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Title |
Journey of Growth: Searching the Meanings of Life in Pangcah Girl |
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Author |
Lin, Shu-Hui |
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Professor, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University |
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Abstract |
Growing up is a journey of learning how to live and finding the meaning of life. Bildungsroman, focusing on main characters’ experience in society, is a good teaching material for life education. In Gan Yao-ming’s Pangcah Girl, the illustration of characters’ enlightenment process provides an aspect to understand life in the context of collective relations. Being faced with conflicts in life, choices of life situations, and helping friends to get out of the self-blaming trauma, it seems that by passing through such rituals, the protagonist Gu A-xia is successfully marching toward a more intelligent stage. By visiting the forest farm of Morisaka and reading relevant texts, the author presents the landscape of logging in the Central Mountain Range in the 1970s and interprets the core values of growth through imagination and irony. The characters in the novel grow in their traveling, looking for the value of life. This fiction implies how people could get along with the nature, and expresses the eternal meaning of life practice. By braiding and reorganizing the stories, it conveys the value of life and triggers readers’ empathy. This article explores the theme of how the narrative of the novel interprets the meaning of life from two aspects: travel and self-growth and the transformation of material. |
