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The Taste of Apples
From the preeminent writer of Taiwanese nativist fiction and the leading translator of Chinese literature come these poignant accounts of everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. Huang is frequently cited as one of the most original and gifted storytellers in the Chinese language, and these selections reveal his genius.
In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in "Xiaoqi's Cap" a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl.
Huang's characters―generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty―come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.
In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in "Xiaoqi's Cap" a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl.
Huang's characters―generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty―come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.
288 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2001
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About the author
Huang Chunming
15 books7 followersHuang Chunming (黃春明, also Hwang Chun-ming; born February 13, 1935) is a Taiwanese literary figure and teacher. Huang writes mainly about the tragic and sometimes humorous lives of ordinary Taiwanese people, and many of his short stories have been turned into films, including The Sandwich Man (1983).
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 22, 2018
It has been months since I put my pen to paper. Words keep struggling against my emotions, the range of my imagination jammed up in literary reflections. As I sat with an open book in my lap, Huang Chun-ming’s characters gazing right back into my face, I pondered on the thought of how human survival becomes magnified when human condition thrives at the lowest rung of the societal ladder. Marginalised people, forgotten lives overlooked by the socioeconomic indicators, suffering at the hands of their affluent counterparts and their stories steeped in inherent universality, hesitant in finding an ardent voice to uncover the social process of basic human survival conflicted in a world of contradiction and confliction.
“ Ah-cang , the next time you come home, try to bring a fish back with you. It’s not easy getting a saltwater fish up here on the mountain. Bring a big one if you can.”
The cooked bonito wrapped in taro leaf swayed heartlessly into fragmented happy endings. The saltwater fish fairly symbolizes the temporary victories harboured by a child on a threshold of youth, only to mercilessly fade into a vague far-fetched desire bearing harsh realities of trust and resentment. Self-doubt, a sense of personal inadequacies creeps through the rickety windows of paranoia. A yearned escape from loneliness and fatigue seeks a satisfying reprieve in an infant’s smile. A loving father on a verge of a mental breakdown dons his “sandwich-man” costume for he has always been his son’s ‘big doll’ “Oh! I’m Ah-long’s big doll, his big doll!!”
Trepidations over birth control and poverty find a respite in the scaly outlines of ringworms patterned on infected bodies. Minor events captured in everyday subsistence become majorly momentous in these impoverished lives. The currency of luck shines in most dreadful ordeals. A looming tragedy compensating a family’s fortune, an unforeseen affluence now a commonplace in penurious existence is filled with a surge of anxiety and guilt over bewildering kismet. The sour taste of the apples devoured with a demure crunch was sweetened with every bite as the thought of a luxury unknown heightened with the chorus of noisy munching.
"Principles I’ve held on to tenaciously for many years and that have formed my unique personality and temperament – are they to be cast aside now? Then why have them in the first place? It wouldn’t seem like the real me without them. "
Caught up in an ambivalent world of mangled moralities, a mask of pleasantries worn to handle two onerous affairs makes a young office employee question the value of adhered ideologies and the inevitability of primary survival. The wounds of a tragic Japanese-Chinese history (1930s) conflicted with the provisional role of a “pimp” to entertain visiting Japanese businessmen , a quest to move from the bitter past resulting in artful linguistic diplomacy and friendly sayonora/zaijian greetings in a rapidly changing societal mores.
"Memories of the past are always fond ones and this was especially true for these men in their twilight years; only their past instilled a sense of pride."
