Contemporary Authors

• Ji Mo De Qun Chung (Taipei, Taiwan), 1995

1. Notes of a crocodile LCCN 2017000237 Type of material Book Personal name Qiu, Miaojin, 1969-1995, author. Uniform title Eyu shouji. English Main title Notes of a crocodile / Qiu Miaojin ; translated from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie. Published/Produced New York : New York Review Books, [2017] Description 242 pages ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781681370767 (paperback : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PL2892.5.U65 E913 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Last words from Montmartre LCCN 2013049765 Type of material Book Personal name Qiu, Miaojin, 1969-1995. Main title Last words from Montmartre / Qiu Miaojin ; translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich. Published/Produced New York : New York Review Books, 2014. Description 161 pages ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781590177259 (pbk.) Links Cover image 9781590177259.jpg Shelf Location FLS2015 018348 CALL NUMBER PR9470.9.M53 L3713 2014 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 3. Ji mo de qun chung LCCN 2003478904 Type of material Book Personal name Qiu, Miaojin, 1969-1995. Main title Ji mo de qun chung / Qiu Miaojin zhu. Edition Chu ban. Published/Created Taibei Shi : Lian he wen xue chu ban she ; Taibei Xian Xizhi zhen : Zong jing xiao Lian jing chu ban shi ye gong si, [Min guo] 84 [1995] Description 166 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9575221222 : CALL NUMBER PL2954.3.U25 J525 1995 China Copy 1 Request in Asian Reading Room (Jefferson, LJ150)

• Wikipedia -

  Qiu Miaojin
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  This is a Chinese name; the family name is Chiu (Qiu).
  Chiu Miao-Chin (Qiu Miaojin)
  Qiu Miaojin.jpg
  Born May 29, 1969
  Changhua County, Taiwan
  Died June 25, 1995 (aged 26)
  Paris, France
  Occupation Novelist, short story writer, filmmaker
  Language Chinese
  Nationality Taiwan
  Alma mater Taipei First Girls' High School, National Taiwan University, University of Paris VIII
  Period 1989–1995
  Genre Literary fiction, autobiography
  Literary movement LGBT literature
  Notable works Notes of a Crocodile, Last Words from Montmartre
  Notable awards China Times Literature Award, Central Daily News Short Story Prize, United Literature Association Award
  Chiu Miao-Chin (Qiu Miaojin) (Chinese: 邱妙津; 29 May 1969 – 25 June 1995) was a Taiwanese novelist. Her unapologetically lesbian[1] sensibility has had a profound and lasting influence on LGBT literature in Taiwan.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Biography
  2 Work
  3 Bibliography
  3.1 Novels
  3.2 Short stories
  4 See also
  5 References
  6 Further reading
  7 External links
  Biography[edit]
  Originally from Changhua County in western Taiwan, she attended the prestigious Taipei First Girls' High School and National Taiwan University, where she graduated with a major in psychology. She worked as a counselor and later as a reporter at the weekly magazine The Journalist. In 1994 she moved to Paris, where she pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology and feminism at University of Paris VIII, studying with philosopher Hélène Cixous.[2]

  Her death was a suicide,reflecting the internal struggle she was going through as a result of the intolerable outside world. Although there has been a great deal of speculation as to the exact cause of death, most accounts suggest that she stabbed herself with a kitchen knife.

  Work[edit]
  Qiu's writing is influenced by the non-narrative structures of avant-garde and experimental film. Her novels contain camera angles and ekphrasis in response to European art cinema, including allusions to directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos, Derek Jarman, and Jean-Luc Godard. During her time in Paris, Qiu directed a short film titled Ghost Carnival.[3] Her works as a filmmaker are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.[4]

  Her best-known work is Notes of a Crocodile,[5] for which she was awarded the China Times Literature Award in 1995. The main character's nickname, Lazi, is the direct source of a key slang term for "lesbian" in Chinese.[6] Notes of a Crocodile was published in 1994, amid a Taiwanese media frenzy surrounding lesbians, including an incident in which a TV journalist secretly filmed patrons at a lesbian bar without their consent, resulting in some suicides, and the group suicide of two girls, rumored to have been lesbians, from the elite private high school attended by several characters in the novel and by Qiu herself. Along with her final work before her death, Last Words from Montmartre, the novel has been widely described as "a cult classic."[7][8][9]

  Last Words From Montmartre is a conceptual novel that comprises 20 letters that can be read in any order, drawing on the notion of indeterminacy. Its prose appears to "blur distinctions between personal confession and lyric aphorism."[10] Dated between 27 April 1995, and 17 June 1995, about a week before the author killed herself, the letters begin with the dedication: "For dead little Bunny, and Myself, soon dead." It has been described as a work of relational art and noted for the required presence of the reader, "a 'you' to narrate to" that is a signature of Qiu's works.[11]

  Qiu has been recognized as a counterculture icon,[12] as well as described as a "martyr" in the movement for LGBT rights in Taiwan.[13] A two-volume set of her diaries was published posthumously in 2007. Luo Yijun's book Forgetting Sorrow (遣悲懷) was written in her memory. In 2017, her life and work became the subject of a documentary produced by Radio Television Hong Kong and directed by Evans Chan.[14][15]

  Bibliography[edit]
  Novels[edit]
  Notes of a Crocodile (1994) - translated by Bonnie Huie (New York Review Books Classics, 2017)
  Last Words from Montmartre (1996) - translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich (New York Review Books Classics, 2014)
  Letters from Montmartre (1996) - excerpt translated by Howard Goldblatt. In J. Lau and H. Goldblatt (Ed. & Trans.), The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8248-2652-9
  Short stories[edit]
  "Platonic Hair" (1990) - translated by Fran Martin. In F. Martin (Ed. & Trans.), Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-231-13841-3

• South China Morning Post - http://www.scmp.com/culture/film-tv/article/2061926/taiwanese-novelist-who-killed-herself-paris-26-qiu-miaojin

  Taiwanese novelist who killed herself in Paris at 26, Qiu Miaojin, remembered and reassessed in RTHK film
  Lesbian writer whose death is credited with seeding LGBT movement in Taiwan is the subject of Hong Kong filmmaker Evans Chan’s documentary, which comes amid renewed interest in her books

  PUBLISHED : Friday, 13 January, 2017, 3:45pm
  UPDATED : Monday, 16 January, 2017, 12:53pm

  Enid Tsui
  Enid Tsui

  enid.tsui@scmp.com

  http://twitter.com/enidtsui
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  Think of Qiu Miaojin, and the first thing that comes to mind is the Taiwanese writer’s melodramatic death; the second, perhaps, is her sexuality. In June 1995, the lesbian novelist killed herself in Paris shortly after completing Last Words from Montmartre, a semi-autobiographical novel in which the protagonist decides to commit suicide. She was 26.

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  A Chinese-language RTHK television documentary about her was broadcast this month as a precursor to a longer version in English that will be released later in the year by director Evans Chan Yiu-shing. It should encourage viewers to look past the tabloid sensationalism and to focus on her literary talent, Chan says.

  “I am not interested in ... personalities,” the director says. “ I became convinced by her books as soon as I read them. She had a forceful personality that shines through her powerful writing. There is also a strong intuitiveness in her writing,” he adds.

  The documentary doesn’t quite accomplish what it set out to do, with the director deciding to inject a heavy dose of histrionics. There were scenes of interviewees crying, revelations about her love life and her history of self-harm, as well as some rather superfluous dramatisation of her books. In one bizarre scene, Qiu’s alter ego – a crocodile – is seen stroking Anthony Gormley’s nude male sculpture that stood in Queen’s Road Central last year while declaring her inability to desire a man.

  It would have made Qiu wince, since she was particularly piqued by local media’s obsession with Taipei’s then largely underground lesbian community. But to be fair, it would not be possible to discuss Qiu’s books without some acknowledgment of her personal struggles since they are largely autobiographical.

  The decision to include Qiu in the series was based on the impact of her work rather than her biography, says producer Lo Chi-wa. “Our series has always taken a very open approach. We cast the net wide and end up finding some really interesting writers,” he says.

  It was Chan who pitched the idea to RTHK. The Hong Kong director behind the highly acclaimed film To Liv(e) and, more recently, Raise the Umbrellas – documentary of the Occupy Central protests and the birth of localism in Hong Kong – first heard of Qiu while making a 2014 film about Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung for the same television series.

  Hong Kong cinemas won’t show Occupy documentary, filmmaker fears

  “I was interviewing the Taiwanese novelist Lo Yi-chin about Dung and he brought up the fact that Qiu was one of the contemporaries he most admired. That was the first time I came across her name,” says Chan, now based in New York.

