In April 2024, the Taiwanese drag queen Nymphia Wind became the first East Asian winner of the RuPaul Drag Race.[1] Videos of her in a galactic golden suit went viral, putting Taiwan in the international media spotlight and enshrining her as a sort of queer ambassador for Taiwanese realness to the rest of the world, or, as she has said, like a wai jiao guan 外焦官 – ‘external banana official’, a punning homophone for ‘ambassador’ 外交官. Back at home, Nymphia was invited to perform for Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. She wore a banana blossom costume, a symbol of her Asian heritage, and danced in front of Sun Yat-sen’s statue to a medley of songs, including Taiwanese diva classics and her favourite song by Lady Gaga, ‘Marry the Night’.
In this show, Nymphia displayed the same queer high as Taiwan’s sci-fi writers have done since the 1990s. Although this time Taiwan’s queer imagination gained global intelligibility outside literature and on TV, both Nymphia and Taiwanese queer science fiction writers before her shared a common goal: dreaming of a different future.
Dreaming of a different future
In 1995, writing in the technical journal Wanglu Tongxun 網路通訊, the Taiwanese gothic sci-fi writer Hong Ling 洪凌 wondered what it could mean to exist in cyberspace, a concept at the core of contemporary literary science fiction:
I just returned from a place where that which can be comprehended is not set by three-dimensional physics. Saying ‘returned’ violates the normal course of current physics, because I have not moved. Actually, I have been sitting still in my little attic, with my keyboard on a cushion over my knees and my gaze never moving away from an 87 cm monitor… Somehow, the me of a few minutes ago is not the me who is now frenziedly striking the keys on their keyboard; they are indeed in two different places.
Amid a fear of the pervasive spread of the internet in the 1990s and its consequences for freedom and civilisation, the title of Hong Ling’s contribution ‘A Fatal and Magnificent Surreal Realm’ 致命華美的超現實境域 announced a hopeful perspective for the future. It is one that has permeated queer science fiction in Taiwan: the perspective of existing differently.
Sci-fi is not a popular genre in Taiwan. Anyone who visits a bookstore in the island, either now or in the 1990s when sci-fi first appeared, would realise that these texts lack a shelf of their own. The elements used by Taiwanese sci-fi writers in the 1990s are of the most varied, making it difficult to create a rigid corpus of Taiwanese sci-fi without stepping into the genres of fantasy or general literature.
Theorists in the field of science fiction have long argued that one of the central elements of sci-fi as a genre is the concept of cyberspace. It is accepted that cyberspace represents an opportunity to fulfil the fantasy of leaving the ‘prison of the meat’ in the future.[3] However, Taiwanese queer sci-fi writers like Hong Ling dealt with the uncertainty of the future in a holistic way. They saw technology not as a way out of the problems of the present world but as central to their hopes for survival in a non-normative way. In their works, cyberspace and technology do not mean a departure from material embodied concerns, neither do they entail an adoption of a more abstract, transcendent self. In these texts, technology mediates between our fragile existences and the threats posed to human survival in order to invent queer futures.
Such is the centrality of the body in 1990s Taiwanese sci-fi that it is a genre full of desire, thirst and lust as well as blood, thinking of Hong Ling’s collection of lesbian vampire stories, Heretic Vampire Biographies 異端吸血鬼列傳, or their story ‘Fever’ 發燒, where lesbian vampires and werewolves dwell in post-apocalyptic cities following nuclear or environmental catastrophes.[4]
Technology has allowed Taiwanese queer sci-fi writers to imagine self-expression free from sexual prejudice by embracing future uncertainty. As Hong Ling wrote: ‘Let’s meet each other online! Even if that means to encounter with fatally alienated identities and get entangled in relationships far different from the ones we already know.’[5] As anarchic as this invitation to the future might sound, it locates technology as the means to actualise the unknown and speaks of a need to make a change in a spoiled present. Technology was not only an abstract source of inspiration for queers’ stories; it was also the means to actualise an uncertain yet desired future, and queer sci-fi writers were high on it.
In 1995, when Microsoft Word and the internet were still novelties, Chi Ta-wei 紀大偉 published what has been labelled the first modern Sinophone queer sci-fi novel and seemingly the first featuring a trans protagonist: The Membranes 膜, translated into English in 2021 by Ari Heinrich. It portrays a world where humanity has fled the surface of the Earth and found refuge at the bottom of the ocean. This novel, which has already been translated into several European languages and adapted into theatre, was written in just one month, only two years after its author learned to use Microsoft Word – a clear example of how technology was not only a fictional element but also a real tool with which to invent the future.
In a 2021 interview, Chi spoke of the high in the writing process of The Membranes as an unequivocally embodied experience mediated by technology: ‘I did not feel the adrenaline rush when writing on paper, but with a computer I felt that my writing experience was suddenly enhanced and made euphoric. I enjoyed the high a lot back then.’[6] This is reminiscent of the passage by Hong Ling, revealing an important characteristic of Taiwanese queer sci-fi writers: their future as queer people had been foreclosed by an authoritarian present, but with the lifting of martial law in 1987 and a keyboard at hand, the horizon of possibilities for politics, culture and self-expression suddenly broadened, together with the arrival of the internet and mass electronic communications. This generation of queer writers inevitably started imagining their survival as queers in intimate relation with technology.