With the advent of modernisation and Pedi cabs, the aging men of a rural village, the gong-beaters of a quaint town, migrant workers and the unaltered rural landscapes, all caught between the old and new are propelled into a state of hopelessness, a feeling of invisibility blending into the inability to adapt to change. The present seem to be crumbling into prospects of an innovative future overshadowing humble heritages and traditionalistic customs. Amid the peals of laughter, the drowning of an old cat demarcated the irreversible modernisation and a tale of stubbornness of a man and his rebellion. A world of absurdities and turmoil is formed when two-sign painters get entangled in the web of technology and media in metropolitan culture. The beats of Han Qinzai’s gong succumbing to the monopoly of pedicabs, a desperate man holding onto the last crumbs of his fading fortune seeks salvage in ghost stories and a group of vagrants for a momentary boost of a dignified life. For, when fortune goes missing from one’s life, all a man has left are the remains of his reputation, a final refuge to belong somewhere in this societal structure. The concept of losses and gains and a lackadaisical attitude spun chronicles of two pressure cooker salesmen in a little coastal town. The thin line between faith and deception quivering between courage and cowardice hurls unforeseen folds of events wrecking illusions of perfection. The disfigurement of harsh reality lay bare underneath Xiaoqi’s cap signalling underlying societal metaphors.
..………. I figure that the hardest compromise to strike would be with myself, for if I put a side my principles, what would I have left?
Huang Chun-ming’s short stories penned in circa 1960-70s, exclusively focuses on the intricacies of the then thriving Taiwanese society; its rural folk being the crucial element. The so-called “ordinary folk”( a term I detest to use, for these very people exhibit extraordinary grit of survival), societal rejects who are witnesses to a hostile socio-economic milieu, coping with effects of illiteracy , debilitating poverty , migration to urban cities, adherence to conformist dogmas , muddled self-worth , modernisation and callousness of urban life. Human existence at its most detrimental stage. Nevertheless, what is remarkable about these engaging stories is the array of characters that come alive through the subtle yet sincere prose narrating their unique tales, their robust presence felt throughout numerous incidents spanning across their lives from the countryside to the metropolitan cities. Huang neither pities his characters nor want his readers to do the same. In the despair of an obsolete existence what is desperately searched is wisdom and dignity, a need to be acknowledged and cherished in a world where remorse overpowers elation, where the reservations of the past are carried in a shaky present, dreaming of an uncertain future and all a basic survival needs is a true sense of humanity.
July 22, 2022
There’s something so wonderful about how Huang writes that makes me want to linger on the scenes that he conjures and the ways in which they come to life. His characters are marginalized and/or working-class, down on their luck, often enraptured by circumstances out of their control (as Huang in “Sayonara / Zaijian” puts it, “I was squaring off with the Gargantuan society […] caught up in a violent windstorm”) and isolated from friends and family. I couldn’t help but sympathize with them (except for Wuxiong, man’s incel-coded fr). To name a few from these short stories, there’s old man Ah-sheng, who just wants those dirty pool-builders to not ruin Clear Springs, Jiang Ah-fa and Ah-gui’s scruffy family of seven (which the book follows for two stories, yay! except where did Ah-cang go??), and Kunshu, the ad-man who has to dress like a clown and really just needs a big hug at the end of his story, man. But Huang doesn’t endlessly dwell on and pity the plight of these characters—rather, their struggles are hardy and whimsy. Here's a passage I really liked:
In essence, these are stories of the benshengren (本省人)—the Han Chinese people who arrived in the island of Taiwan before 1945 and the Chinese Civil War—and their shifting positions in society after infamous running dog of imperialism Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT take over Taiwan (for a great collection of stories about the waishengren [外省人], see Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People). Regarded as a “national treasure writer of Taiwan,” Huang’s humanist work is part of the larger Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue (乡土文学), or “native-soil” / “nativist” literature movement, which arose in the 60s and 70s against the backdrop of KMT “modernization” in an attempt to construct an “indigenous” Taiwan/ese literature and highlight a burgeoning Taiwan/ese consciousness (there were emotionally and nationally-charged literary debates over this beginning in the 80s—as in, what is Taiwan lit? Taiwanese lit? is it part of Chinese lit? From these skirmishes between native-soil proponents and opponents [i.e. nativists and unificationists], anyone can tell that this was symptomatic of the new mission of nation-building and extrication from Chinese identity that began in the latter half of the twentieth-century. See Xiaobing Tang’s essay on this debate for more.).