  Qiu Miaojin photographed in Paris. Photo: Courtesy of Evans Chan
  Serendipitously, it was at that moment that the first English translations of Qiu’s novels started to appear. Last Words from Montmartre, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich, was published by the New York Review of Books in 2014, while the English version of Notes of a Crocodile is expected in 2017. There is a revival of interest in Taiwan, too, where Qiu’s life inspired composer Yen Ming-hsiu to create an orchestral work in 2015 as the island considers becoming the first Asian territory to allow same-sex marriages.

  Broader recognition of Qiu’s literary talent is long overdue, Chan says.

  “I am not interested in ... personalities. The personality of a writer is only interesting to me if the works are substantial. I became convinced by her books as soon as I read them. She had a forceful personality that shines through her powerful writing. There is also a strong intuitiveness in her writing,” the director says.

  A still from Chan’s film of Helene Cixous, who taught Qiu Miaojin in Paris. Photo: Courtesy of Evans Chan
  Qiu started writing when she was studying psychology at National Taiwan University, and won the Central Daily News literary award for her short story Prisoner in 1988. She worked for a few years as a counsellor and journalist in Taipei and, in 1994, enrolled as a postgraduate student at the University of Paris 8. She attended Helene Cixous’ seminars and worshipped the feminist theorist, who appears in Chan’s documentary, referring to her as “the light of my art, the light of my life” in Last Words from Montmartre.

  Cixous’ concept of feminine writing, the idea that women can use the act of writing to shake loose the yoke of patriarchal values, has few better examples in Chinese than Qiu’s works. In both her novels, which adopt a non-linear narrative, Qiu’s alter egos unflinchingly dissect their feelings about their attraction to women, their constant fear of being found out, and the pressure to conform.

  Notes of a Crocodile (first published in 1994) is the easier read. Light-hearted chapters about a crocodile (a pseudonym for lesbians in the book) intersperse with the central character’s cynical, coruscating observations from a Taipei university campus. The character’s nickname in the book, Lazi, is one that’s since been widely adopted by Mandarin-speaking lesbian communities.

  The cover of the forthcoming English translation of Qiu’s 1994 novel. Photo: Courtesy of Evans Chan

  In the epistolary Last Words from Montmartre (first published posthumously in 1996), the protagonist, Zoe, obsessively picks at the emotional scab left behind by a lost love. It is a distressing portrayal of a troubled soul’s descent into hell, violently passionate and an unsettlingly honest reflection on the human condition by a writer resigned to death.

  The only solace that Zoe - a name Qiu used in Paris - found was in art. Qiu described an intellectual universe richly populated by Theo Angelopoulos’ films, the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, the books by Japanese writers, wonderfully evoklng a cosmopolitan world view.

  Her death became a cause célèbre in Taiwan and, some say, helped give birth to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement there. “Taiwan is the vanguard in the Chinese world when it comes to LGBT equality. Chi Ta-wei, an activist I interviewed, says Qiu is seen as a ‘martyr’ in Taiwan’s gay rights movement,” Chan says.

  She should be remembered for being a true genius. I am delighted that a writer of such calibre has emerged from the Chinese speaking worldEVANS CHAN
  The self-disgust exhibited by Qiu’s characters and their conviction that being a lesbian would only bring a life of misery, not to mention Qiu’s own suicide, hardly make her a good role model, however.

  “We invited a number of local lesbians to a private screening and they all said they couldn’t relate to the books,” says Lo.

  Qiu died too soon to see views about homosexuality changing, and the benefits brought by the internet. Experiences and literature are now shared freely online and, for many lesbians in Hong Kong, Qiu’s sense of isolation seems as remote as the experiences described in the now notorious Well of Loneliness, British author Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel of 1928.

  Chan says: “She had a tremendous impact on Taiwan and we should recognise that she did her best to challenge Chinese society. At the end of the day, she should be remembered for being a true genius. I am delighted that a writer of such calibre has emerged from the Chinese speaking world.”

• Amazon -

  Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995)—one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer—was born in Chuanghua County in western Taiwan. She graduated with a degree in psychology from National Taiwan University and pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Paris VIII. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2007, a two-volume edition of her Diaries was published, and in 2017 she became the subject of a feature-length documentary by Evans Chan titled Death in Montmartre.

• Paper Republic - https://paper-republic.org/authors/qiu-miaojin/

  Qiu Miaojin
  邱妙津
  wikipedia / MCLC

  Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) – one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer – was born in Chuanghua County in western Taiwan. She graduated with a degree in psychology from National Taiwan University and pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Paris VIII. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2007, a two-volume edition of her Diaries was published. In 2017, she became the subject of a feature-length documentary by Evans Chan titled Death in Montmartre. Qiu’s films can be found in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  See part of a Chinese-language documentary on Qiu, directed by Evans Chan, on Youtube here.

  Listen to an interview with translator Ari Larissa Heinrich here.

  Watch a reading by translator Bonnie Huie here.

  Original Works
  Short stories (1)
  Bolatu zhi Fa (柏拉图之发)
  tr: Platonic Hair, by Fran Martin
  Novels (3)
  Mengmate Yishu (蒙马特遗书)
  tr: Last Words from Montmartre, by Ari Larissa Heinrich
  Eyu shouji (鳄鱼手记)
  tr: Notes of a Crocodile, by Bonnie Huie
  tr: Notes of a Crocodile (excerpt), by Bonnie Huie
  [Letters from Montmartre] ([Letters from Montmartre])
  tr: Letters from Montmartre (excerpt), by Howard Goldblatt
  Index

Quoted in Sidelights" “a meandering, but moving, look at queer identity,” further noting that “Qiu’s willingness to show youth at its most self-absorbed and earnest is part of the book’s appeal.”
\Miaojin, Qiu: NOTES OF A CROCODILE
(Mar. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Miaojin, Qiu NOTES OF A CROCODILE New York Review Books (Adult Fiction) $14.95 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-68137-076-7

A college student's romantic obsession with another woman threatens to derail her happiness.Taipei in the late 1980s. Lazi is 18, newly enrolled in college, and describes herself as "an innately beautiful peacock" who is "pure carrion inside." Depressed and self-harming over her attraction to women, Lazi enters into a toxic relationship with Shui Ling, a fellow student. During the course of their on-again, off-again unconsummated relationship, Lazi turns to a group of friends whose love lives are as complicated as her own. Qiu (Last Words from Montmartre, 2014), who died in 1995 at the age of 26, structures her essentially plotless novel as a series of eight notebooks that take us through Lazi's college years. These notebooks can be unabashedly adolescent--sentences like "The glow on her face was like rays of sunshine along a golden beach" abound. Also true to the college experience are the long pages of abstract conversation Lazi and her friends engage in, usually late at night. But in many ways, Qiu's willingness to show youth at its most self-absorbed and earnest is part of the book's appeal. Most readers--perhaps especially those who identify as LGBTQ--will see themselves somewhere in Lazi's agonized social circle. But Qiu also reminds her readers at every turn how truly isolating otherness can be: interspersed with Lazi's musings, Qiu tells a kind of surreal, contemporary fable of a crocodile, the subject of equal parts bigotry and misplaced reverence. The crocodile's plight, as it "got home from work [and] removed the sweat-soaked human suit clinging to its body," serves as an odd, but perfect, metaphor for Lazi, whose true heartbreak is feeling so alien as to scarcely feel human. A meandering, but moving, look at queer identity.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Miaojin, Qiu: NOTES OF A CROCODILE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911786/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5de1194. Accessed 13 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911786
Quoted in Sidelights: “enchants even as she writes from the familiar perspective of a spurned lover.”
Last Words from Montmartre
261.15 (Apr. 14, 2014): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Last Words from Montmartre

Qiu Miaojin, trans. from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich. New York Review Books, $ 14.95 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-59017725-9

