ABSTRACT
A number of interpretive accounts regarding the trends of modern Taiwan literature are available. This chapter suggests that Chinese diaspora and their modernist Sinophone articulations; nativism and hometown discourses; the aborigine's eco-political writings; overseas student and global Sinophone literatures; and post-1987 urban and queer discourses. From the 1980s on, social movements triggered by the new demands of democratic representation, gender equality, human rights, gay discourse, fair distribution, class mobility, multiculturalism, local community reconstruction, and so forth helped push Taiwan farther apart from China. Writers in these categories tend to appropriate postmodernism and magic realism from such diverse sources as Japanese, French, German, Eastern European, and Latin American, that they consider themselves to be no longer just Chinese. Huang Chunming's Taste of Apples is a good example of such nativist discourse, with stories around common, rural characters who are struggling with illness, debt, uncertainties, and all sorts of bitter-sweet life situations, like becoming a sandwich man or infant's puppet-clown.
