Memories of Mount Qilai: The Education of a Young Poet

by Yang Mu, John Balcom (Translation)

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War.

Taken as a whole, these evocative and allusive autobiographical essays provide a personal response to history as Taiwan transitioned from a Japanese colony to the Republic of China. Yang Mu recounts his childhood experiences under the Japanese, life in the mountains in proximity to indigenous people as his family took refuge from the American bombings, his initial encounters and cultural conflicts with Nationalist soldiers recently arrived from mainland China, the subsequent activities of the Nationalist government to consolidate power, and the island's burgeoning new manufacturing society.

Nevertheless, throughout those early years, Yang Mu remained anchored by a sense of place on Taiwan's eastern coast and amid its coastal mountains, over which stands Mount Qilai like a guardian spirit. This was the formative milieu of the young poet. Yang Mu seized on verse to develop a distinct persona and draw meaning from the currents of change reshuffling his world. These eloquent essays create an exciting, subjective realm meant to transcend the personal and historical limitations of the individual and the end of culture, "plundered and polluted by politics and industry long ago."

Genres: Poetry

296 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 2015

About the author

Yang Mu was the pen name of a Taiwanese poet, essayist and critic in Chinese language. He was born as Wang Ching-hsien on 6 September 1940 in Hualien County, Taiwan.
As one of the representative figures in the field of contemporary Taiwanese literature, his work is known for its combining of the graceful style and writing techniques of Chinese classical poetry with elements of Western culture. Apart from romantic feelings, his works also reflect strong awareness of humanistic concern, which has thus brought him widespread attention and high respect. He was named the laureate of the 2013 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, making him the first poet and the first Taiwanese writer to have won the award.

Reviews

[Joris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three years ago. On this day I would leave Taiwan after a year and a half, but not just yet. I got up at 4am and took the bus from Banqiao to Yilan for one last hike to one of Taiwan's most gracious waterfalls for an exploration and a morning splash. The path was partly overgrown and as I was the first on the trail that day I had to wield a stick to prevent the cobwebs from devouring my face every few steps. The morning sun came at the perfect angle to penetrate the valley and play magical light games with the droplets from the waterfall filling the valley. I was back in time for breakfast and pack my bags. The hike was for me the perfect way to say goodbye to the island.

I thus felt a deep connection to the way Yang Mu bids us farewell to conclude his literary autobiography. Nature is everything. It stimulates our inner and outer lives. Above all, it shapes our thoughts and connects us to a place. Hualien is possibly the best place anywhere to feel this, with the endless Pacific ocean on one side and mountain chain after maintain chain on the other, until you reach Mount Qilai, 奇萊山, at 3,605m.

The title and cover photo drew me in. 奇萊山 is high on my list of mountains to climb. But it's the deep introspections that kept me reading. Yang Mu is a master of story telling, and it sometimes felt as if I was experiencing the stories myself, rewriting my own childhood memory with bits of Yang Mu's stories. And what memories they are! The metaphors are beautiful, and the stories are full of humour and compassion. Besides deeply personal stories of love, friendship, loss and loneliness, Yang Mu touches on all the topics of Taiwanese history of that time: Japanese occupation, war, migration from China, ever changing teaching methods.

Above all, this book has strengthened my reverence for nature. It now feels disrespectful to say 奇萊山 is on my to-hike list, as if it is a box to tick. It isn't. But I do hope that one day it will grant me access to it's majestic heights, overlooking 二子山，太魯閣山，立霧山，林田山，and, of course, Hualien itself.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the November/December 2015 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Harry Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memories of Mount Qilai is a prose poem based on youthful reminiscences of Hualien and other places in eastern Taiwan. It (via this translation) is very beautiful and hypnotic, so much so that it will often make you think of other things, until you are turning the pages without absorbing or even reading the words. Yang Mu is an excellent poet, and some of his conventional, individual works are included here, including (from p. 159):

Carrying an oil paper umbrella
alone, I make my way down a
long, long and lonely lane in the rain,
pacing back and forth, hoping to encounter a
young woman knotted with sadness and hate
like a bud of lilac

However, if the cited shorter poems are emotionally compressed, with a high ratio of meaning to word, the prose poetry of the overall book is the opposite: meandering and unfocused, rather obscure. A chapter toward the end concerning a friend who committed suicide never seems to come to any point of power or intensity.

Still, though, some passages will differentiate themselves from the meandering flow and make an impression on you, such as (on p. 201)

The sound I heard, beyond being entangled in my own questioning, was the sound of bicycles braking high on the slope above the north end of the bridge, the sound of bicycle chains.

I knew it was the sound of school being let out. They must have lowered the flag, listened to the speech of exhortation, dispersed, and set off for home. Nine hundred male students were surging out, swinging identical book bags in the same color and with the same weight, their hats on their heads, in their hands, or, like mine, thrust into their book bags. I didn't attend the flag-lowering ceremony today. Starting around noon, I couldn't sit still, as a strange, unformed melody floated through my mind, as if from the other side of a high, dark, ancient wall someone abandoned himself to chanting for me a fragmented but still special and recognizable song of prudence, pronouncing words that were difficult to understand but occasionally stressing a certain expression, seemingly also what I frequently heard between sleep and wakefulness. I looked around me: the distant sky, sea, prostrate mountains, the aged banyan tree, hibiscus, canna lilies, and the beehive under the eaves, steadily growing larger by the day. 'How am I to let go, be free, release myself, and be different from others?' I repeatedly asked myself such silly questions and then when totally exhausted, 'How can I prove that I am different from others?' The blackboard was covered with proper nouns: 'Age of Enlightenment,' 'feudal lord,' 'serf,' 'guild,' 'Galileo,' 'isolationism,' and 'indulgence.'

Of course, poetry is the best proof that one is different from others. In a passion of 'unsociable eccentricity' (on p. 142), Yang asserts, 'My form of expression is my own....This is the best. No one else has come up with it before; it belongs entirely to me, appropriate, exact, and effective.'

Yang's book is subtitled 'The Education of a Young Poet.'

[Lenhardt Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you need to be Taiwanese to enjoy Yang Mu's book? No, I say. But it would help if you knew what Hualien looked like and could imagine Mu's descriptions of Taiwan's eastern coast. It's a personal and moving work, and its rhythms in Taiwanese history align with a clear-eyed portrayal of its writer. A marvelous book.