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Title |
Another Field in Taiwan ─ The Natural Writing of Li Chiao’s “Vegetation Kindness” |
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Author |
Chen, Welin-Lin |
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Professor, Institute of Taiwan Literature/ Institute of Sinophone, National Tsing Hua University |
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Abstract |
The old writer Li Chiao has published the new book “Vegetation Kindness”, which records Taiwan’s plants and flowers in the field and narrates the self life experience recently. The book is briefly divided into 62 chapters which are named after vegetations and the illustrated chapters are attached. Each chapter structure broadly includes 3 points: first, it is the introduction of notes for the illustrated handbook of similar kind of plants, and their meanings are named in Hakka, Minnan dialect and Chinese; second, it is to use the vivid words to narrate various stories about vegetations’experience and the intersections in each stage of his own life; third, it is involved in the local features of plants and collective historical memory of Taiwan. Therefore, this paper takes Vegetation Kindness as a green map leading to “locality”, “life” and “historic culture” to seek for the Li Chiao’s diversified and plentiful green rhetoric with far-reaching figurative meaning according to the map, so as to observe another dimension of natural writing in Taiwan. In addition, Li Chiao also uses the biological species as the writing theme of “Three Friends of Land, Sea and Air”, which will also be listed as an intertextual reading, to grasp the multi-view of Li Chiao’s writing of the natural ecological race. |