The reception of this short novel, which is considered a high point in Taiwanese LGBT fiction, will unavoidably be colored by Qiu's suicide in 1995, at age 26 (the book was written just before her death and posthumously published in Taiwanese). Her memorable dedication reads, "For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead." As Heinrich, the translator, explains in the afterword, the book's spiraling, plotless structure mirrors Qiu's increasingly intense last days. Written in the form of letters, the novel vacillates between romantic ecstasy and despair, while a coherent story slowly emerges. As the unnamed narrator pursues graduate studies in France, she grows increasingly alienated from her lovers and< family still living in Taiwan. She feels adrift and alone without the love of her life, Xu, and without Bunny, the pet rabbit they cared for together, and she seeks relief from her overwhelming pain: "I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die." Qiu's voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants even as she writes from the familiar perspective of a spurned lover. It would be wrong to interpret the book's--or, for that matter, the author's--ultimate surrender to death as a rejection of the richness of life; rather, like Goethe's young Werther, this "last testament" (an alternative translation of the title) affirms the power of literature. (June) Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Last Words from Montmartre." Publishers Weekly, 14 Apr. 2014, p. 31. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A365458136/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b64ba10. Accessed 13 Jan. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A365458136 Quoted in Sidelilghts: “the work’s literary merits are a particular taste at best.” The letters, he said, add up to ” a meandering (very French) interior monologue,” and “rather than experimentality, the general impression is of a young writer unable to tame her material.” He added: “Its Parisian setting, its queer eroticism, its discovery of French loves and ideas must have been so much fresher in Chinese in 1995 than they are in English today.” Qiu Miaojin. Last Words from Montmartre Josh Stenberg 89.5 (September-October 2015): p66. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 University of Oklahoma http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com Qiu Miaojin. Last Words from Montmartre. Ari Larissa Heinrich, tr. New York. New York Review Books. 2014. ISBN 9781590177259. One cannot be qualified to make a specialist judgment on a work and also have no preconceptions about it. To be frank, I opened the package containing Last Words from Montmartre prepared to be enthusiastic, committed as I am to formal experimentation, queer texts, and global sinophone writing, and glad to find a rare Asian writer among the NYRB Classics. Qiu enjoys a sky-high reputation in contemporary Taiwanese literature, and reception of her in the West so far has also been warm. Then there is the biographical hook: the novel, if that is what it is, revolves around and culminates in the suicide in Paris of the twenty-six-year-old Taiwanese lesbian narrator, and was written by Qiu, a twenty-six-year-old Taiwanese lesbian, who committed suicide in Paris in 1995. But though it is a flawless translation, it is not really a good book. Bracketing the question of Qiu's real-life death, which is responsible for much of the work's cult status, the work's literary merits are a particular taste at best. The book is organized in letters, most of them addressed to the distant and estranged beloved, Xu. A note tells us that we may read the letters in any order, and indeed they are neither internally cogent nor sequential. Since few plot situations or character portraits are presented, either, the result is a meandering (very French) interior monologue. The literary payoff in such a text must be in felicities of thought, language, perception, or image, since the torments of passion are in and of themselves standard fare. But, although no one could doubt the depth of the narrator's misery, there is nothing here that one hasn't heard once too often before. Even the occasional passage considering gender roles and identities seems now largely of historical interest. It is often unclear who is writing, or to whom, but rather than experimentality, the general impression is of a young writer unable to tame her material, while the rare intrusions of the external world--the films of Angelopoulos, the classes of feminist Hélène Cixous--have a callow quality that reminds the reader just how young Qiu was. Near the end, one reads that "an artist's work only really moves me if the artist has suffered through profound tragedy and death--only then can greatness be achieved," which is wrenching, but not for the right reasons. If one can't accept such a credo, what sets in is a kind of uncomfortable intimacy with the morbid narrator, constantly presenting herself as doomed great artist, victim and paragon of passion. It is perhaps especially reading it in translation that makes the text seem depressing but humdrum--its Parisian setting, its queer eroticism, its discovery of French loves and ideas must have been so much fresher in Chinese in 1995 than they are in English today. Josh Stenberg University of British Columbia Stenberg, Josh Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Stenberg, Josh. "Qiu Miaojin. Last Words from Montmartre." World Literature Today, vol. 89, no. 5, 2015, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A426980479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bf3778f8. Accessed 13 Jan. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A426980479

"Miaojin, Qiu: NOTES OF A CROCODILE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911786/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5de1194. Accessed 13 Jan. 2018. "Last Words from Montmartre." Publishers Weekly, 14 Apr. 2014, p. 31. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A365458136/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b64ba10. Accessed 13 Jan. 2018. Stenberg, Josh. "Qiu Miaojin. Last Words from Montmartre." World Literature Today, vol. 89, no. 5, 2015, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A426980479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bf3778f8. Accessed 13 Jan. 2018.

• Asian Review of Books
  http://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/notes-of-a-crocodile-by-qiu-miaojin/
  Word count: 1102

  Quoted in Sidelights: “is an important work that explores the liberation of gender during a time when anything behind a façade of hetrosexuality in Taiwan was still considered taboo,” commented T. F. Rhoden in the online Asian Review of Books. Rhoden pronounced it “candid and creative … a classic of Taiwanese contemporary literature that stirs the imagination as it confronts social inequities of gender and sexuality.”
  T F Rhoden 29 May 2017 Fiction, Reviews, Uncategorized
  “Notes of a Crocodile” by Qiu Miaojin
  crocodile
  Taiwan’s top court just recently ruled in favor of gay marriage, culminating in what could be Asia’s first jurisdiction to allow members of the same sex to marry. Despite many challenges that still persist politically with the ruling, it indicates a more liberal attitude toward non-heterosexual relationships than when Qiu Miaojin published the novel Notes of a Crocodile in the early 1990s.

  Qiu’s frank exploration of lesbianism was a breakthrough for the island’s literature and modern Chinese fiction as a whole. More than twenty years on, the English-speaking world can now also enjoy this daring, youthful, and insightful book at an important moment in Taiwan’s history.

  Because the author Qiu Miaojin committed suicide a year after the book’s publication in Chinese, the story carries an extra weight of anguish not normally found in coming-of-age tales.

  Half journal and half epistolary, the story follows the troubled protagonist Lazi as she tries to understand her place in society during her years at university. Something of a misfit, Lazi explores the counter-culture of Taipei, struggling to embrace an identity that is labeled queer. The plot is driven by her relationships, some romantic, others more platonic, and the numerous failed attempts at lasting love for individuals who don’t fit the traditional, Taiwanese notion of heterosexuality.

  In “Notebook #1” of the book, Lazi starts with an explicit admission. Her tone is straightforward and continues throughout the novel:

  In the past I believed that every man had his own innate prototype of a woman, and that he would fall in love with the woman who most resembled his type. Although I’m a woman, I have a female prototype too.

  Yet, regardless of the exploration of gender, the detailed self-inquiry of Lazi’s listless move from high school to college to her first post-university job constitutes a universal and empathetic coming-of-age story. Indeed, lesbianism is incidental to the power of the story.

  Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin, Bonnie Huie (trans)
  Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin, Bonnie Huie (trans) (NYRB Classics, May 2017)
  Woven in-between the chapters on Lazi’s story of young love is a concurrent, separate account of surrealist crocodiles who can think and speak. This surrealism is utilized simply, but effectively, as the reader is to imagine that Taiwan is being infiltrated by crocodiles who dress and act as humans do. This avant-garde addition of conscious animals, though at times purposely jarring, serves a symbolic purpose that reinforces the LGBT theme.

  These crocodiles in hominid clothing represent the non-hetero citizens of the island. They attempt to fit in. Sometimes they pass as normal. Other times they fail. All experience pain. As much as this novel is about Lazi’s story, the crocodiles’ “notes” are also meant to speak to this larger, queer population.

  The crocodiles also highlight those who feitishize the gay community, even if that means poking fun at queer studies at times:

  Various crocodile experts had begun to crop up. Every day in the papers there was a new crocodile-related article written by a PhD. In accordance with their discipline’s understanding of crocodile families, their research indicated distinct differences from humans at every stage of development from birth to puberty as well as in maturity, though details had yet to be ascertained. There was general consensus, however, that up to the age of fourteen, crocodiles adopted a homemade “human suit” before running away from home.

  The crocodile’s “human suit” represents the normative, public exterior of heterosexuality all too often adopted by LGBT individuals.

  Lazi’s main love interest in the story is to another female character Shui Ling. Lazi’s inability to embrace fully her own lesbianism creates a tension between these two lovers that eventually causes their relationship to rupture. As Lazi tries to date other women, she is unable to move beyond her first love. Later, Lazi writes a letter to Shui Ling, admitting that she herself was the saboteur of their relationship:

  If I could just fall in love with a man, it would put an end to the anguish of having fallen in love with a woman by somehow overwriting that earlier consciousness. My attraction to women has materialized, and regardless of whether it becomes a thing of the past, it’s a part of me. By the same token, the part of me battling that attraction has been around even longer.

  Lazi is herself one of the crocodiles in a “human suit.” The other loves through which she attempts stability later in the story all suffer from the self-admission that she still battles her natural attraction by attempting to love men.

  Like any bildungsroman, this novel too has its moments of sharp pain for its main character. But because the author Qiu Miaojin committed suicide a year after the book’s publication in Chinese, the story carries an extra weight of anguish not normally found in coming-of-age tales. The strength and spirited freeheartedness of this novel continue to add to her allure as a writer.

  What Qiu would have thought of the recent progressive ruling on gay marriage would have been fascinating to read if she were still alive. Regardless, she did not live to see a Taiwan that was more accepting of homosexuality, so readers of her fiction cannot know for sure.

  The is an important work that explores the liberation of gender during a time when anything behind a façade of hetrosexuality in Taiwan was still considered taboo. Candid and creative, Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin is a classic of Taiwanese contemporary literature that stirs the imagination as it confronts social inequities of gender and sexuality.

  T F Rhoden is an adjunct instructor at the Institute of South East Asian Affairs, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. His most recent publication is Karen Language Phrasebook: Basics of Sgaw Dialect (White Lotus Press, 2015).

