Taipei People
by Hsien-Yung Pai, 白先勇
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Pai Hsien-yung is among the most important writers in contemporary Chinese and world literature. His masterpiece Taipei People is a classic of Taiwanese modernism; with an intensity of vision comparable to James Joyce's Dubliners, it follows the individual struggles of the people of Taipei, with a mix of compassion, nostalgia, mourning, and tenacious clarity. Fifty years after its publication, the collection continues to move readers around the world. Stories from this collection have been show more translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Taipei People is a collection of 14 short stories by the Taiwanese writer Bai Xien Yong. Published separately during the 60s, and for the first time as a collection in 1971, the work is rightly regarded on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as a masterpiece of Chinese literature, a contemporary classic. The stories focus on those who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai Shek’s armies in 1949: the singsong girls, taxi dancers, prostitutes, Beijing Opera stars, cooks, batmen, industrialists, widows, airmen and soldiers, generals, scholars and minor government functionaries, all of whom are living out their last days in Taipei, victims of history, survivors of loss, nursing their reveries of bygone days, putting a brave face on grief, and coming show more to terms with exile and defeat.
Read the full review on The Lectern. show less
Read the full review on The Lectern. show less
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100 works; 2 members
Author Information
37+ Works 329 Members
Son of one of the military leaders of the Nationalist Revolution and high government defense official during the war against Japan, Pai spent much of his youth in wartime Kweilin in southwest China, which has provided much of the material for his subsequent fiction. After the war ended, he resided for a time in Shanghai, and then resettled with show more his parents in Taiwan when he was of middle-school age. He attended the prestigious National Taiwan University. He published his first short story in September 1958, having just completed his freshman year. Pai came to the United States in 1963 and since 1965 has taught Chinese at the University of California at Santa Barbara while continuing to publish fiction. His style is among the most polished of any modern writer in Chinese. He depicts his characters with vivid realism, and often chooses themes that describe the pain of exile, showing the once powerful reduced to humble or humiliating circumstances. Such themes are particularly evident in his highly acclaimed collection of stories, Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream: Tales of Taipei Characters (1971) which he dedicates to his parents and "the tumultuous age in which they lived." With his novel Crystal Boys (1990), he has become the first modern Chinese writer to explore the theme of homosexuality in a story about gay life in the city of Taipei. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
11 Works 94 Members
Awards and Honors
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- 臺北人
- Original publication date
- 1971
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 895.1 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages Literatures of East and Southeast Asia Chinese
- LCC
- PL2892 .A345 .T313 — Language and Literature Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania Languages of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania Chinese language and literature Chinese literature Individual authors and works
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 99
- Popularity
- 326,224
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.23)
- Languages
- Chinese, English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 18
- ASINs
- 2
