|
Title |
Writing Care and Farewell: Caregiving, Mortality, and Religious Imagination in Chung Wen-Yin's Mother-Illness Trilogy |
|
Author |
Chiang, Ya-Ni |
|
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Chinese Literature, National Cheng Kung University |
|
|
Abstract |
Beginning in 2017, Chung Wen-Yin's (1969-) Mother-Illness Trilogy—consisting of the essay collection Reluctant to Say Goodbye to You (2017), the novel Do Not Send Me Off (2021), and the notebook-style work The Chronicle of Parting (2023)—documents her long journey of accompanying her mother through illness, aging, and death. At the same time, these works reveal the gradual formation of a "language of care" situated between literature and religion. This paper first examines the transformation of Chung's writing from travel narratives to mother-illness writing, exploring how this shift reflects a broader change in her life experience and literary concerns. It then analyzes how repetitive acts of caregiving become everyday practices with religious significance, and how the different genres of essay, novel, and notebook employ varying degrees of fictionality and factuality to express distinct emotional dimensions of caregiving, farewell, and loss. Finally, by extending the discussion to Private Elegy (2025), this study investigates how literature and religion together function as means of accommodating grief and preserving memory in the aftermath of long-term caregiving and bereavement. |