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2014/07/03/reviews/helen-stuhr-rommereim/last-words-from-montmartre-qiu-miaojin/
  Word count: 1049

  Last Words from Montmartre – Qiu Miaojin
  by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

  Miaojin Last Words from Montmartre[NYRB; 2014]

  Towards the end of Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre, the unraveling narrator of this emotionally overflowing epistolary novel writes, “I still haven’t given you a home! I’ve been working so, so hard on it, did you know that?”

  The “you” she addresses is ambiguous; it is her lover who has left her, it is herself as her consciousness fractures into pieces. Her inability to construct a home reflects the instability of the narrative at this late stage in the novel. After pages and pages of letters exploring the possibility of loving purely and permanently, the nature of desire and sex, the complex experience of gender between genders, the capacity of art to encompass and heighten human experience, the narrative comes unpegged, spiraling out of coherence, the “I’s” and “you’s” all mixed up. The narrator addresses an ambiguous figure, Zoe, who gains shape as Qiu loses track of herself. The novel takes on such a pitch of intensity that it seems to propel itself towards its terrible conclusion with an energy and inevitability all its own, culminating in Qiu’s actual suicide at the age of 26, soon after completing the book.

  An icon for lesbian and queer culture in Taiwan since the publication of her first novel, Notes of a Crocodile, in 1994, Qiu Miaojin gained legendary status beyond these circles after her death in 1995, her work now widely beloved, taught in schools in Taiwan and the subject of many university theses.

  Her suicide is, of course, a subject of great collective interest. The obsessive speculation that often surrounds a young artist’s death at their own hand can often function to obscure the work left behind with romanticizing hagiography. In Qiu’s case, however, it’s necessary to attempt to understand the web of intention that binds what she wrote with the way she died. Last Words from Montmartre, composed of letters mostly addressed to a lost love in the immediate aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution, but also occasionally to other friends and lovers of the narrator, is inextricably intertwined with Qiu’s suicide. The New York Review of Books edition, which presents Last Words from Montmartre for the first time in English, includes a helpful afterword by translator Ari Larissa Heinrich, in which Heinrich situates Qiu’s work culturally and historically, emphasizing the particularity of suicide’s associated cultural meanings in East Asia. Heinrich writes, “In the end we should try to understand Qiu’s death as she wanted it to be understood: as a kind of speech act, as the ultimate means of sealing the connection between art and life.”

  While Last Words from Montmartre can at times read as an outpouring of undirected and incoherent desire, so powerful as to become all consuming and blinding, it would be wrong to take it as the document of an emotional breakdown. The careful artistic intention at the heart of the novel is apparent on every page. She presents her goals with deceptive modesty, writing, “It won’t be a great work of art, but it could be a book of true purity; the detailed, thorough excavation of one very small field of a young person’s life.” And indeed the novel becomes a mechanism for fusing life and art together, in no way a small undertaking.

  “In this life what I really want to become is an artist like Angelopoulos — to become a ‘shaman,’” she writes, referring to her favorite film director Theodoros Angelopoulos. She wants, in other words, to harness the animating power of fiction. The novel is then a performance of all consuming passion given shape by the artifice of fiction but remaining very real in the life of the author. Qiu writes, “One can talk endlessly about the sorrows of life, but only art can express it precisely . . .” And this is Qiu’s ambition: to access pure emotion and pure love. Writing is the means through which it becomes possible to do this.

  Although predicated on exchange, epistolary novels are often one-sided, an outpouring of feeling and thought directed towards an imagined or non-responsive recipient. In The Color Purple, Celie writes to an unanswering God, in I Love Dick, the titular Dick has no response for the volume and fervor of Chris Kraus’ letters to him. From The Sorrows of Young Werther, to Jacques Derrida’s fever dream of wandering pronouns The Postcard, to C.S. Lewis’ demonic philosophical fantasy The Screwtape Letters, one-sided epistolary works abound, and it becomes clear that a narrative structure that inherently implies give and take actually operates to facilitate something very different. While “you” might not respond, the fact of choosing some “you,” and directing thoughts towards that chosen recipient opens the gates for emotional and narrative experimentation, as well as for a complicated and evolving relationship between the author and the “I” of a novel.

  For Qiu, what is being explored is not so much these positions of “you,” and “I,” but the potential to turn the novel into a vessel for pure emotion. The dyadic space opens up a channel for that feeling. As she writes, the letters outgrow their purpose as means of communication to a specific individual: “It now expresses more than what I’d wanted to convey to you; it has grown denser, more beautiful, and you won’t be able to appreciate its whole value until I’ve finished writing it.” The result is the eventual destruction of Qiu’s narrating consciousness, her construction of self, and then of her actual, bodily self.

  Qiu writes, “I could only imagine living for her because only her existence truly needed me, needed my existence to live,” and then later, “. . . the instant our journey overlapped and influenced the other, my fragile personality exploded and my individual self, caught between heaven and earth, was soundlessly, breathlessly sacrificed. This is merely called Nature.” In Last Words from Montmartre, selves and emotions hurtle through time and space with terrifying force — both destructive and productive — and ecstasy and pain exist in very close proximity.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/consider-the-crocodile-qiu-miaojins-lesbian-bestiary/#!
  Word count: 2750

  Quoted in Sidelights: “There’s a reason Qiu’s work earned her a cult following — a reason that her novels are so fiercely loved, by so many, as well as taught in high schools, produced as theater, and cited reverently by other novelists,” observed Ari Larissa Heinrich, who translated Qiu’s Last Words from Montmartre into English, in the online Los Angeles Review of Books. “All of Qiu’s works contain a lush beauty, if you know where to look for it.”
  Consider the Crocodile: Qiu Miaojin’s Lesbian Bestiary
  By Ari Larissa Heinrich

  658 0 0

  MAY 7, 2017

  IN DECEMBER, a massive rally for same-sex marriage rights in Taipei flooded the main boulevard and spilled into the streets circling the Presidential Offices. Taiwanese media went into overdrive: celebrity interviews, live debates, and an endless stream of video footage rehearsed the global gay pageantry of rainbow flags, hot men making out, endearing elderly couples, and proudly supportive parents. As I write, a panel of 14 Supreme Court justices is hearing arguments on a civil case that may well lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Taiwan, leading Asia in gender equality with its democratically elected female president and setting a world standard for its widely praised universal health care, now leads international media in its coverage of gay rights issues.

  But things weren’t always that way. Three decades ago, Taiwan underwent a seismic shift in politics: following successive repressive regimes, martial law was lifted in 1987 and Taiwan’s international market presence exploded, unleashing a massive shockwave in the island’s social and cultural life. In the years immediately following the lifting of martial law, Taiwan’s intellectual pluralism flourished, such that everyday urbanites — already highly literate — now had direct access to an unprecedented variety of Japanese, European, and American literature and film, not to mention a vast new cultural vocabulary on topics ranging from postmodernism to feminism to environmentalism to indigenous rights. Figuring prominently in this cultural explosion moreover, was the rise of what scholar Fran Martin has called in her study Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public Culture “the literature of transgressive sexuality.” In Taiwan in the early 1990s, notes Martin, “[p]rime-time television news, news-magazine and variety shows [were] at the forefront of the island’s mass media’s sensationalist and generally homophobic obsession” with homosexuality. As a result, “the image of [the homosexual became] a valued entertainment commodity in 1990s Taiwan. It [became] self-evidently ‘attractive to the audience’ and a guarantor of high ratings[.]” In an infamous media scandal from 1993, a television reporter from TTV News infiltrated a lesbian bar in Taipei, filmed patrons with a hidden camera, and then broadcast the footage on the evening news. “[A]long with the reporter’s homophobic commentary,” Martin notes, the airing of the footage “caus[ed] the catastrophic unexpected ‘outing’ of several of the women to their families.” Taiwan’s media fixation with the spectacle of transgressive sexualities had begun.

  It was precisely at the peak of this explosion in intellectual life and heightened media attention to transgressive sexualities that Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995), a celebrated novelist who killed herself at the age of 26, came onto the scene. The abbreviated but impressive span of her career coincides with the emergence of some of the same debates that gave rise to Taiwan’s robust LGBTQ rights movements today. Qiu’s earlier works, for instance, include stories like the homoerotic “Platonic Hair” (first published in 1990, and translated in 2003 by Martin in the anthology Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan), while her later works culminate in the experimental epistolary suicide memoir Last Words from Montmartre (written in 1995, published posthumously in 1996, and translated by me, with an afterword, for New York Review Books in 2014). Notes of a Crocodile, originally published in 1994 and now released by New York Review Books in a translation by Bonnie Huie, is Qiu’s literary middle child. Personal and literate, Notes of a Crocodile is nonetheless profoundly significant in historical terms: it is the direct source of one of the key slang words for “lesbian” in Chinese (derived from the main character’s nickname “Lazi,” pronounced Lah-dzuh), and it includes a defining episode in Taiwanese lesbian identity politics, a queer Cartesian moment when the narrator commits her orientation to words, declaring: “I am a woman who loves women.” Even before Qiu’s books started winning mainstream literary awards, Notes of a Crocodile helped earn her the status of underground queer cult figure in Taiwan and eventually elsewhere in the Chinese-speaking world. For English-speaking audiences, the fact that so many of Qiu’s works are now available in translation acknowledges her importance for contemporary queer and Sinophone cultures, as well as her vital addition of yet another counterpoint to falsely universal LGBTQ “liberation” stories that recognize only white, Western (especially male and Anglophone) understandings of “transgressive sexualities.”

  The narrative of Notes of a Crocodile is structured like a double helix. The denser strand follows the intuitive arc of university life in a rhythm reminiscent of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation. It opens with Lazi’s first days at the prestigious National Taiwan University in Taipei, chronicles her binge-drinking, sexual experiments, and dark ruminations on shame, monstrosity, and sexuality, before it closes with her commencement, which she attends alone. Through a pastiche of first-person narration and epistolary excerpts, we follow Lazi’s turbulent relationship with another female student, Shui Ling; the full circle of her relationship with a slightly older woman called Xiao Fan; as well as the development of deep friendships with two men (the erratic, intense Meng Sheng and his dyspeptic lover Chu Kuang) and with two women (the spritely Tun Tun and her sometimes-lover Zhi Rou). Notes’s detailed character portraits and episodic structure lend it an almost Joycean quality, though the book is ultimately less like Dubliners than Pai Hsien-yung’s exquisite Taipei People, a novel from 1971 with which Qiu was certainly familiar. (Pai also wrote what is commonly understood to be Taiwan’s first “gay” novel, Crystal Boys, published in 1983.)

  Like most of Qiu’s work, this strand of Notes can be a difficult read, looping and preoccupied, its angst and self-absorption familiar to anyone who’s kept a teenage diary, forcing the reader to conspire in the kind of painfully earnest self-reflection that can be a hazard of the genre. Even semi-autobiographical work needs a “you” to narrate to. At one point, the narrator recalls the early days of her friendship with Shui Ling as “a clandestine form of dating — the kind where the person you’re going out with doesn’t know it’s a date.” You could say the same about this novel. With its confessional intimacy and its single-blind narrator, you may not realize that you, as the audience, have been constructed just as much as any other “character” in the novel; and that, in a kind of role-reversal, it is you who are the novel’s intimate object. You are Qiu’s conscript confidante and, as uncomfortable as that may be, this displacement (or misplacement) of agency in the emotional grammar of the memoir is one of this author’s signature literary achievements. Adding to the challenge of reading Notes of a Crocodile is the novel’s dense network of cultural allusions; to films ranging from Betty Blue to Valley of the Dolls to books like Chronicle of a Death Foretold and writers ranging from Kobo Abe to Jean Genet to F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the insistent drumbeat of the author’s hyper-literacy, and in our awareness of both her prodigy and her death-drive, we could perhaps describe Qiu Miaojin as a kind of Taiwanese David Foster Wallace.

  Yet there’s a reason Qiu’s work earned her a cult following — a reason that her novels are so fiercely loved, by so many, as well as taught in high schools, produced as theater, and cited reverently by other novelists. All of Qiu’s works contain a lush beauty, if you know where to look for it. In Notes of a Crocodile, for example, the true object of the narrator’s affection is not a lover but the city. Like Paris in Last Words from Montmartre, Taipei in Notes takes on a cinematic quality, its description often more generous and more loving than any snapshots of its human objets d’amour. While Lazi admits that she “can’t conceivably depict” her lover, Xiao Fan, the narrator’s infatuation with Taipei comes through in her description of the “magnificent night scene, gorgeous and restrained” across which the city unfolds during a ride on the Number 74 bus. Lending an exhilarating urgency to the novel, meanwhile, Notes also conveys an irrepressible excitement about the possibilities of gender and sexuality at a time when mainstream characterizations of those possibilities had not yet hardened into the current obsession with marriage equality as the benchmark of LGBTQ liberation (this is not nostalgia on my part, but rather anxiety about the enshrinement of heteronormativity — represented so often by the marriage equality movement — as a standard for rights that is founded as much upon who it excludes from “equality” as on equality itself, as if all anyone needs for happiness under the surveillance state is government recognition of one’s romantic life). At one point, for instance, Lazi, Meng Sheng, and Chu Kuang agree on the inadequacy of the gender binary, with Lazi explaining that:

  [T]he gender binary […] stems from the duality of yin and yang, or some unspeakable evil. But humanity says it’s a biological construct: penis vs. vagina, chest hair vs. breasts, beard vs. long hair. Penis + chest hair + beard = masculine; vagina + breasts + long hair = feminine. Male plugs into female like key into lock, and as a product of that coupling, babies get punched out […] All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone.

  Upon establishing the sinister inadequacy of the gender binary, the friends’ first impulse is of course to do away with sex-segregated public restrooms. “How about if the three of us agree to have post-gender relations?” proposes Meng Sheng, to Lazi’s delight. “In the end, all three of us have been seriously warped by gender labels. Everybody has, more or less […] Hey, we should found a gender-free society and monopolize all the public restrooms!” While the friends’ revolutionary ideas don’t come to fruition immediately, they evidence a historical engagement with questions around gender that forecast certain contemporary struggles with uncanny clarity.

  Notes of a Crocodile has all this, and a cute talking crocodile to boot. What’s not to love? While the passages featuring Lazi can feel heavy, the thinner strand of Notes’s narrative helix consists of more lightly rendered interludes featuring none other than a shy, cartoonish crocodile who dreams and frets and snacks and watches TV. While most crocodiles don’t have natural predators, the mass-media ecosystem of Notes is crocodile obsessed, with constant reports on croc-sightings and wild speculation about what these secret urban crocodiles eat and how they mate alongside polemics on whether they should be protected or destroyed. Anxious about being exposed, the novel’s eponymous crocodile disguises itself in a “human suit,” lives unobtrusively in a basement, and avoids conspicuous behaviors like purchasing too many cream puffs at the local bakery (cream puffs being a known crocodile delicacy, naturally). Not knowing any other crocodiles, when the reclusive beast sees a flyer for a secret crocodile masquerade ball, it can’t sleep for excitement, and — in a description that hilariously captures that awkward and terrifying moment when a young queer first ventures out to a “gay” event — gathers its courage to enter the venue:

  The crocodile […] whispered, “Is everyone here a crocodile?” The attendants nodded […] It wanted to crawl under the reception table and hide […] The crocodile felt as if it were home at last. Why did everyone else’s human suits fit so securely?

  When media speculation about the existence of crocodiles picks up speed, Lazi offers the crocodile shelter at her place. There, she and the crocodile collaborate on a video to send to TTV. This strand of the helix — and the novel — concludes with a clip from the closing scene of their film, a sequence in which the crocodile floats out to sea in a flaming tub to the voiceover of a quote from the filmmaker Derek Jarman: “I have no words.”

  In the history of talking animals in literature — of cats, say, or cockroaches — Notes of a Crocodile goes somewhere new. On one hand, the book’s depiction of Lazi’s psyche is crowded with animal metaphors: over the course of the novel, we encounter references to a panther, a lion, a tiger, a lizard, a skunk, a wild boar, a snail, a leech, a hedgehog, a pig, a bivalve, and even a centaur. (It’s no accident that Tun Tun, the friend who understands Lazi best, is studying to be a zoologist.) But emerging from this psychological bestiary comes a truly unique — and distinct — literary animal. Rather than a dour Gregor Samsa wasting away in his room, we have a shrewd but adorable archosaur who, when it gets home after a long day, likes:

  [T]o turn on the TV to see if there was anything about crocodiles on the evening news. Meanwhile, it would sit in a bathtub on casters, scrubbing itself with a sponge. It would reach over to grab a can of food from the side table, then remove its retainer and use its canines to puncture two holes in the top of the can. Shaped like turret shells, its canines glistened in the light and were cool to the touch. Afterward, the crocodile reinserted its retainer. It liked to eat with a sharpened straw that it plunged into the top of the can and used to siphon food. In the water was a green plastic toy crocodile. Leaning over, the crocodile squeezed the plastic belly with both hands. The toy made a squeaking noise and squirted water onto the crocodile’s face.

  While Lazi is consumed by shame, the crocodile slowly begins to embrace the spectacle of its own identity. If Lazi sees herself as “something straight out of Lagerkvist: a hideously deformed dwarf stuffed into a jar, pressed up against the layer of glass,” the crocodile begins to cultivate its talent as a “natural-born performer.” Recognizing the potential of video-blogging decades before the fact, the crocodile refuses to allow Lazi to talk to it unless she looks through the viewfinder of the video-camera, but it leaves video-messages for Lazi when she is not there, musing, “A medium of communication, eh? Well, I’ll be the first to have done this.” Lazi may feel like her identity is beyond her control, but the crocodile’s growing confidence suggests a more powerful agency in queer self-definition. The crocodile — Lazi’s alter ego — uses its media savvy to define itself on its own terms.

  Between the celebratory rhetoric of same-sex marriage and the global mainstreaming of gay rights, it’s easy to forget that finding community, finding healthcare (including mental health), and finding sanctuary from homophobic violence remain critical for many queers, and that there are many for whom the intersection of racial, economic, cultural, and sexual oppression represents an imminent threat to life. To someone for whom all identity is an act of impersonation (impersonating someone straight, for example, or someone of another sex), the layering of masks is, quite simply, a survival tactic. Qiu’s work may be dark, but now more than ever, it offers a provocative counterpoint to the blinkered optimism of gay rights as tethered to the interests of the state. Notes of a Crocodile reminds us that we all have our crocodiles. It’s just that now their preferred medium is the internet.

  ¤

  Ari Larissa Heinrich teaches in the Literature Department at UCSD. His translation of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre was published by New York Review Books in 2015. His forthcoming book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body, explores how human bodies acquire commodity value in the age of biotech — from the point of view of art.

• Kyoto Journal
  http://www.kyotojournal.org/online-special/notes-of-a-crocodile/
  Word count: 2595

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Qiu is what you’d call a writer’s writer, usually someone you read because you love to follow the motions of his or her voice, Her prose reads like non-fiction, a genre which is, above all else, about cultivating a style.”
  Notes of a Crocodile

  In Translation Online Special

  The Kids Are Too Straight: Translating Qiu Miaojin’s notes of a crocodile
  Bonnie Huie

  When I first started translating Notes of a Crocodile, I showed a draft to a friend from Taipei who once worked as a journalist and had read one of Qiu’s novels for her research. She couldn’t remember exactly what the book was about, she told me, but when she was cleaning out her apartment, it occurred to her that she should donate her copy. But then she hesitated. She didn’t think it was a good idea to donate a book that might not be a positive influence on teenagers.

  In 1987, a young Qiu Miaojin was just graduating from high school, and during that magical summer, Taiwan revoked martial law after 38 years. It was an opportune time, if you had the courage and the experience as a writer, to come of age and speak your piece.

  Notes of a Crocodile is not a book that shows teenagers how to live a straight life, in any sense of the term. And yet it is intended to be a survival manual for teenagers, for a certain age when reading the right book can save your life. The author lived as an outsider. She went to the best private school, got into the best university. She started writing. She became the first writer in her society to come out as a lesbian. Then she escaped and started a new life on the other side of the world. And then, in the final act, she threw her life away. A suicide. All of these circumstances are inseparable from her heroism. These survival lessons are intended for adults, too, for whom comfort and security come at the incremental cost of individuation, for there will be recurring moments when one feels as though life has yet to be lived, and the truth is, certain mistakes are better than nothing.

  Nobody wants to read morality plays anymore, but a lot of people still want to know how to live. And when you want to know how to live, you study great lives, you read Plutarch. But heaven also lets in a few dark stars, and it is best to be exposed to this fact while one is impressionable or has a tall stack of chips sitting on the table. Freedom of speech is based on a degree of faith in the noble potential of all individuals, whose ethical development cannot take place under strictly controlled social conditions. The higher self does not follow orders. It obeys a more mutable and sensitive thing known as conscience, which must be entirely cultivated on the level of the individual. This notion underscores the extraordinary loss in the recent passing of American publisher Barney Rosset in February last year. As the founder of Grove Press, he made an enormous contribution to our shared ethical imagination by offering examplars of beauty and moral complexity through the medium of literature, and moreover, providing access to the rest of the world through the English language. Elsewhere in the world in 1987, a young Qiu Miaojin was just graduating from high school, and during that magical summer, Taiwan revoked martial law after 38 years. It was an opportune time, if you had the courage and the experience as a writer, to come of age and speak your piece.

  Qiu is what you’d call a writer’s writer, usually someone you read because you love to follow the motions of his or her voice. Her prose reads like non-fiction, a genre which is, above all else, about cultivating a style. It lays out its own aesthetic blueprint, a constellation of writers and filmmakers of real spiritual conviction and of real artistic risk, a somewhat reserved school of thought which answers a work’s own call to necessity, knowing that whether it succeeds or fails, it all looks the same from above. The epigraphs on the first page of Notes of a Crocodile are entirely made up, but they clearly indicate what gifts she wanted to receive from her literary forefathers who, in this case, are all giants of modern Japanese fiction. From Dazai, something erotic and personal. Not quite autobiography, yet impossible to separate the author from the story. From Mishima, the most beautiful writer in the language, easily the mightiest pen. Burn his biography and perfect artistry will survive in his works regardless. From Murakami, a brand-name degree that means nothing unless you can communicate with the general public. The easier the sentence, the further it will travel. These are all aspects of a single persona that come together organically, exquisitely in the voice of a young woman writing in Chinese. At the same time, there’s a bit of swagger in the mouth. Partly a natural boyishness, partly the college kid talking, and partly the mature writer who openly flouted linguistic conventions and boundaries. This motif can be found again in her last novel, which takes its epigraph from “Amor,” a story by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Hers is a voice that deliberately carves its own mannerisms and inflections into the language.

  It takes an unfamiliar voice, if sometimes a damaged one, to reveal something of humanity to itself. I imagine that a translator ought to approach a literary composition in much the same way that a musician approaches a score, namely with performance as the object. When you pick it up and read it for the first time, which reaches you first, the sound or the meaning? If you manage to capture the sound, the meaning is likely to arrive on its own. It seems a tad unnatural to try to figure things out in the reverse order, since the former emphasizes knowledge and the latter technique. In an interview, Gregory Rabassa confessed that he translated Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch without reading it beforehand, simply doing it as he went along. The highest beauty lies in improvisation, a blindness of technique in which a battle is played out between one’s individual gifts and absolute faith. It requires fidelity to style, as well as true stamina. Some would call it living by your wits, an instinctive state of being that cannot be taught. But thankfully, it can be put into fake manuals for teenagers, and it can be translated.

  The Latin quote on translator Bonnie Huie’s left wrist comes from Horace’s Odes, and was quoted in Montaigne’s essay “On the Education of Children.” It has been translated as “Let him live beneath the open sky and dangerously,” as well as “Let him pass his life beneath the open sky amid stirring deeds.”

  Notes of a Crocodile (Excerpt)
  Written by Qiu Miaojin
  Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie

  It’s like a two-sided warning sign. The back says: Don’t believe it. The front says: Wield the axe of cruelty. It dawned on me one day, as if I were writing my own name for the very first time: cruelty and mercy are in fact one and the same.

  Notebook #1
  1
  July 20, 1991. Picked up my university diploma at the service window of the registrar’s office. It was so big I had to carry it with both hands. I dropped it twice walking on campus. The first time it fell by the sidewalk, into the mud. I wiped it off with my shirt. The second time the wind blew it away. I chased after it ruefully. All the corners were bent. In my heart, I held back an embarrassed laugh.
  When you come visit, will you bring me some presents? the Crocodile wanted to know.

  Very well, I’ll bring you some new handmade lingerie, said Osamu Dazai.

  I’ll give you the most beautiful picture frame on earth, would you like that? said Yukio Mishima.

  I’ll plaster your bathroom walls with copies of my Waseda degree, said Haruki Murakami.

  And that’s where it all began. Enter cartoon music (insert the closing theme to Two Tigers).

  Forgot to return my student ID and library card, but didn’t realize it. At first I’d actually lost them. Nineteen days later, both were anonymously returned to me in an envelope, instantly transforming their loss into a lie. But I couldn’t stop using them, either, just out of convenience. Also didn’t take my driver’s exam too seriously. Took it four times and failed, although two of those times were due to factors entirely beyond my control. What’s even better, I publicly claim to have failed only twice. Whatever, I don’t care…

  Locked the door. Shut the windows. Took the phone off the hook and sat down. And that’s how I wrote. I wrote till I was exhausted, smoked two cigarettes, went into the bathroom and took a cold shower. Outside were the torrential winds and rain of typhoon season. Halfway undressed, I realized there was no soap left. Got dressed again. Emerged from the bedroom with a bar of soap, then climbed back into the shower. That’s how it is, writing a bestseller.

  With soap in hand, and the sound of late-night radio in the background. There was a sudden clatter, as if a fuse had blown. I was enveloped in silence and pitch darkness. The power had gone out. Nobody else was around, so I ran out of the bathroom completely naked, searching for a candle without so much as a lighter. Carried three tiny tealights with me into the kitchen, stumbling into an electric floor fan along the way. Tried to light them on the gas burner, but the wax instantly melted down to the very bottom. There was nothing left to try. I threw open the door to the balcony and stepped outside to cool off. I hoped I would catch a glimpse of other kindred souls standing naked on their balconies. That’s how it is, writing a serious literary work.

