” This paper is a study of the English translation of the Chinese founding work of gay literature, Niezi (Crystal Boys) by Pai Hsien-yung, which proves to be a supporting example of what Keith Harvey calls “gayed translation,” through labeling strategies and other non- linguistic resources.

Re-negotiating domesticating and foreignizing: bridging The Symposium and Niezi through the imagery of emptiness

This article attempts to rethink the dichotomy of domesticating and foreignizing in translation. With a close examination of Howard Goldblatt’s Crystal Boys, a translation of Bai Xianyong’s (Pai Hsien-yung) Niezi (Nieh-tzu), it suggests how the English version has missed one of the most important themes in the novel, namely, the different images of darkness and emptiness within the characters and the city. It conducts a brief comparison between Niezi/Crystal Boys and The Symposium, another important text on male–male relationship in Western literature, suggesting that the image of the wound and emptiness is equally significant in Plato. Therefore, the two texts on a similar subject have missed an important link because of a reader-oriented approach of translation. This paper argues that the concept of domesticating and foreignizing cannot be clearly differentiated in some cases: while a foreignized strategy could produce a feeling of familiarity to Western readers, the approach of domestication has disconnected the Chinese text from its Western counterpart. The study has its implication on translation and communication: perhaps a true cross-cultural understanding should be achieved through acknowledging and recognizing the presence of the gap (both within the text and between civilizations), instead of hiding and concealing their differences.

Where Past Meets Present: The Emergence of Gay Identity in Pai Hsien-yung's Niezi

Where Past Meets Present: The Emergence of Gay Identity in Pai Hsien-yung's Niezi

From Glass Clique to Tongzhi Nation: Crystal Boys, Identity Formation, and the Politics of Sexual Shame

This article proposes a historically and movement-wise contextualized reading of Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys, known as the first “gay” novel in Taiwan. As the novel was taken up as a signifier in the new tongzhi politics in 1990s Taiwan, the article shows, its legacy as a historical representation of male prostitution culture was left out entirely. Through genealogical investigation, the article argues that tongzhi politics and subjectivity as articulated through Crystal Boys is founded upon the normative exclusion of the gendered prostitute subject and that such a repudiation is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order upheld by Taiwan's state culture. In querying this limiting continuity, this artcile demonstrates in particular that the novel represents a particular “state affect” of gendered sexual shame linked to prostitution, a shame that later came to be displaced by the emerging tongzhi_movement through its political praxis of “coming out.” By tracing the trajectory of identity formation process via the (re)articulation of Crystal Boys, this paper thus highlights the centrality of prostitution in the state production of heteronormativity in Taiwan as it argues for a queer politics that critically engages that normative condition.

Immigration, Nationalism, and Suicide: Pai Hsien-yung and Pai Ching-jui's Chinese Obsessions and American Dreams

Immigration, Nationalism, and Suicide: Pai Hsien-yung and Pai Ching-jui's Chinese Obsessions and American Dreams

性別符碼、異質發聲－白先勇小說與電影改編之互文研究

There are four films, The Last Night of Madame Chin, Madam Yu-Ching, Love's Lone Flower, and The Crystal boys adapted from the novels of Pai Hsien-yung in 1980s. Owing to the high reputations of the novels as well as of film directors, prestigious for its social concern of the minority groups, the four films, including its production and casting, and the representation of homosexuality have gained intense attention. The numerous lectures and newspaper reports and interviews all become part of the ”Literature and Film” phenomena in 1980s. By comparing and contrasting the four films and Pai Hsien-yung's novels, this thesis explores how the concept of gender and homosexuality are reconfigured and represented in the mass media.

At the intersection of the global and the local: Representations of male homosexuality in fictions by Pai Hsien-yung, Li Ang, Chu Tien-wen and Chi Ta-wei

(2003). At the intersection of the global and the local: Representations of male homosexuality in fictions by Pai Hsien-yung, Li Ang, Chu Tien-wen and Chi Ta-wei. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 191-206.

Celestials and Commoners: Exiles in Pai Hsien-Yung's Stories

(1984). Celestials and Commoners: Exiles in Pai Hsien-Yung's Stories. Monumenta Serica: Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 409-423.

“Crowded Hours” Revisited: The Evocation of the Past in Taipei jen

As an epigraph to Taipei jen (Taipei residents), Pai Hsien-yung could not have chosen a better poem for effectively evoking the mood of sadness and that gripping sense of loss emanating from the “wild grasses” and the “slanting sun” of his stories, for dramatically bringing out the contrasts between the past and the present, between age and youth—one of the memorable features of this anthology. Inasmuch as “Black Coat Lane” can be read as a tiao-ku (mourning the past) poem, so can Taipei jen be read as an elegy on the final dissolution of an ancient culture. That Pai Hsien-yung should have chosen Taipei as “the center of paralysis” is only logical, since the very concept of life for so many of his Taipei jen depends on the observation of rituals. By rituals, I mean a practice or a pattern of behavior repeated in a prescribed manner. Understood in these terms, such a story as “State Funeral” could not have taken place anywhere other than in Taipei. Where else could the death of a Kuomintang general be honored in such a pompous manner? And where could Tou Fu-jen (in “Wandering in the Garden”) stage her k'un-ch'ü dinner party if not in Taipei? In Taipei, if she chooses to, she could still prepare a cup of tea with as-much loving care as Yün Niang did in Fousheng Lu-chi (Six Chapters of a Floating Life), even if it is no longer possible to serve it in the immaculate manner of a Miao Yü in Hung-lou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber).

“Crowded Hours” Revisited: The Evocation of the Past in Taipei jen

As an epigraph to Taipei jen (Taipei residents), Pai Hsien-yung could not have chosen a better poem for effectively evoking the mood of sadness and that gripping sense of loss emanating from the “wild grasses” and the “slanting sun” of his stories, for dramatically bringing out the contrasts between the past and the present, between age and youth—one of the memorable features of this anthology. Inasmuch as “Black Coat Lane” can be read as a tiao-ku (mourning the past) poem, so can Taipei jen be read as an elegy on the final dissolution of an ancient culture. That Pai Hsien-yung should have chosen Taipei as “the center of paralysis” is only logical, since the very concept of life for so many of his Taipei jen depends on the observation of rituals. By rituals, I mean a practice or a pattern of behavior repeated in a prescribed manner. Understood in these terms, such a story as “State Funeral” could not have taken place anywhere other than in Taipei. Where else could the death of a Kuomintang general be honored in such a pompous manner? And where could Tou Fu-jen (in “Wandering in the Garden”) stage her k'un-ch'ü dinner party if not in Taipei? In Taipei, if she chooses to, she could still prepare a cup of tea with as-much loving care as Yün Niang did in Fousheng Lu-chi (Six Chapters of a Floating Life), even if it is no longer possible to serve it in the immaculate manner of a Miao Yü in Hung-lou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber).