Last Words from Montmartre

by Qiu Miaojin

  Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but “love” means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. “Love” is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one’s own in relation to those of the other.

  Bunny’s cage was placed at the foot of our bed. He was so lovely and active, and chewed through countless books on the shelves. When we ate, we lifted him up onto the table, and at night he kept us company when we worked or watched television. Most of all he loved to stretch out under Xu’s desk and nap. The very first thing we did upon returning home each day was to let him out of his cage and leave him out until it was time for bed and one of us locked him back up. Watching Xu play with him or feed him yogurt or add hay to his bedding or change his food or pet him softly or chase him around the apartment was the essence of all my fantasies of “home.” I wanted nothing more from life.

  After the death of his wife, André Gide wrote Et Nunc Manet in Te, a stark confession of his failed marriage. I’ve had my copy for five years and I often turned to it while writing this fiction of human nature, for Gide’s sincere account is filled with the power of love and ressentiment—it consoled me during this painful process of writing. Only a spirit of artistic sincerity can console the souls of humankind.

  Gide wrote: “What’s unique about our story is that it has no obvious contours. The time involved is too long, spanning my whole life, a continuous play, invisible, secret, and the story true.”

  Xu often laughingly protested at my overindulgent adoration of Bunny, as I picked him up and snuggled and kissed and nipped him. I think this was just me channeling affection for Xu onto Bunny. But I guess Bunny and Xu were always closer—they understood each other more naturally and had more in common. My disposition seemed distant from theirs. Once when we took a long trip together, Xu pleaded for me to bring Bunny with us instead of leaving him at home for so many days, but in the end it was out of concern for his safety that we left him behind. Xu worried that he wouldn’t have enough to eat while we were gone and moved one of the potted green plants next to his cage and when we returned we found he had eaten most of the plant’s leaves.

  The morning Xu was to leave Paris, she hurriedly snapped some pictures of him before finishing her packing. Bunny hopped in circles at her feet. At one point, Xu lifted her leg as Bunny clung to her ankle with his entire little body and hung there. My heart tightened. Bunny also couldn’t bear to see her go. Bunny had a soul, too, and knew that she was about to abandon the both of us; he knew with his brief ten months of life that he would be parted from Xu forever!

  Zoë, what do you think Bunny is doing right now?

  I’ll never forget that moment: We were on the sleeper train from Nice, and in the middle of the night I climbed up to her bunk to give her an extra blanket and that’s when she asked me the question.

  I jumped to the ground and went out to the hallway. The wind howled and pushed against the glass of the windows. The world outside was pitch-black with faint starlight. I lit a cigarette and asked myself how I could change to keep loving her.

  Zoë, when we get home, will Bunny greet us at the door wearing a suit and tie?

  Zoë—

  Of all the scenes in Angelopoulos’s films, the one that moves me the most is in Alexander the Great. Alexander, “a child of fortune,” adopts a woman in town as his mother, whom he loves. He eventually marries her, and while wearing her white wedding gown, she is shot for resisting the totalitarian regime. For the rest of his life, he loves only her. Alexander returns from the battlefield and enters his room. There is only a bed and, hanging on the wall, his mother’s bloodstained wedding gown. He says to the gown on the wall: Femme, je suis retourné. Then he lies down quietly and sleeps.

  And on it flows. I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die . . . and when I’m dead for my body to be consumed by birds and beasts, leaving only the bone of my brow for Xu . . . like Alexander, loyal to an everlasting love.

  WITNESS

  Je vous souhaite bonheur et santé

  mais je ne puis accomplir votre voyage

  je suis un visiteur.

  Tout ce que je touche

  me fait réellement souffrir

  et puis ne m’appartient pas.

  Toujours il se trouve quelqu’un pour dire:

  C’est à moi.

  Moi j’en ai rien à moi,

  avais-je dit un jour avec orgueil

  à présent je sais que rien signifie

  rien.

  Que l’on n’a même pas un nom.

  Et qu’il faut en emprunter un, parfois.

  Vous pouvez me donner un lieu à regarder.

  Oubliez-moi du côté de la mer.

  Je vous souhaite bonheur et santé.

  —THEO ANGELOPOULOS, Le pas suspendu de la cignogne

  I wish you happiness and health

  but I cannot complete your journey

  I am a visitor.

  Everything I touch

  causes me real suffering

  and does not belong to me.

  There is always someone who says:

  This is mine.

  But I did once say proudly,

  I have nothing of my own

  for now I know that nothing means

  nothing.

  That one does not even have a name.

  And that sometimes one must borrow one.

  You can give me a place to look at.

  Forget me by the seaside.

  I wish you happiness and health.

  —THEO ANGELOPOULOS, The Suspended Step of the Stork

  AFTERWORD

  Artifacts of Love: Qiu Miaojin’s Life and Letters

  TAIPEI TO PARIS

  THOUGH nearly twenty years have passed, the circumstances of Qiu Miaojin’s suicide in Paris at the age of twenty-six still inspire speculation in newspapers, scholarly journals, and across the gamut of social media in Taiwan. How did she die? Who were her lovers? Did she die of a broken heart? Qiu’s breakout novel, an accessible yet mordant work called Notes of a Crocodile (1994), gave voice to a generation of Taiwanese lesbians and earned Qiu a kind of cult status in queer circles. Soon after her death, Notes of a Crocodile won the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature in 1995 and her work catapulted from the margins into the mainstream. Her novels are taught in high schools and universities across the island, and several doctoral dissertations have tried to untangle her complex emotional grammar. At least one tribute memoir has been written (Luo Yijun’s Forgetting Sorrow, 2001), as well as a novelistic reflection by her friend Lai Hsiang-yin (Thereafter, 2012). Besides reaching a popular audience in Taiwan, Qiu’s books were recently published on the Chinese mainland—an astonishing turn, really, for not even a decade ago the only editions available there were bootleg copies circulating hand to hand in lesbian communities.

  How did the dark, experimental meditations of a young Taiwanese lesbian come to attract such a devoted and diverse following? Perhaps Qiu’s success relates to the general cultural receptivity of Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, a city whose flourishing public life and dynamic cultural scene invited a coy comparison in a recent Wall Street Journal profile to Portland, Oregon, as a place where “nature, a decent croissant and rare vinyl increasingly trumps having the latest Rolex.” The city is also widely known as one of the most “gay friendly” in Asia. Yet this kind of snapshot tends to mask not only the boiling tensions underpinning the present “liberalism” in Taipei but also the city’s complex past. Only a decade before Qiu wrote Last Words from Montmartre in Paris, the Taiwanese government had finally lifted nearly forty years of martial law, and it had been little more than a generation since the great split leading to the present deadlock between Taiwan and mainland China. “Gay rights” was a newly coined term in Chinese in the 1990s, and the memory of police raids and harassment in Taipei’s New Park, a notorious and much-loved cruising site under martial law, was
still fresh—even as a more liberal regime now tried to “clean up” the park in the name of “democratic and progressive” nationalist policies. It was also during this time that Taiwan began to lobby officially for readmission into the United Nations, having been formally expelled in 1971. As Qiu was completing Last Words from Montmartre, questions of national sovereignty and Taiwanese identity dominated public discourse, and tensions with the mainland escalated until China eventually launched “test” missiles into the Formosa Strait in an effort to influence Taiwan’s first-ever democratic presidential election. And yet if Taipei in the mid-1990s was no Portland, how do we explain Qiu’s warm reception by readers across all walks of life, beyond identity politics, nation, and even language (her books also have been translated into Japanese)? Is it the literary value of her work, or the mysterious, tragic circumstances of her death? Or was she simply in the right place at the right time?

  The answer is most likely a mix of the above. The richness of Taiwan’s history is sometimes obscured in the West by a tendency to reduce the country’s cultural identity either to the political tensions that confound cross-strait relations or to its “economic miracle” over the last thirty years. But vertiginous shifts in Taiwan’s political and cultural life over the course of the twentieth century made the island a home to many languages and cultures, and yielded a spectacular literary pluralism. Although the island was a protectorate of the Qing dynasty until 1895, it was ceded to Japan as part of the settlement from the Sino-Japanese War, and thus became a Japanese colony for fifty years, until 1945. During this half century, Taiwanese were forced to speak Japanese in public, and to learn Japanese literature, history, and culture in school, while at the same time the infrastructures for transportation and social welfare (train lines, public works) were put in place that would become a foundation for Taiwan’s economic miracle in the later part of the twentieth century. With the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, however, Taiwan was remanded in 1945 to the rule of the Nationalist Party in China. This initially seemed like good news to many Taiwanese—after half a century of Japanese rule, people were optimistic that a culturally vested Chinese leadership would better represent their interests (and would be more supportive of local dialects). But the new regime enforced the use of standard Mandarin, imposed crippling taxes, and used ruthless force to suppress local dissent and demands for representation. So brutal was this initial period of Nationalist control—involving strict censorship, curfews, “disappearances,” and, most tragically, a 1947 massacre of thousands of Taiwanese dissenters and civilians—that some citizens became nostalgic for the Japanese regime. Nevertheless, after the Chinese Communist Party took control of Mainland China in 1949, the Nationalist leadership was left to rule Taiwan for another fifty years, until the popularly elected Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian took office in 2000. Whereas Qiu’s grandparents’ generation lived under Japanese colonialism, it was the harsh rule of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists that determined the shape of public life for Qiu’s parents’ generation. By the time Qiu was a teenager in the 1980s, she was heir to a unique mix of living traditions and divergent notions of civic life: Japanese modernist aesthetics versus Chinese “anti-Communist” austerity; the experience of—and imperative to articulate—a sense of divided selves, public and private; and increasing access to a broader global “public” of Western-language literatures and cultures. When Qiu was in high school, it was normal for a young urbanite to speak Hokkien at home with her parents, Japanese with her grandparents, and Mandarin on the streets—all the while taking classes in English, French, Korean, and possibly other languages.

  When the Nationalist government lifted martial law in 1987, and with it the broad-based censorship of literary and political expression, the time was ripe for Taiwan’s literature scene to explode. Boundaries were broken, comfort zones challenged, and distinctions blurred in ways akin to the civil rights movements in the United States. Not only did Taiwan “nativist” activists now campaign for the adoption of Hokkien as a national language (itself generating debate about which language could best represent Taiwan’s current ethnic and cultural diversity), but in the 1990s there was also, as the scholar Fran Martin summarized so effectively in Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (2003), a “diversification and strengthening of a range of grassroots political movements including feminism, the Indigenous people’s movement, the trade union movement, the environmental movement, and the tongzhi [gay and lesbian] movement.” During this period, new literary journals and magazines sprang up to meet increasing levels of demand by a urban middle class hungry for literature, while cultural commerce between Taiwan and Western nations increased dramatically as numerous European and American classics were translated into Chinese for the first time. The sheer variety of literary forms emerging in this period dazzles the mind: not only did everyday readers witness an improbable “mainstreaming of a postmodernist literary aesthetic that privilege[d] narrative fragmentation, linguistic play, a contemporary urban setting, and a global imaginary” but if postmodern aesthetics didn’t appeal, a reader could now also choose from “realism, surrealism, metafiction, psychological literature (xinli wenxue), urban literature, the nostalgic ‘literature of the veteran’s neighborhood’ (juanqu wenxue), Indigenous literature, and feminist writing, [as well as] popular forms such as fantasy, mystery, martial arts fiction, and science fiction.” Figuring centrally in this emerging proliferation of literary and cultural taxonomies, moreover, was queer literature, or what Martin has called “the literature of transgressive sexuality.” Queer literature in many ways occupied a larger-than-life position in Taiwan in the decade after martial law, as public discussion about sexual subcultures increased exponentially in “newspapers, television, radio, and Internet chat rooms, as well as at universities and academic conferences.” So conspicuous a presence on the literary scene was queer literature that, for a time, it seemed as if “not a literary competition went by without at least one prize being awarded to a tongzhi-themed short story, novella, or novel,” causing one Taiwanese literary critic to remark that “homosexuality” as a topic had even “become a ‘fad.’”