  Even if this is neither popular or serious, at least it’s sensational. Five cents a word.
  It’s about getting a diploma and writing.

  *
  2
  In the past, I believed that every man carried in him the innate prototype of a woman, and that he would love the woman who most resembled this prototype. Although I am a woman, I also share this prototype of a woman.

  My prototype of a woman was the type who would appear in hallucinations at the last moments of your freezing to death at the top of an icy mountain, a mythical beauty who blurred the line between dreams and reality. For four years, that’s what I believed. And I wasted all of my university days—during which I had the most courage and honesty I would ever have towards life—because of it.

  I don’t believe it anymore. It’s like the impromptu sketch of a street artist, a little drawing taped to my wall. When I finally learned to leave it behind, I gradually stopped believing it, and in doing so, sold an entire collection of priceless treasures for next to nothing. It was then that I realized I should leave behind some sort of record before the entire vial of my memories ran dry. I knew that these feelings would vanish one day, as if they had been only a dream, and that the list of what had been bought and sold—and at what price—would never be recovered.

  It’s like a two-sided warning sign. The back says: Don’t believe it. The front says: Wield the axe of cruelty. It dawned on me one day, as if I were writing my own name for the very first time: cruelty and mercy are in fact one and the same. Existence in this world relegates good and evil to the exact same status. Cruelty and evil are but natural, and together they are endowed with half the power and half the utility in this world. As for the cruelty of fate, it seems, I have to learn to be crueler if I’m to become the master of the situation.

  Wielding the axe of cruelty against life, against myself, against others. It’s a rule that conforms to animal instinct, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics—and is the axis of all four. And the comma that punctuated being 22.

  *
  3
  Shui-Ling. Wenzhou Street. The white bench in front of the French bakery. The #74 bus.
  We sit at the back of the bus, the aisle between us. Shui-Ling and I occupy the window seats on either side. The December fog is sealed off behind a layer of glass. Dusk starts to set in at six. Taipei is now devoured in a sea of black. Traffic creeps along Heping East Road. At the outer edge of the Taipei Basin, where the sky meets the horizon, is the last wedge of a dark orange sun whose natural radiance floods through the windows and spills onto the traffic behind us, as if the blessing of some mysterious force.

  Silent, exhausted passengers pack into the aisle, heads hanging, bodies propped against the seats, stone oblivious. Through a gap between their draping winter coats, I peer over at her, trying to contain the enthusiasm in my voice.

  “Did you look outside?” I say in my most ingratiating tone.

  “Mmm,” comes her barely audible reply.

  After a light pause to frame the moment, Shui-Ling and I are sitting together in that hermetically sealed bus. Through the windows around us, the dark silhouettes of human figures wind the streets in a magnificent night scene, gorgeous and restrained. The two of us are content. We look happy. But underneath, there is already a strain of something dark, malignant. Just how bitter it would become, we didn’t know.

  See more, at the Brooklyn Rail’s In Translation site.

  And here, at The Margins:

  Qiu Miaojin (1969-1995) was a Taiwanese novelist. In 1995, she was awarded the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. Her works garnered mainstream attention and critical acclaim for their queer politics, countercultural ethos, and international scope of artistic influence, ranging from European cinema to modern Japanese literature. She was educated at National Taiwan University and Université Paris VIII. She committed suicide at the age of 26. A two-volume set of her diaries was published posthumously in 2007.

  Bonnie Huie
  Bonnie Huie is a writer and translator. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and educated in the US and Japan, and she has also lived in Germany and the Czech Republic. Her translation of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, for which she was awarded a PEN Translation Fund Grant, is forthcoming from New York Review Books.

  Copyright (c) INK Publishing, Taipei, 1994.
  English translation copyright (c) Bonnie Huie, 2012.

• Asymptote
  https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/qiu-miaojin-last-words-from-montmartre/
  Word count: 1886

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The exact facts of the narrative are unimportant,” Dylan Suher remarked in the online journal Asymptote. “What drives the novel forward instead is passion—an obsessive, all-consuming passion.”
  “It is clear why it has mesmerized the Taiwanese queer community and a generation of Taiwanese rebels and outsiders, and thanks to this skillful translation, I expect it will enthrall a whole new community of readers,”
  Dylan Suher reviews Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre
  Translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich (New York Review Books Classics, 2014)

  The world's oldest literary tradition might also have the world's longest literary martyrology. One of the earliest sources of the Chinese lyrical tradition, the Songs of Chu, was traditionally attributed to Qu Yuan, a semi-mythical poet-minister who, having lost favor with his ruler, jumped in a river and drowned himself. From Qu Yuan all the way to the suicide of Hai Zi some two thousand five hundred years later, there has been no end of Chinese poets and writers who have been jailed, executed, or driven to suicide as a result of their inability to reconcile their literary ardor to the disappointing realities of this world. Their suffering and martyrdom is held as proof of their transcendent spirit; as Qu Yuan said, according to Sima Qian's account, just before he jumped into the river, "How could I blot out the purest white with the filth and confusion of this vulgar world?"

  On June 25, 1995, a brilliant twenty-six-year-old Taiwanese fiction writer named Qiu Miaojin joined the ranks of the Chinese literary martyrs. Hounded by depression, Qiu took her own life in her Paris apartment in dramatic fashion, stabbing herself in the heart with an ice pick (or a kitchen knife; even the facts of Qiu's suicide have succumbed to her legend). Shortly after her death, Qiu Miaojin won one of Taiwan's most prestigious literary prizes, the China Times honorary prize, for her first novel, Diary of a Crocodile. Her posthumously published, semi-autobiographical, epistolary novel, Last Words from Montmartre, has become a cult classic, particularly in the Taiwanese queer community. In the words of Taiwanese novelist Luo Yijun, the book is "a Bible for lesbians." Her life and work have been the subject of a dedicated special issue of the Taiwanese magazine INK, as well as the subject of two full-length tribute works: Luo Yijun's memoir Encountering Sorrow, and the fiction writer Lai Hsiang-yin's novel Thereafter. New York Review Books recently published a new translation of Last Words from Montmartre, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich (2014), and will bring out her second novel, Diary of a Crocodile, translated by Bonnie Huie, in 2015. Her publication by New York Review Books puts her in rare company: the only other Chinese writer in their classics series is Eileen Chang, arguably the greatest Chinese writer of the twentieth century.

  Last Words from Montmartre is a hundred-page book of twenty letters, sent from a Taiwanese woman studying in Paris to her friends, her family, to no one in particular, and to her love interest, a woman named Xu. In these letters, the narrator discusses life as a student in Paris, the films of Theo Angelopoulos, the 1995 election of Jacques Chirac, the works of Kobe Abe and Osamu Dazai, the politics of her sexual identity, her thoughts of suicide, and above all, her desires. We are instructed to read these letters in any order, and as the book progresses (or reverses), chronologies and identities become confused. The narrator sometimes identifies as Zoe, a masculine, dominating sexual presence, but some of the letters seem to be written to Zoe from the point of view of Xu, and some of the letters clearly are not letters at all. The exact facts of the narrative are unimportant. What drives the novel forward instead is passion—an obsessive, all-consuming passion:

  Xu, you don't know how I love you. I'll be here till the end loving you this way. You don't know how I love you, or maybe you just don't want to know . . . You dismiss the value of my love, plaguing me with ulcers. But I'll use my life to prove my beauty and my love; I'll use an 'immortal' self to make my love shine forth with its lustrous glow, and I'll persuade you that all of this is the ultimate meaning of life. But I'll stop talking about it now, and keep my silence. Heaven will make people understand, as you will too . . .

  In the Chinese, Qiu's diction is slightly elevated but never obtuse, just elevated enough by grand metaphysical statements to give weight to the demands of her desire. Through compulsively repetitive batteries of short clauses and long modernist-inspired sentences, she evokes a hypnotic mania. Ari Larissa Heinrich, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, does honor to the tradition of the scholar-translator. He is familiar enough with Qiu's work and influences to make good use of the corresponding English idiolects: Sylvia Plath, Kathy Acker, Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" as translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Jean Genet as translated by Bernard Frechtman.

  Thanks to Heinrich's skill and judgment, Qiu's passion is as overwhelming and relentless a force in translation as in the original. Qiu's prose strikes the reader like a tsunami: waters of an unassuming height slowly but assuredly surge onto the land until they fill every room and take every object not nailed down. This is not simply passion, but what the Chinese call qing, which is passion as a full-blown aesthetic ideology. For those overcome by it, qing becomes the sine qua non of existing in the world. To quote the preface of the sixteenth-century play The Peony Pavilion, qing can cause "the living to die, and the dead to live again."

