The Taste of Apples. (Noted).

Kinkley, Jeffrey C.

Huang Chun-ming. The Taste of Apples Howard Goldblatt, tr. New York. Columbia University Press. 2001. xv + 251 pages $42.50 ($16.50 paper) ISBN 0-231-12260-8 (12261-6 paper)

APART FROM THE ADDITION of a newly translated story (a substantial one), this volume reprints The Drowning of an Old Cat and Other Stories by Taiwanese author Huang Chun-ming, published by Indiana University Press in 1980. Written in the 1960s and 1970s, the nine original stories in Chinese are not the "latest thing" in hip Taiwan, but the works and Howard Goldblatt's sensitive translations of them are now poignant classics that do credit to David Der-wei Wang's new Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series.

The intensity of internal and social conflicts that Huang packs into a few pages is apparent in the newly included story, "Xiaoqi's Cap," in which a disgruntled and cocky twenty-year-old salesman of imported Japanese pressure cookers struggles with his attraction to an abnormally beautiful and shy grade-schooler. After taming his incipient lust, he removes her schoolgirl's cap in an affectionate paternal gesture, discovering a scalp covered in scabs. What can he do to restore her dignity?

Huang's fertile imagination moves amid squatters, grotesques, misfits, oddballs -- people with lifestyles characteristic of a poor, developing country prematurely unsettled by urbanization, world politics, and globalization. Such a world is mostly past in Taiwan, but very much alive elsewhere in Asia. The characters' guilt, despair, and defiant pride are universal, generally revealed in subtle but startling ways.

Jeffrey C. Kinkley
St. John's University, New York