I was eight when I first read 张晓风. 《我在》 was the one that opened my world. There was a period of time I was obsessed with writing the character 在 (zài). It means being here and present. Reading 《我在》, the piece built on a single word, I saw the way her sentences moved and connected the small dignity of a child’s presence to the bigger world around her.
I read her as 散文家, or an essayist. The school curriculum had filed her there. So had every anthology I’d ever pulled off a shelf.
Today I learned she also wrote 《潘渡娜》 in 1968. Pandora, in the Taiwanese transliteration; the mainland would later render it 潘多拉. The story, published in 中国时报 on September 12 of that year, is now recognized in Taiwanese SF circles as the first piece of Chinese-language science fiction. 1968. A year before Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Years before almost anything English-language readers think of as the start of feminist SF.
She wrote it in a room that hadn’t been built. The terms 科幻小说 and 科幻文学 didn’t crystallize as stable categories in Taiwan until around 1980. When 《潘渡娜》 appeared, “Taiwanese SF” was not yet a thing the field could see. Two other writers, 张系国 and 黄海, published their first SF stories that same year. Both later became 鼻祖 of Taiwan SF: founding figures, biographies built around the fact. The third writer was filed as 散文家 and stayed there.
So which is it: was the genre invisible to her, or was she invisible to the genre?
During my first year of college, I took a writing class on Weird Fiction. I read Xia Jia’s 《百鬼夜行街》, A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight, first in Ken Liu’s translation. It was the first time I’d read a Chinese writer in English before reading her in Chinese.
At the time, Ken Liu’s name felt more visible because he had translated the well-known Three Body Problem series into English. I learned about Xia Jia and her stories through him. This was an inverted reading experience: I met the translator before I met the author, even though all three of us move between Chinese and English.
Reading 《百鬼夜行街》 in English made me ponder the human-robot spectrum and the meaning of being human. But the Chinese version, with its extremely poetic language, added another register that reads more like fantasy. “假作真时真亦假” pulls me into the dreamy world 《红楼梦》 fabricates.
Looking back, how much of what I thought 《百鬼夜行街》 was about came from Xia Jia, and how much from Ken Liu’s hand?
After my Weird Fiction semester, I read an interview where Xia Jia called her own work “porridge SF.” Not hard SF. Something she had to invent a name for. A man writing speculative fiction at scale gets read as hard SF. It is about conquered space, won wars and developed technologies. But when a woman writes the same fiction, she has to invent a new name.
Little me, reading in Chinese first, would have called 《百鬼夜行街》 fantasy not science fiction. The genre line had already been drawn before I knew to look for it.