Against encroaching urbanization and industrialization, native-soil stories primarily focus at capturing the rural and village life of the benshengren and their attempts to grapple with the changes effected in their lives. This sets the stage for Huang’s realist stories in this collection: Ah-cang’s prized bonito fish is run over by a truck, Ah-fa migrates with his family up north in search for a good job (and gets hit by a car driven by an Amerikan military colonel), Ah-li promises money he can’t earn to his mother back in Jin village, you get the idea. The emerging predominance of capitalist relations of production precipitates changes in social relations: Kunshu’s story, narrated through flashbacks, inner monologues, and stream-of-consciousness, in “His Son’s Big Doll” is emblematic of the new sort of alienation engendered by this transition from old to new. Kunshu’s job as an ad-man (“sandwich man”) is introduced as an originally Amerikan occupation, in which he dresses up as a 19th-century European soldier with make-up and all and holds up giant movie boards on his shoulders (honestly I couldn’t imagine him as anything but a clown for some reason). The work is humiliating, precarious, and, most of all, estranging. When Kunshu finally finds a better job and takes off his ridiculous outfit, his baby son cannot recognize him. The story ends with Kunshu desperately slathering make-up on his face, while his confused wife Ah-zhu asks why. God, I don't know if I'm even doing this scene justice. If you read just one of these stories, read this one!
The task of the native-soil movement was to claim a uniquely “native” Taiwanese subjectivity against the others of the authoritarian KMT ruling government (and its crude anti-communist official culture) and communist PRC abroad (and thus, sovereignty for both literature and nation)—of course, in practice this was required much historical twisting-and-turning along with the help of Cold War discourse. The most obvious issue here is that, in search for a “native” and “indigenous” subjectivity, one runs up against the actual indigenous peoples living in Taiwan, who have lived through the Han Chinese migrations, Japanese occupation, and Amerikan-sponsored KMT terror. In the settler-nationalist imaginary, these indigenous peoples are simply left out while a settler claim on the land is asserted—Tuck and Yang construe these as “settler moves-to-innocence”—and Huang’s work is no exception to this. But don't take this as a simple and absolute condemnation. Rather, it's part of what makes interpretation interesting. I don't find today's prospects all too bright in terms of where the DPP and Taiwanese nativists may go, but the settler imaginaries of the benshengren, who have unusually only recently gained some sort of symbolic sovereignty, are super interesting (thinking about Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race, which I've read somewhat recently).
I wish could write more, but sometimes you just gotta jot down a bit before you forget about the whole thing entirely (the prospect of writing this review has kinda existed in my head for a few months now). In any case, this is a really enjoyable collection of short stories!
The policeman walked over from the reception desk and told Ah-gui, "Mr. Jiang is no danger—his legs were broken, that's all. He'll be out of surgery soon." From his expression and tone of voice, plus the few words she understood, Ah-gui had a rough idea of what he was getting at. She glanced at the reception desk as the foreigner, a comforting smile on his face and a foreign nurse beside him, walked up to her. He began talking feverishly, bending at the waist to make hand motions first against his left leg, then his right; then he nodded. Just then, to everyone's surprise, the mute girl, seeming to comprehend what he was saying, walked up to him, patted his leg, and began grunting and gesturing. The foreigner smiled and nodded (146).
In essence, these are stories of the benshengren (本省人)—the Han Chinese people who arrived in the island of Taiwan before 1945 and the Chinese Civil War—and their shifting positions in society after infamous running dog of imperialism Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT take over Taiwan (for a great collection of stories about the waishengren [外省人], see Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People). Regarded as a “national treasure writer of Taiwan,” Huang’s humanist work is part of the larger Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue (乡土文学), or “native-soil” / “nativist” literature movement, which arose in the 60s and 70s against the backdrop of KMT “modernization” in an attempt to construct an “indigenous” Taiwan/ese literature and highlight a burgeoning Taiwan/ese consciousness (there were emotionally and nationally-charged literary debates over this beginning in the 80s—as in, what is Taiwan lit? Taiwanese lit? is it part of Chinese lit? From these skirmishes between native-soil proponents and opponents [i.e. nativists and unificationists], anyone can tell that this was symptomatic of the new mission of nation-building and extrication from Chinese identity that began in the latter half of the twentieth-century. See Xiaobing Tang’s essay on this debate for more.).