Other Taiwanese writers of sci-fi feel their survival threatened for different reasons not related to their sexuality, including climate collapse. Wu Ming-yi’s 吳明益 The Man with the Compound Eyes 複眼人 (2011) shows how all lives face the same fatal risk of ecological catastrophe. In the novel, Atile’i, the second son of a family on the imaginary island of Wayo Wayo, is offered as a sacrifice to the Sea God, as tradition requires. Unexpectedly, he survives. Caught in a trash vortex, Atile’i arrives on the coast of Taiwan, where he meets Alice Shih. Alice, who has just lost her husband and son in an accident in the mountains, and Atile’i, who has left behind his civilisation and everything he knew, both feel their world is over and are in need of imagining a future different from the one they could have foreseen. This situation of finding each other as the world collapses from climate change bonds them as they are forced to reimagine their lives afresh.
Wu Ming-yi first published a short story with the same title in 2002 in the journal Chung-wai Literary. In the story, a researcher employed by a tour company must film a nature reserve and replicate it virtually. While filming, he meets a man with compound eyes who advises him to set up cameras to record how purple crow butterflies (which also have compound eyes) see the world, telling him: ‘If the gaze with which animals see the world is not understood, everything will come to an end.’[7]
In this seminal work, two key elements of 1990s Taiwanese queer science fiction are evident: a need to imagine the future afresh after undergoing a life-threatening situation (ecological disaster in this case), and technology (filming) as the mediator between humans and their possibility of a different future.
Although Wu did not write from a queer perspective or for a queer audience, one can trace his writing back to previous experiments of 1990s queer sci-fi, propelled by a similar feeling of urgency for a different future and with technology as the facilitator of that future.
The novel that developed from Wu’s short story has been translated into more than ten languages, and the acquisition of the rights for an English translation at the 2011 Frankfurt Bookfair by American publisher Vintage Pantheon was spurred precisely by the urgency and global intelligibility of its ecological message.[8]
While the sense of emergency in The Man with the Compound Eyes is visible, the key role of technology as mediator, although present at the seminal work that served as its blueprint, is lost in the time lapse of the decade that separates the publication of the two texts.
The realistic turn of contemporary Sinophone sci-fi
After the 1990s, the role of technology seemed to have gradually lost its ability to ‘wow’ Taiwanese sci-fi writers, and its role in Sinophone sci-fi might be changing altogether.
In the popular saga The Three Body Problem 三體 (2008) by mainland Chinese writer Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, a world on the edge of alien invasion strives to save itself. The Redemptionists put all their efforts into finding a solution, via technology, to their seemingly doomed future while the Adventists welcome the invaders’ goal of taking over the Earth. Unlike Taiwan’s queer sci-fi, in this trilogy, technology does not serve as a mediator to overcome humankind’s mistakes, nor to make human life on Earth more inclusive, or at least give it an option for survival after an apocalyptic disaster. In The Three Body Problem, technology is represented in what can be read as realistic terms: as a locus where power is contested in line with current geopolitics.
Mimicking real life and no longer speculating about the future, some contemporary science fiction portrays technology as a frontier to be controlled to attain power. The United States blocking China’s access to some technological improvements can be read as analogous to the real-life Sophons; those subatomic particles in The Three Body Problem saga sent by the enemy to foreclose technological advances on the Earth. Even the poisoning and murder in real life of Lin Qi, one of the promoters of the TV adaptation of The Three Body Problem, defies the limits of fiction, taking a Hollywood murder plot into reality.[9]
China’s global ambitions and the logistics and politics surrounding the international flow of semiconductors put unique pressures on Taiwan. This might affect Taiwan’s future artistic production and push it to take a more realistic turn following the example of mainland Chinese writers like the aforementioned Liu Cixin or Chen Qiufan 陈秋帆.
Nymphia Winds’s performance at the Presidential Office serves as an illustrative example of the distinctive Taiwanese queer imagination that emerged in the 1990s: one that uses technology as a mediator, reaches global audiences, and does not resort to realism to invent the future. Nymphia’s performance of Huang Fei’s 黃妃 ‘zhui, zhui, zhui’ 追追追 [‘Chase, chase, chase’], a classic Taiwanese diva song, at the otherwise formal setting of the Presidential Office serves to evoke the uniqueness of Taiwanese queer spirit that is so pervasive in 1990s queer sci-fi. It is a spirit that strives to find a way, from a seemingly hopeless atmosphere, to imagine a queer glittering future that, like Nymphia’s dress, blooms like it has gone bananas
Notes
[1] ‘Best of Nymphia Wind’, YouTube, retrieved 24 September 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE2gsHaIDpI
[2] Hong Ling, ‘Zhiming Huamei de Chaoxianshi Jingyu’, Wanglu Tongxun, 1995, p. 114.
[3] Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 102–3.
[4] Paola Zamperini (trad.), ‘Fever’, in Patricia Sieber (ed.), Red is Not the Only Color, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, p. 149.
[5] Hong Ling, ‘Zhiming Huamei de Chaoxianshi Jingyu’, p. 117.
[6] Chris Littlewood, ‘Never prosthetic: An interview with Chi Ta-Wei’, Paris Review, 13 October 2021.
[7] Wu Ming-yi, ‘The man with the compound eyes’, Chung Wai Literary Quarterly vol. 31, no. 4 (2002), p. 205.
[8] Pei-yin Lin, ‘Positioning “Taiwanese literature” to the world’, in Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin (eds), Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019, p. 22.
[9] David Pierson, ‘The bizarre Chinese murder plot behind Netflix’s “3 Body Problem”’, 1 April 2024, online at https://www.nytimes.com
