Remains of Life

by Wu Wu He, Michael Berry (Translator)

Overview

On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, a bloody uprising occurred unlike anything Japan had experienced in its colonial history. Before noon, the Atayal tribe had slain one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing the tribe to the brink of genocide.

Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng, a writer known as Wu He, or "Dancing Crane," investigated the Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. Remains of Life, a milestone of Chinese experimental literature, is a fictionalized account of the writer's experiences among the people who live their lives in the aftermath of this history. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, it contains no paragraph breaks and only a handful of sentences. Shifting among observations about the people the author meets, philosophical musings, and fantastical leaps of imagination, Remains of Life is a powerful literary reckoning with one of the darkest chapters in Taiwan's colonial history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231166010
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Series:	Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wu He is a native of Tainan, Taiwan, and came to prominence in 1974 with the publication of his award-winning short story, "Peony Autumn." He spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in seclusion before returning to the literary world with a string of powerful and challenging books, including Digging for Bones (1995), The Sea at Seventeen (1997), Wu He Danshui (2001), Ghost and Goblin (2005), and Chaos and Confusion (2007), and has won nearly every major national literary award upon its publication in Taiwan.

Michael Berry is professor of modern Chinese literature and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of, among others, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2005) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), and the translator of several novels, including Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up (2000), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2002), and, with Susan Chan Egan, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (2008), all from Columbia University Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Remains of Life
Afterword
Notes

Editorial Reviews

For those readers prepared to spend time on a challenging text, Wu’s novel will make for a wonderful experience. Less an examination of history than a reflection on the way ‘minority’ cultures are slowly being pushed aside by the majority, the work forces us to consider whether progress is always positive, and to think of what is being lost.

Tony's Reading List

After spending ten years living in seclusion, Wu He began publishing a series of short stories, novellas, and novels that culminated in the publication of Remains of Life. The novel stands as a singular statement, at once profound and powerful, that could only come from the brilliant literary imagination of Wu He.

Chu T'ien-wen

Wu He is one of the most innovative Chinese-language writers today, and Michael Berry is one of the best translators of Chinese. I cannot think of a modern or contemporary work of literature in the Chinese language that is comparable to Remains of Life. It deserves a place alongside great literary works dealing with genocide such as Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

Lingchei Letty Chen

A literary and translation feat. . . . Remains of Life is an important novel that touches upon the most profound aspects of life, with a depth and commitment that are all too rare in contemporary literature.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal - Ilaria Maria Sala

Remains of Life is challenging but not unrewarding, and it is, of course, politically and historically important. . . . Some may enjoy the disrup­tive effects of its style, or the tale of a man haunted by history, or Wu He’s attempts to remember a forgotten people and to under­stand dreadful events. Remains of Life has all that, and more.

South China Morning Post - Mike Cormac

Remains of Life is a bold and unsettling search for a new way to represent life in the face of desolation.

Times Literary Supplement - Chris Littlewood

Wu He's narrative is an outpouring, and only to a limited extent a story; the fascinating historical events and his encounters do make for an often engaging read, and his efforts to consider both the Mushu Incident and its aftermaths are fascinating.

The Complete Review - M. A. Orthofer

Thoughtfully and insightfully, Berry has devoted his translation to maintaining the novel’s original experimental writing techniques. . . . Reading this novel is an intellectually challenging and rewarding process.

Asian Review of Books - Yu Zhang

Remains of Life is a novel of the first order. Welding experimental language and penetrating insights into history and memory, it transcends commonly used categories such as literary movements and schools. Remains of Life is not only a landmark in modern Chinese literature but truly an epochal accomplishment.

Michelle Yeh

★ 2017-02-12
"A massacre involves a fundamental betrayal of life by life itself": searing experimental novel by the pseudonymous Taiwanese writer Wu He.Wu He the writer—the name means Dancing Crane—and Wu He the character and narrator are not quite one and the same, though this novel, originally published in Chinese in 1999, recounts events in the author's real life. Following modest success as a writer of short stories and literary novels, Chen Guocheng took up a historical and anthropological investigation of an event that Taiwan had long forgotten: the massacre of hundreds of members of Taiwan's Atayal tribe by Japanese colonial police and soldiers nearly 90 years ago. Now called Wu He, Chen ascends into the country of the Atayal to explore what happens to a people brought nearly to extinction by an act of genocide. In an onrushing, stream-of-consciousness narrative that takes a single paragraph over the length of nearly 300 pages, Wu He answers that question, drawing on the voices of native people known simply by names such as Elder, Cousin, and Girl. The people are suspicious: what, they wonder, is a stranger doing poking around in their past? "There's a hell of a lot to research when it comes to you Han Chinese," says one bluntly, "why don't you go home and research yourselves?" It's a good question, one that doesn't deter Wu He, who tucks into the indigenous fare of flying squirrel stew and the like and, as the anthropological saying has it, goes native—though not quite as native as Cousin might like, for she encourages him to chuck it all and head deeper into the mountains to become one of them and "lose yourself for the rest of your life!" In the end, the anthropologist becomes as much an object of study as the people he is researching, with all sorts of implications. A brilliant but immensely challenging work, of great interest to students of contemporary Asian fiction—and of the literature of atrocity and remembrance as well.

Kirkus Reviews