Against encroaching urbanization and industrialization, native-soil stories primarily focus at capturing the rural and village life of the benshengren and their attempts to grapple with the changes effected in their lives. This sets the stage for Huang’s realist stories in this collection: Ah-cang’s prized bonito fish is run over by a truck, Ah-fa migrates with his family up north in search for a good job (and gets hit by a car driven by an Amerikan military colonel), Ah-li promises money he can’t earn to his mother back in Jin village, you get the idea. The emerging predominance of capitalist relations of production precipitates changes in social relations: Kunshu’s story, narrated through flashbacks, inner monologues, and stream-of-consciousness, in “His Son’s Big Doll” is emblematic of the new sort of alienation engendered by this transition from old to new. Kunshu’s job as an ad-man (“sandwich man”) is introduced as an originally Amerikan occupation, in which he dresses up as a 19th-century European soldier with make-up and all and holds up giant movie boards on his shoulders (honestly I couldn’t imagine him as anything but a clown for some reason). The work is humiliating, precarious, and, most of all, estranging. When Kunshu finally finds a better job and takes off his ridiculous outfit, his baby son cannot recognize him. The story ends with Kunshu desperately slathering make-up on his face, while his confused wife Ah-zhu asks why. God, I don't know if I'm even doing this scene justice. If you read just one of these stories, read this one!
The task of the native-soil movement was to claim a uniquely “native” Taiwanese subjectivity against the others of the authoritarian KMT ruling government (and its crude anti-communist official culture) and communist PRC abroad (and thus, sovereignty for both literature and nation)—of course, in practice this was required much historical twisting-and-turning along with the help of Cold War discourse. The most obvious issue here is that, in search for a “native” and “indigenous” subjectivity, one runs up against the actual indigenous peoples living in Taiwan, who have lived through the Han Chinese migrations, Japanese occupation, and Amerikan-sponsored KMT terror. In the settler-nationalist imaginary, these indigenous peoples are simply left out while a settler claim on the land is asserted—Tuck and Yang construe these as “settler moves-to-innocence”—and Huang’s work is no exception to this. But don't take this as a simple and absolute condemnation. Rather, it's part of what makes interpretation interesting. I don't find today's prospects all too bright in terms of where the DPP and Taiwanese nativists may go, but the settler imaginaries of the benshengren, who have unusually only recently gained some sort of symbolic sovereignty, are super interesting (thinking about Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race, which I've read somewhat recently).
I wish could write more, but sometimes you just gotta jot down a bit before you forget about the whole thing entirely (the prospect of writing this review has kinda existed in my head for a few months now). In any case, this is a really enjoyable collection of short stories!
February 3, 2017
Insightful, moving short stories about the Taiwanese countryside and the people there. Compassionate portraits of people struggling with poverty, work pressures, a changing economy, national identity. It gave me a little window into Taiwan and the experiences of the people there over the past several decades.
July 20, 2021
In the preface, Chun-ming writes that his American translator describes his stories as being "Faulknerian in style and tone." Maybe that's true. There are certainly parallels between the two in terms of setting and characters. Like Faulkner, Chun-ming chooses a rural setting for almost all his stories, and his characters are what some might describe as simple, uneducated, "salt of the earth" types. Again like his American peer, Chun-ming explores the socio-economic effects of modernity on rural life. But I would add that there is also a hint of Dostoevsky in these stories. Often Chun-ming's characters struggle with their morals, and the outer conflict is mostly overshadowed by their inner conflicts. That said, there is always a spectre looming, a force greater than the character's agency that seems to be determining the outcomes of these stories. It's hard to pinpoint what that force is: is it Fate, is it Progress/Urbanization, is it a community in the throes of an identity crisis? Maybe all of these things.
