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271 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 11, 1994
“Cruelty and mercy are one and the same. Existence in this world relegates good and evil to the exact same status. Cruelty and evil are only natural, and together they are endowed with half the power and half the utility in this world. It seems I’m going to have to learn to be crueler if I’m to become the master of my own fate.”
// buddy read with cath!!
Miaojin is able to draw on the particularities of their individual dispositions without making the impossibility of queer relationships, at that precise historical moment in Taiwan, seem like the result of mere problems with individuals. In fact, all of these unhappy queer people in love with people they can’t be with begin to add up to a problem that is more than just personal failings. “I remember back in high school, we were a bunch of misfits, always having fun. There was something going on every day. We were part of a community. Now life’s all about being tied down by a man,” says Tun Tun, summing up the central issue of the book: how to live a life of queer imaginaries outside of the strictures of heteronormative society. In another conversation that Lazi has with Chu Kuang about his relationship with Meng Sheng, he tells her, “How about if the three of us agree to have post-gender relations? I’m done talking about it. In the end, all three of us have been seriously warped by gender labels.”
College—now there's a system. Though it's not quite death, it's a pretty close second.I've a corpse hundreds of books long dragging behind me, a corpse I once viewed as the key to fending off the demons of suicidal ideation but now see as more stickly stagnant and staringly status quo than not. It's made me erratic in my less carefully premeditated reading choices, and when NYRB offered a queer sale for the sake of a queer month and this work popped up, I cast back to the blood breaking spine spewing success of Last Words from Montmartre and thought, there's the rub. Indeed, at first this rubbed me the wrong way, least until I recognized the need to 'regress' to a form of my self pre college drop out, pre full time job, pre hormone regeneration therapy almost 100% subsidized by decent healthcare. You see, Qiu Miaojin killed herself at the age of 26 before I reached the age of five, and there's some cracking and straining of that gnaw-off-your-brain-to-escape-the-chain-around-your-skull chemistry should you make it past certain ages with enough luck to win you something stable. So, to come to this work was to go back in the void, and here's the funny thing: I may not live in post-martial Taiwan, but just try to tell me that the state of trans people in 2024 USA doesn't have some flavor of the butcher market to it. And look, I may be completely off the mark when it comes to the crocodiles, but all I could think about was Čapek's Newts, where satire bleeds out what bildungsroman burrows away from except take it to the drugs, take it to the self-sabotage, take it to the playing dead as the spotlight of eugenics roves across your trembling lust and martyred flesh. I don't begrudge the younger folks their representation, I truly don't, but to read the author's roiling over physical attraction while the self-censors move out in self-righteous force makes me want to laser through the nearest submarine fiberoptics and force the kiddies to read all these treebound histories and listen to all those who have gone before before these festering youth fling themselves into the Moloch of respectability politics.
There are many important images in my mind that were captured at strange twists and turns, during the passage from one stage to the next, accumulating a weight I never expected. But I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.
You were like acid on my limestone, unaware of how hardened I was. My sense of self had begun to disintegrate, and so I had to flee. Still, you know nothing of how it transformed me, nor do you realize how I altered your destiny.All in all, I caught myself off guard by how much I got this. Nicked off some chunks of my sanity, but that's a small price to pay for a piece of one's soul.
The reason Xiao Fan accepted me was because I didn't reject her. And because it wasn't love.
Effective today, we have designated this month as National Crocodile Month in order to give crocodiles nationwide an opportunity to turn themselves over to the registrars of the Bureau of Health and Sanitation or the National Police Academy, to whom crocodiles must provide their names, which will be made public. Scheduling of treatment and a pledge of compliance will also be undertaken at that time. Any late registrants who are discovered will be subject to penalties, which will be administered separately.
It didn’t matter what kind of person I was inside, how I yearned for a bond with Xiao Fan, or if my desire to love her had been my undoing: The world didn’t care. It was nothing personal. Even the woman right in front of me was telling me no. There was no right or wrong here. In the end, the world didn’t owe me anything, not even half a chance. That was the hand I’d been dealt in life, and while detachment was enough for me to withstand hatred, extricating myself from the jaws of suffering called for enough detachment to exercise cruelty.
From the standpoint of developmental psychologists, crocodiles were an aberrant species. In accordance with their discipline’s understanding of crocodile families, their research indicated distinct differences from humans at every stage of development from birth to puberty as well as in maturity, though details had yet to be ascertained. There was a general consensus, however, that up the age of fourteen, crocodiles a homemade ‘human suit’ before running away from home. While exact causes remained unknown, scholars cited societal attitudes as a factor in crocodile mutation, suggesting that there was no means of preventing an increase in the number of emergent crocodiles, which would ultimately contribute to a broader societal trend toward a full-fledged crocodile ecology and genetic mutation.