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In a 2012 article in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop series The Margins, translator Bonnie Huie describes Qiu Miaojin’s style as containing “traces of real-life suffering that one can’t help reading into the work.” She’s right; it’s hard not to see Miaojin’s protagonist Lazi’s depressive and suicidal musings as ominous and foreboding, as the author committed suicide at the age of 26 soon after completing Notes on a Crocodile. In an article for Kyoto Journal, however, Huie writes that the novel is “intended to be a survival manual for teenagers, for a certain age when reading the right book can save your life.” It is in part this paradox that’s made Miaojin a counter-cultural icon, and her experimental work a cult classic in Taiwan. Her prose is in turns satirical, obsessive, and devastating, and explores “closetedness” amidst consuming romantic love, isolation, and crippling mental illness.
Notes of a Crocodile was written on the heels of China’s martial law rule in Taiwan. The novel is being reprinted in May by NYRB Classics, with a new translation from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie. The presence of queer literature in the 1990s was a direct result of this military exit, as Taiwan was opened to global trade and cultural cross-pollination. Newfound multiculturalism combined with the deregulation of free speech made for a more open and diverse landscape. Miaojin’s work addresses this newfound liberalism and comparatively fertile environment for queer Taiwanese writers, despite the fact that social stigma of LGBTQ+ people was still the norm.
Miaojin’s novel osculates between diary entries in which Lazi exhaustively recounts her romantic woes, and an absurdist reality in which crocodiles don human suits...