EATS Young Scholar Awards – Sheng Chiang

World Literature and Queer Taiwan: Notes of a Desolate Man in Translation
When Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man (荒人手記) was published in 1994, it quickly became one of Taiwan’s most celebrated novels. Winning the China Times Prize, it was canonized as a landmark of Sinophone queer literature. Yet the novel has always been controversial. At its center is Xiao Shao, a middle-aged gay intellectual reflecting on the death of his friend and former lover, Ah Yao, who succumbs to AIDS. Instead of affirming queer life, however, the narrator embraces a reactionary stance: he longs for heteronormative stability, clings to reproductive futurity, and finds solace not in activism but in Buddhist transcendence.

For many Taiwanese critics, this was both politically incorrect and ethically troubling. Liou Liang-ya argued that the text reflected Chu’s “female consciousness,” appropriating gay male subjectivities while reinforcing conservative ideologies. Chi Ta-wei warned against the dangers of such appropriation but also noted its queer potential to destabilize identity categories. Chu Wei-Cheng pointed out the risks of canonizing a text that overshadowed the voices of queer activists at a time when they were fighting for visibility in Taiwan.

In other words, Notes was never simply a novel; it was a discursive intervention in the heated debates around gender and sexuality in early 1990s Taiwan.

Queer Translation and World Literature
My own approach to this novel is through the frameworks of queer translation and world literature.

Queer translation asks how queerness itself is mediated, transformed, and even mistranslated across different cultural and linguistic contexts. It also suggests that translation is inherently queer: it destabilizes authenticity, embraces in-betweenness, and resists fixed identities.

World literature, meanwhile, invites us to consider how texts circulate beyond their original language and nation. As David Damrosch argues, works become part of world literature not because they belong to a canon but because they travel, are read in new contexts, and acquire new meanings. Pheng Cheah adds another dimension: world literature not only circulates, it also worlds—it participates in shaping new ethical and political imaginaries.

By bringing these two frameworks together, we can see how Notes of a Desolate Man not only introduces queerness to Taiwanese readers but also transforms in unexpected ways when translated into English and read abroad.

Translating Queerness in Taiwan
One of the most striking features of the novel is its explicit introduction of the word queer. Published in the same year that the Chinese term ku’er (酷兒, literally “cool kid”) was coined in Taiwan, Notes presents queer in its untranslated English form, sharply distinguishing it from “gay.” For Ah Yao, the activist, queer signified inclusivity across genders, races, and sexualities. For Xiao Shao, the conservative narrator, queer was bound to AIDS and despair.

The novel also translates queerness through its thick web of cultural references—from Lévi-Strauss to Foucault to Buddhist texts. Yet these translations often take a negative turn. Xiao Shao ridicules Foucault’s History of Sexuality and repeatedly forecloses utopian visions of queer life, reducing homosexuality to a doomed deviation from reproductive futurity.

Perhaps more problematically, Chu T’ien-wen—herself a straight-identified woman—ventriloquizes a gay male narrator. Xiao Shao’s homosexuality is often described in heterosexist terms, as a “feminine soul trapped in a masculine body.” Rather than representing lived queer experience, the novel instrumentalizes homosexuality as a philosophical problem. But paradoxically, this very act of ventriloquism also destabilizes authorship: queerness emerges through the text’s transgressive slippages, making the novel queerer than intended.

Queering the Text in English Translation
When Notes was translated into English in 1999 by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, new interpretive possibilities opened. Two elements stand out:

1. The cover image. The Taiwanese edition featured a stark, emaciated sketch of St. Sebastian, echoing the suffering body of Ah Yao. The English edition, however, chose a brightly colored, muscular St. Sebastian, reminiscent of Yukio Mishima’s homoerotic self-portrait. This aestheticized male body queered the novel visually, foregrounding eroticism rather than transcendence.
   
2. A mistranslation. On the very first page, the Buddhist term rūpa (色相), meaning “material form,” was rendered simply as “sexuality.” Where the Chinese text suggested transcendence over worldly forms, the English translation placed sexuality at the center. This mistranslation queers the text by resisting the novel’s effort to sublimate desire into emptiness.
   

In both cases, translation undermines authorial intention. What was in the original a conservative meditation on mortality becomes, in English, a text that foregrounds sexuality, desire, and corporeality.

Reception: From Reactionary to Camp
The reception of Notes also shifts dramatically across linguistic borders. In Taiwan, critics condemned Xiao Shao’s voice as ventriloquistic and inauthentically queer. In the Anglophone world, however, many readers took the opposite view. Online reviews describe the narrator as humorous, ironic, even campy. What Sinophone critics saw as reactionary despair, Anglophone readers often read as satire or exaggeration. This recalls Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as art that is “too serious to be taken seriously.” The novel’s heavy philosophical references, once treated as weighty in Taiwan, were instead read as overblown performance—queering the text through reception.

Conclusion: Queer Translation as World-Making
Notes of a Desolate Man is troubling, but also productive. Its queerness is never stable: it is translated by the author across gendered voices, mistranslated by English translators, and camped by Anglophone readers. Each layer of translation resists heteronormative foreclosure and reopens the text to new meanings. This is precisely how world literature works. As texts travel, they are misread, mistranslated, and reimagined. In the case of Notes, these processes allow queer voices—however compromised in the original—to be recuperated and reworlded in unexpected ways.

For Taiwan, often seen as peripheral in global literary circuits, this is significant. Notes of a Desolate Man shows how a text from the margins can intervene in world literature not by offering a pure or authentic representation, but by being productively mistranslated, queered, and reinterpreted across contexts. In this sense, queerness itself becomes worldly: not a fixed identity, but a practice of translation that resists capture, reclaims minoritized voices, and unsettles the very terms of representation.