Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan: Becoming Sinophone

What can literature tell us about the ways “mainlander” (waishengren) writers articulated their changing relationships to both KMT ideology and Taiwanese nationalism? This is one of the fascinating questions posed by Phyllis Yu-ting Huang's Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan. Huang's book is a chronological study of selected works by second-generation mainlander writers, tracing their gradual, but rarely complete, disengagement from pro-unification KMT discourse after the end of martial law and the rise of “Taiwan consciousness” (Taiwan yishi). These political and cultural movements, which shifted the center of Taiwanese politics and culture to the nonmainlander populations of Taiwan, including the Hoklo, Hakka, and Indigenous peoples, radically shifted the ways mainlanders understood their relationships to nation and culture in the PRC and Taiwan. The increasing complexity of the relationship between “mainlanders” and the mainland as portrayed in literature is a process Huang characterizes in her subtitle...