With the end of the Kuomintang’s authoritarian rule, in the late 1980s, Taiwan gradually opened to a public discussion of its own traumatic past, characterised by systematic government abuse, violent dissent suppression, and general disregard of civil and human rights. The memories of that history found ways to be expressed through a number of different media, including literature. This paper investigates two pieces of post-martial-law fiction, namely Zhu Tianxin’s “Once Upon a Time There Was an Urashima Taro” and Huang Chong-kai’s “Dixson’s Idioms”, which, in different ways and from different authorial perspectives, elaborate on the experience of political imprisonment during the White Terror. In these texts, inter-textuality is consistently used as a strategic narrative device to conjure the past into the present, and therefore constitutes a productive analytical perspective from which to look at Taiwan’s post-authoritarian literary mnemonic practices.

In un futuro molto vicino, la vita biologica sulle terre emerse non esiste più (il Sole ne ha bruciato ogni possibilità) e l’umanità si è rifugiata sui fondali marini. Queste le premesse narrative su cui Chi Ta-wei costruisce Membrana, opera cult della fiction speculativa taiwanese, di recente tradotta in italiano da Alessandra Pezza per add editore.

During the famine that befell China following the disaster of the Great LeapForward, hunger was a major affliction for the people undergoing reform in the laborcamps. Food—in terms of procurement, consumption, or just discursive recollection—wasa central issue in the prisoners’ lives and, as a consequence, descriptions of meals andeating practices are a recurring presence in Chinese literary texts that revolve around thosecarceral experiences. This contribution investigates three literary works that reconstructpersonal experiences of imprisonment by way of eating: Wang Ruowang’s Hunger Trilogy(1980), Zhang Xianliang’s Mimosa (1984), and Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou(2003). In these texts, food becomes a privileged perspective through which to look athow personal and collective memories are re-appropriated and re-elaborated, as well asto analyze how narratives of the past are consumed and produced. 

中国六十年代的大饥荒很深刻地影响到当时正在接受劳动改造和劳动教养的政治犯。在囚犯经验中，食物的收取、摄入及想象是一个很关键的问题，所以在聚焦个人监狱经验的中国当代文本里出现许多不同食物及饮食习惯的描述。本文的目标为分析王若望、张贤亮和杨显惠编写的关于劳动改造和劳动教养经验的三本文本。在《饥饿三部曲》、《绿化树》及《夹边沟记事》中，藉由食物做为特权视角，可以去看个人及集体回忆如何重新描写。透过这些特殊又有饮食性的监狱回忆去分析过去的叙述如何摄入及生产，历史如何被咀嚼、吞咽和吐出。

Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou (2003) is a collection of stories detailing life and death during the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-59) in the homonymous laogai camp located in the middle of the Gobi Desert, in the Chinese north-western province of Gansu. Based on the author’s extensive research, fieldwork and interviews with Jiabiangou survivors, in many instances the text dwells on particularly foul descriptions, mostly related to the harsh living conditions of prisoners undergoing reform, further exacerbated by the hostile geographical setting and by a famine that had struck the whole country. Physically and morally offensive descriptions of bodily expulsions and incorporations are portrayed with straightforward yet evocative accuracy, revealing very appalling aspects of the laogai experience.

Building on psychological analyses and phenomenological interpretations of disgust, this paper interrogates some key passages in the textwhere the literary iconography is built through the use of this aesthetic technique, with a special attention to the representation of carceral bodies -often construed as the true repugnant objects. Through the analysis of this symbolic bodily iconography, this paper addresses the text’s contribution to the construction of alternative narratives of incarceration and political persecution that have the potential to challenge Chinese orthodox historiography.