Wild Kids: Two Novels about Growing Up

By Chang Ta-Chun

Translated by Michael Berry

(1993 and 1996, translated 2000)

Columbia University Press

In the 1990s, Chang Ta-Chun achieved rock-star fame in Taiwan as a writer and critic. The two coming-of-age stories in this collection are classics of Taiwanese literature.

My Kid Sister (1993)

The narrator of My Kid Sister is eight years old when his sister, Jinxin, is born. He looks at his sister’s arrival as if she is both a present intended just for him and as a signal that his own childhood is at an end. His family is uniquely broken. His grandparents live in derelict housing built quickly to house the fleeing the Kuomintang. His mother is mentally ill and his father, after a twelve-year-long affair with an artist, files for divorce. The narrator is no angel; throughout his teens, through his military service, university training, and on into his successful career as a writer, he indulges himself as an opportunistic rake. Unable to improve his conduct, he is at least self-aware. Likewise, he can see the ways that his grandfather manipulates and undermines his grandmother, and he recognizes that their marriage is built around endless conflict. He also understands the extent of his mother’s crippling obsessive behaviors, but he clearly understands that his father is exploiting his wife’s illness and wilfully contributing to her psycho-emotional decline. Chang’s narrator is a product of a patriarchal society who nevertheless can see the ways the sovereign lives of his grandmother, mother, and kid sister are eroded by the men who possess and abuse them. The narrator’s voice is well-educated, insightful, jarring, hilarious, crude, and honest to a fault. Despite his soulless womanizing, his portrayal of his sister is endearing–he loves her and supports her at every step. The upshot of his loving respect for his sister, their “listening and telling stories,” is that his portrait of Junxin pops off the page with behaviors that are eccentric, oppositional, and courageous.  

My sister took a detour through the devil’s gate of feminism, the ideology that is like thorns scraping on the back of every man, and was brought back to life. A pedantic nitpicker no more, she became cute and witty again and I had my normal sister back. Who could ask for anything better? However, instead of rejoicing, I had the same feeling I had when I drove back to that fight at Ximingding. I felt myself on the brink of being crushed–I suddenly became scared. (35)

Wild Kids (1996)

Wild Kids is the story of Hou Shichun, a “C” level middle school boy who runs afoul of an abusive principal. He decides, after assaulting the martinet, to run away from home. Why not? His mother, Jade Aroma Chen, the Commercial Queen of Taipei, is focused entirely on her career and his philandering father is fleeing town to escape his astronomic gambling debts. Hou quickly finds his way into the underworld of Taipei; his adventures suddenly turn sideways when, after a near-fatal beating, he witnesses a gang assassination. With humorous sangfroid, Hou recounts the dilemma that his “friends” face. If they assume the assassin saw the boy semiconscious in the van, they should turn him over to be killed by the rival gang. Worse, Hou’s mother has used her pull to get the entire Taiwan police force to search for her son and the criminals who must have kidnapped him. Somehow, the two gangs negotiate a detente, and as the police are incompetent and his parents file for divorce, Hou continues to tag along with Little Horse, Big Bull, Horsefly, Little Xinjiang, Loop, and Annie. He lives in a crowded double-decker bus in a junkyard, spending his days stripping parts from wrecked cars and eventually learning to operate the yard’s crane and car crusher. As brutal and bleak as the lives of the gang are, Chang leavens his portrayal of the “losers” of the world with humor, respect, and awe. He finds a home with these broken gangsters and molls, and it comes as no surprise when he discovers that they are all adult orphans. Like Hou, Chang agrees that the young boy is getting an education about life and the world that will far outstrip his experience in the classroom. Incidentally, Chang alludes to the 1996 election in the ROC in Taiwan, the organized crime figure Big Brother Luo or Luo Fuzhou, who won a seat in the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan, and the 1996 kidnapping of Legislative Yuan representative Lao Xueguang.

If you have watched soap operas before, you know that as soon as an adult tells a child someone has got to go far, far away, it means that this somebody is going to die. As my father told me this, I thought, can’t you wait a while before you die? This incident of the super-loser Mr. Hippo falsely accusing me of burning the class geography exams hadn’t even been resolved yet! But after that my father didn’t say a word; it was like after you put in your last coin and the machine suddenly shuts down and only the words GAME OVER appear on the screen. (138)