What I found most ingenious about this collection is how it's ordered: there is a clear progression from rural to urban. The first story is totally isolated, and as you move through the subsequent stories you eventually end up in a story that takes place partly in Taipei and partly on a train (a symbol of modernity). As you progress through the book, your journey kind of mirrors the urbanization of Taiwan. It's a pretty cool thought, I think.
The last thing to note that I haven't mentioned is just how funny some of these stories are or how absurd some of the situations and outcomes end up being. Chun-ming, despite tackling some heavy subjects, displays his sense of humour, which is great.
A good collection. Shoutout to ML for gifting this to me.
What I found most ingenious about this collection is how it's ordered: there is a clear progression from rural to urban. The first story is totally isolated, and as you move through the subsequent stories you eventually end up in a story that takes place partly in Taipei and partly on a train (a symbol of modernity). As you progress through the book, your journey kind of mirrors the urbanization of Taiwan. It's a pretty cool thought, I think.
The last thing to note that I haven't mentioned is just how funny some of these stories are or how absurd some of the situations and outcomes end up being. Chun-ming, despite tackling some heavy subjects, displays his sense of humour, which is great.
A good collection. Shoutout to ML for gifting this to me.
October 28, 2024
I totally understand the comparison with Hemingway.
Yet, there is some proper, original value here.
This is a collection of stories of rural people who are overwhelmed by the process of modernisation and globalisation.
The Gong Beater - I swear - is one of the best pieces of tragicomedy I’ve ever come across.
Yet, there is some proper, original value here.
This is a collection of stories of rural people who are overwhelmed by the process of modernisation and globalisation.
The Gong Beater - I swear - is one of the best pieces of tragicomedy I’ve ever come across.
January 27, 2025
A little overly slow and probably missing a lot due to translation, but full of vivid characters.
May 20, 2025
Stories from 60-70s Taiwan mostly about tensions between rural vs urban folks. Clever titles and some touching situations. It touches on the hardships of poverty and illiteracy and ends with a funny story about a businessman hosting some guests from Japan. All were previously published in magazines.
December 23, 2016
Written in the 60's and 70's in a ‘’nativist’’ style, these short stories portray life in rural Taiwan with the encroachment of modernization. I think I see some remnants of the background they’re set against in the small buses climbing their way uphill on the outskirts of Beitou, in moon blocks clattering on temple floors or in the raucous Hokkien conversations of the elderly. Colourful dragons perched on roof ridges and folk religion now serve as picturesque counterpoints to the towering modernity of Taipei 101 and the ingenuity of one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, but they used to play a more central role in a society embarking on the path to development. Huang populates this transitional world with characters that are poignant and humorous -at times even grotesque- and always very human and relatable, whether they’re a boy pedaling a rickety bicycle up a mountain who fails to please his grandpa or a poverty-stricken father struggling for the affection of his infant child. All nine stories put together paint a composite picture of the island, but my personal favourites were ‘’The Taste of Apples,’’ in which an American military advisor changes the lives of a disadvantaged family and ‘’Sayonara/Zaijian,’’ which features tensions with Japanese businessmen and an interpreter who steps out of line to teach a lesson or two.
For me, visiting places is traveling in space only; reading literature is also traveling in time and gives me a better understanding of the country while living here. Perhaps more importantly, literature appeals to the universal, to the common emotions we all share underneath superficial differences that may seem unbreachable.
For me, visiting places is traveling in space only; reading literature is also traveling in time and gives me a better understanding of the country while living here. Perhaps more importantly, literature appeals to the universal, to the common emotions we all share underneath superficial differences that may seem unbreachable.
March 17, 2013
Huang Chun-ming's lyrical, tragic writing style poignantly captures the melancholy, fragility and loss of the common people in the face of modernization and cultural transformation. The characters are always well crafted. After reading his short stories, you get this heartache, and the sense of inevitability. Excellent selection.
December 9, 2013
My first jaunt into Taiwanese literature-these beautiful stories read like a photo album. They gave me a colorful background to all the mysterious activities occurring around me in Taiwan.
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