| Bai Xianyong's writing has two dimensions; one is "decline", and the other is "youth". Rooted in the fracture of historical trauma experience, "decline" stands for the last mainlander. However, the theme of Taipei People is not limited to the decline of a class, but rather "after the ending", that is, how to face historical burden and newly establish and control subjectivity. The "after the ending" is just before the 1970s, during which Taiwan's awakening of self-consciousness had begun. The rise of Taiwan's self-consciousness during the 1970s did not come into being overnight. The 1960s was the period full of struggle and anxiety before the birth of the subject consciousness. In Taipei People, Bai Xianyong uses different stories to offer a multiform examination of the phenomena of historical anxiety associated with mainlanders in Taiwan. This thesis argues that the anxiety is rooted in their identity as the "last mainlanders." During the transformative period of the 1960s and 1970s, these "Taipei people" solve the problem of how to face historical trauma through compulsively "tailing" the past. In contrast to the context of "Youth Writing" in the 1960s, Bai Xianyong pushes readers to face their historical anxiety through writing its declining years. |