  Multicultural, polyglot, literate, ambitious, and queer—such was the literature and arts scene into which Qiu was born, and such was the scene that she helped to shape. Indeed, key dates in her short life track closely with some of the early milestones I’ve already mentioned. When she was still a teenager, for instance, Qiu moved from her native Changhua County (in southeastern Taiwan) to attend the top girls’ academy in Taipei, a sort of Taiwanese Brearley School called Beiyinu, or Taipei First Girls’ School. Qiu graduated in 1987, just as martial law was lifted, and then enrolled at the prestigious National Taiwan University. While an undergraduate, just as a new generation of writers began to embrace postmodernism, Qiu began publishing short stories that were serialized in local newspapers. Not quite romans à clef, these stories featured homoerotic subtexts as well as various protagonists who bore conspicuous resemblances to the author. One of these stories won Qiu her first literary award, the Zhongyang Times short-story prize in 1989, when she was twenty. Then in 1990, the same year Taiwan’s first lesbian activist group, Wo men zhi jian (Between Us), was organized, Qiu’s novella-length story “The Lonely Crowd” won the Lianhe Literary Prize. The following year she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and also published her first collection of short stories, The Revelries of Ghosts.

  After graduating, Qiu worked for a time in Taipei as an assistant in a psychiatry clinic and then briefly as a journalist for the weekly magazine The Journalist before finding a job in a teahouse so that she could focus on completing Notes of a Crocodile. In 1992, the infamous TTV News Incident, where a television reporter surreptitiously filmed people at a Taipei lesbian bar and later broadcast it on the evening news, brought public attention to questions of “outing” and queer identity politics. Notes of a Crocodile, completed in the wake of the TTV New
s Incident and subsequent debates, chronicles the life of a lesbian university student and a “cartoon-like, non-gendered crocodile” who, despite a “frenzy of media speculation,” is determined to “conceal the fact that it is a crocodile from the public and the media by wearing a ‘person-suit.’”* Though slightly sardonic in tone, Notes was still highly accessible (as only a novel featuring a talking crocodile can be), and long before it was noticed by the judges for the China Times award, it was celebrated in queer circles and its vocabulary adopted as kind of lesbian code. Timing was therefore certainly a factor in Qiu’s literary success: She found, and also helped to create, a receptive and diverse audience for her work in Taipei in the early 1990s.

  But Qiu also had a rare gift. She possessed an innate clairvoyance and ambition that seems to pop out of nowhere in certain young writers—Rimbaud being perhaps the most famous and profound manifestation of this. Her precocious insight, however, didn’t fully bloom until she left home in 1994. At the age of twenty-five, Qiu moved to Paris to pursue graduate studies in clinical psychology and feminism at the Université de Paris VIII, where the distinguished French feminist Hélène Cixous had established France’s first graduate-level women’s studies program, the Centre d’Études Féminines (a program which, during Qiu’s time there in 1995, the government threatened to eliminate). The detonations of the Taipei literary scene well out of earshot, Qiu immersed herself in Parisian culture and read voraciously, not only Cixous’s books and essays but also works by Clarice Lispector (in French translation), André Gide, and Jean Genet. She watched as many films by Theodoros Angelopoulous and Andrei Tarkovsky as she could; rhapsodized about the sculptor Paul Landowski; and thought deeply about how to fuse these influences with her appreciation for the Japanese modernists as a way to transcend the normalizing limits of narrative structures while remaining artistically authentic. In Paris, assembling what she viewed as her masterpiece, Qiu abandoned the model of the thinly veiled autobiographical avatar that had served her so well in Notes of a Crocodile, and instead sought to incorporate a novelistic self-awareness directly into her writing. The result was a work that could hardly be classified as memoir or as epistolary romance in any traditional sense, nor could its innovations with form and language particularly fit as a strict work of fiction. As she writes in Last Words,