  To associate such passion with queer desire in the Taiwan of the early nineties was highly political. Generally speaking, homosexuality has been tolerated in modern China and Taiwan only on the condition that the homosexual remain invisible. As the scholars Liu Jen-peng and Ding Naifen write, "homophobic forces do not operate as overtly and violently [as in the West] but rather to protect everyone else's face (read: the faces of those who conform)." Last Words from Montmartre can be read as an allegory for that sociopolitical situation. Like letters sent to someone who doesn't respond, Qiu's novel represents a desperate queer demand for recognition from Taiwanese society. For a young person like Qiu, who graduated from Taiwan's finest university, to refuse to maintain face—to, on the contrary, smash it to bits with the power of qing—struck a daring blow for queer emancipation.

  Last Words from Montmartre came at the end of a wave of political unrest powered by student activists on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Ever since the mythic birth of modern China in the May Fourth movement—the 1919 protests by thousands of Beijing students against the international weakness of the Republican government—young students have been granted a privileged political role in China. According to both Communist and Nationalist official ideologies, the revitalizing energy of young people, particularly students, is the essential basis for the continued survival and development of the Chinese nation. Chen Duxiu, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, compared the role of the youth within the nation to that of "a fresh and vital cell in a human body." When thousands of students took to the streets for democracy—in Beijing in 1989, and in Taipei in 1990—they posed a significant ideological threat to the establishment. Qiu's refusal to hide or negotiate her queer identity resonated with a generation of Chinese students who refused to quietly accept the social roles offered to them. The back of this edition features a generous quote from the Tiananmen student leader and exiled dissident Wang Dan, who declares that he "felt a secret intimacy with Qiu Miaojin from the first page."

  Yet the political interpretation of this work highlights its ethical problems. For the youth politics of Tiananmen and the Wild Lily movement are also the politics of martyrdom. In an interview with an American student, the Tiananmen student leader Chai Ling famously declared, "What we actually are anticipating is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes." The narrator of Montmartre is similarly clear that her journey will end in suicidal self-sacrifice: "I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people."

  This martyrdom may demonstrate political and philosophical seriousness, it may even be necessary, but it is also selfish. This novel records not only forbidden passion, but also passion's reverse: depression. Depression is not an idle state, but an active compulsion towards misery. Like qing, it overwhelms, to the point that it suffuses the whole world. Such intensity leaves little room for other people, even those you purport to cherish the most. The narrator of Montmartre does not spend much time considering how Xu, her beloved, might react to her suicide. In fact, Xu's desires are given short shrift throughout the novel. Reread the long passage quoted above as if it was written by a man pursuing a woman, and you will discover a familiar story of a woman being told how she should feel and what she must do in response to someone else's desire—or else.

  To convert suicidal depression or the fevered mania of youth into an aesthetic politics is an awkward task—perhaps one best not attempted. I found myself drawn to the passages in Montmartre that described the details of the narrator's quotidian life in Paris:

  I left a message on Weng Weng's answering machine to tell him my impressions of Chungking Express and Vive L'Amour. I returned home around dusk and made scrambled eggs with beef and onion and macaroni, and some rice. After watching the news on TV, I went back to my room and stuck the stamps on envelopes already addressed to you while listening to the arias you had sent me.

  Last Words from Montmartre is undoubtedly powerful. It is clear why it has mesmerized the Taiwanese queer community and a generation of Taiwanese rebels and outsiders, and thanks to this skillful translation, I expect it will enthrall a whole new community of readers. But what moved me most in the novel was not the poetry of Qiu's suicide, but the prose of her life. There is another counterfactual story buried in the novel: a brilliant young writer who, oppressed by a society that would not accept her, pinned under the weight of staggering depression, nevertheless struggled every day and survived to see the next one. This too could have been Qiu Miaojin's legend. Unfortunately for all of us, this was a legend that never got a chance to be made.

  Zhuxin Zhang and Chi Xu's translation of the essay, also presented here, is authorized by the author.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/books/review/notes-of-a-crocodile-qiu-miaojin.html
  Word count: 1051

  Quoted in Sidelights: "It is refreshing to read a novel that so frankly examines patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, gender normativity and capitalism — especially one that howls so freely with pain." On the whole, Core said, Notes of a Crocodile is a "thrillingly transgressive coming-of-age story," while "Bonnie Huie’s translation is nothing short of remarkable — loving, even; one gets the sense that great pains have been taken to preserve the voice behind this lush, ontological masterwork."
  A Taiwanese Classic Now Available in English
  By LEOPOLDINE CORE MAY 5, 2017

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  Qiu Miaojin in Paris. Credit Photograph from New York Review Books
  NOTES OF A CROCODILE
  By Qiu Miaojin
  Translated by Bonnie Huie
  304 pp. New York Review Books. $15.95.

  “One day it dawned on me as if I were writing my own name for the first time,” the narrator of “Notes of a Crocodile” declares in the early pages. “Cruelty and mercy are one and the same.” This way of reframing dualities within a binary system — and pummeling that system — is the soul of this thrillingly transgressive coming-of-age story by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin. Bonnie Huie’s translation is nothing short of remarkable — loving, even; one gets the sense that great pains have been taken to preserve the voice behind this lush, ontological masterwork.

  Set in Taipei in the late 1980s, directly following the cessation of martial law, the novel follows a wry, soulful and somewhat miserable young woman nicknamed Lazi, who spends much of her time alone, reading, writing and decoding her obsessions deep into the night while somehow scraping by at one of Taiwan’s most esteemed universities. Lazi falls in love with her slightly older female classmate Shui Ling, a love she strains to resist and equates with a crime. The two embark on a tantric, mostly agonizing battle of wills, alternately courting and rejecting each other. “My world is one of tainted sustenance. I love my own kind — womankind,” Lazi contends in one of many letters to Shui Ling. “You were like a realm that exposed me. … You tore me open and exposed the man inside.” Qiu Miaojin’s energetic prose leaves a gratifying welt, marking the reader with the violence of her intelligence. Lazi makes a series of friends — all of them quick-witted, mournful and queer, but each uniquely so. Qiu rejects the notion of queerness as a single experience, showcasing its multitudes instead. Labels are never used to identify the desires of these characters; we are forced to think beyond them — to see the self as something of an abyss: “Hey, we should found a gender-free society and monopolize all the public restrooms!” This idea of the unfixed, fragmented self is mirrored by the structure of the book, which hovers between genres. Composed of Lazi’s eight notebooks and described as a survival guide, an array of literary forms conspire together: aphorisms, fragments and allegorical interludes about crocodiles who wear human suits when they go outside and symbolize the queer body. These sections depicting a world in which straight people are deeply attracted to those who deviate from the heterosexual paradigm, while also fearing and ultimately wanting to kill them. Qiu deftly exposes the interplay between hate and desire, illustrating how the compulsion to prey on queer and gender nonconforming people is often born of repressed desire.

  Photo

  First published in 1994, “Notes of a Crocodile” is in many ways a futuristic text, as it contains conversations about identity that are happening now — and ones that have yet to. It is refreshing to read a novel that so frankly examines patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, gender normativity and capitalism — especially one that howls so freely with pain. Lazi and her friends are philosophers who feel. They convey the rich and vital role of emotion in any revolution. Like gender and sexuality, the depths of pleasure and especially of sorrow are revealed here on a spectrum. Qiu reminds us that “positive” examples of the homosexual in literature and pop culture can be neutering and dehumanizing, as they often speak more to the institutions that despise them. Lazi exhibits moments of bliss and epiphany in a more complicated emotional terrain — the joy is in her mind, her pleasure in thinking, talking and writing — especially writing what she is unable to say.

  An open lesbian, Qiu Miaojin took her life at the age of 26, after which she shot to fame — “Lazi” became slang for lesbian. Suicide has a distinct way of dominating the biographies of artists, particularly young, queer ones, but it would be wrong to view this book through the lens of Qiu’s suicide. While the novel depicts self-harm and a sometimes burning temptation to die, it is in some deeper way about finding the will to live, both through creative means and the sheer vulnerability of being intimate with another person — or even with oneself. You risk a lot in that act, Lazi suggests. You really do risk your life.

  Correction: May 21, 2017
  A bibliographic note with a review on May 7 about “Notes of a Crocodile,” by Qiu Miaojin, misstated the book’s suggested retail price. It is $15.95, not $27.95. The error was repeated in the Editors’ Choice feature last Sunday.

  Correction: June 8, 2017
  An earlier version of the above correction misspelled Qiu Miaojin’s surname as Qui.

  Correction: June 25, 2017
  A review on May 7 about “Notes of a Crocodile,” by Qiu Miaojin, erroneously referred to the author by her given name in subsequent references. Her surname is Qiu, not Miaojin. (Qiu, who was Taiwanese, observed the usual Chinese convention in which a personal name consists of the family name followed by a given name.)

  Leopoldine Core is the author of the short story collection “When Watched” and the recipient of a Whiting Award.

  NOTES OF A CROCODILE By Qiu Miaojin Translated by Bonnie Huie 304 pp. New York Review Books. $27.95.

  A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2017, on Page BR25 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Risk and Reward. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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