A THOUSAND MOONS ON A THOUSAND RIVERS
By HSIAO LI-HUNG
Translated by Michelle Wu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 304 pages, $24.95

Eva Shan Chou

Hsiao Li-hung's novel A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers won the 1980 literature competition of the United Daily newspaper in Taiwan (it was submitted to the competition in manuscript form) and became a bestseller upon its publication the following year. Today, a new generation of readers has discovered it and made it a topic of Internet discussion. Such staying power makes the novel doubly interesting, for its own qualities and for what it tells us about its two generations of readers. Now an attractive translation allows readers of English to take part in, and make their own judgments about, what has been an important literary and social phenomenon.

The novel tells the story of a girl, Zhenguan, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in a fishing village in southern Taiwan, next door to her grandparents, many aunts and uncles, and twelve cousins. Hers is an idyllic childhood, and the loving, detailed description of its events takes up much of the novel's first half and governs its whole mood. There are games and squabbles and teasing among the cousins; Zhenguan goes night fishing in the family fishponds (and sees the moon reflected in all the ponds-hence the book's title, which is also a quotation from a Buddhist sutra); much food is described (always an effectively nostalgic device in literature), and some aunt is always cooking something; all are solicitous of the grandmother and grandfather, who, for their part, pass on their wisdom gently but firmly. This timeless life is punctuated by the new year's, autumn, and double seventh festivals, and by weddings and births, all celebrated with many traditions and even larger family gatherings. As a child, Zhenguan feels that she cannot be separated from her perfect home, but as she grows older, she has to leave, first for a prefectural town, then for Tainan, the big city in southern Taiwan, and finally for Taipei, the capital, in the north.
In 1980, when the novel was written, Zhenguan's was a rural Taiwan that was fast disappearing. The reader of this translation learns, as the novel's many fans in Taiwan must have learned, almost as from a historical novel, about the customs of a past that had endured for centuries and then was suddenly gone. But more than nostalgia is likely at work: one can sense that Hsiao Li-hung has set out to portray and record the culture of Taiwan, which is admittedly a part of Chinese culture, but which at the time was only beginning to receive its separate due. In literature and in other branches of knowledge and creativity, as well as in political and economic spheres, Taiwan as an entity was then coming into focus. Today, twenty years later, the Taiwan variety of Chinese culture is authentically and firmly established, but, sadly, its earlier roots are twenty more years further in the past. In Hsiao's novel, we can see them in a last full bloom.
The second half of A Thousand Moons is taken up with the love story of the heroine and her cousin Daxin, who is from Taipei. Their courtship has the same dreamlike quality as Zhenguan's childhood, and the reader visits with them the evocative haunts-sweetshops, bookstores, museums-of Daxin's student days. In the person of Daxin, the author gives us a gentle guide to Taiwan's non-rural future. Daxin comes to the village to visit his relatives and he reads classical poetry and Buddhist scriptures, but he is also a chemistry graduate of Taiwan National University and wins a scholarship to the University of London. He must have provided the book's first generation of readers with an unthreatening and ideal bridge to Taiwan's urban, international future-which must have been visible in 1980, and which we see today.
A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers is a novel that can be read both for its beautiful evocations of a bygone time and for the glimpses it gives of the hopes, fears, and regrets of a large population of readers.

Eva Shan Chou, assistant professor of Asian studies at City University of New York, Baruch College, writes frequently on Chinese literature and is the author of Reconsidering Tu Fu, a study of the eighth-century Chinese poet.