Qiu Miaojin, a Taiwanese woman with short black hair. She wears a collared denim top or jacket and looks into the camera.
Content warning for suicide mention, outing
“My world is one of tainted sustenance. I love my own kind–womankind.” – Qiu Miaojin
In just a few years and with only a handful of short stories and brief writings under her belt, Qiu Miaojin went from being an educated schoolgirl doing freelance journalism to a Taiwanese household name as one of her country’s most famous and celebrated LGBT figureheads, countercultural voices and innovative authors. For most, it takes a lifetime to build a legacy of work to be remembered by, but Qiu Miaojin was able to accomplish just that by her mid-twenties, and is a name that is still being brought up again and again as a trailblazer and an essential contributor to the queer canon of the Far East.
Qiu Miaojin was born on May 29th, 1969 in Changhua County, the most populous county in western Taiwan. There she attended the prestigious Taipei First Girls’ High School followed by the National Taiwan University, where she graduated with a major in psychology. Qiu then began working as a counselor, but started to explore her interest in writing by publishing short stories in local newspapers, one of which won the Zhongyang Times short story prize in 1989. A year later, Qiu received another accolade when she won the Lianhe Literary Prize for her novella-length story, “The Lonely Crowd”. That same year, Qiu contributed “Platonic Hair” to the Independence Evening Post, notable for being the first overtly lesbian-themed story that she published.
In “Platonic Hair”, the protagonist is a thirty year old writer who, in order to gather material for a piece on nightlife, signs a contract to live with a female sex worker. As time passes, the two grow fond of one another but fear engaging in sexual activity, and each night the sex worker goes out to work with male clients, the protagonist remains at home with increasing jealousy. Only at the end of the story is the protagonist revealed to be female, and that both characters feared intimacy because they felt lesbian sex was too taboo. As the protagonist ruminates: “To be a woman who loves another woman is to be sharply, heart-piercingly humbled. The humiliation of not knowing what I could possibly give her shadowed my every move.” With “Platonic Hair”, Qiu began to explore the topic of lesbian survival in mainstream Taiwanese society, providing a snapshot into her country’s sentiments towards homosexuality at the time. Qiu soon compiled “Platonic Hair”, and several other stories into her first book of collected work, The Revelry of Ghosts, published in 1991. The following year, Qiu solidified her pursuit of a writing career by taking a job as a reporter for the weekly magazine, The Journalist.
To contextualize the environment in which Qiu began to publish her groundbreaking work, it is important to note that it was a watershed moment in Taiwanese history. 1987 saw the lifting of martial law in the country, which led to the democratization of Taiwan, permitting opposition political parties to form legally for the first time and giving Taiwan's increasingly vocal dissenters a new chance to organize. It also began to loosen restrictions on freedom of assembly, speech and the press. On the other hand, Qiu started publishing her work before the rise of the “Tongzhi” (“Comrade”) movement in Taiwan, (also known as the LGBTQIA movement), which only took shape in the mid-’90s and engendered a time of cultural turbulence surrounding the concept of gendered and sexual bodies in the country.
1994 served as a crucial shift for both Qiu’s life and career, as she moved to Paris to pursue graduate studies in clinical psychology and feminism at the University of Paris VIII, studying under the tutelage of famed philosopher, Hélène Cixous. Qiu also began learning French at the Sorbonne, Alliance Française, and Institut Catholique, and dabbled in filmmaking, directing her first short film, Ghost Carnival. Most importantly, Qiu published her first full-length novel, Notes Of A Crocodile, which was awarded the China Times Literature Award in 1995 and was later added to the list for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize.
Taiwan in the ‘90s was suffering from a media fixation with transgressive sexualities, and when Notes Of A Crocodile was released, it was amidst a notorious Taiwanese media scandal surrounding the outing of several lesbians. A TV journalist had secretly filmed patrons at a lesbian bar without their consent, and when the footage was publicly released, it portrayed several girls who were in the closet and resulted in multiple suicides. It is rumored that two of the girls who killed themselves were a pair of lesbians from the same elite high school that Qiu herself attended. Notes Of A Crocodile, therefore, splashed onto the scene at a trying time for the Taiwanese queer community, and in the words of Taiwanese author Hong Ling: “In the sweltering summer of 1994, there at last appeared on Taiwan’s bleak and barren literary scene a crocodile whose existence it was impossible to overlook. With this, the voice of Taiwan’s lesbians truly showed its strength, both in the novel itself, and in readers’ responses to it.”
Set in Taipei in the late ‘80s, Crocodile’s protagonist and narrator is a depressed, sardonic young woman named Lazi, a loner who spends her time reading and writing but is still barely scraping by at the esteemed university she attends. There she falls in love with a slightly older female classmate, Shui Ling, but tries to resist the same-sex relationship as she feels it is a crime. The pair break up and embark on a journey of twisting relations, with each alternately courting and rejecting the other. The rest of the narrative is filled in by Lazi’s group of friends at school, each of whom are also queer and dealing with their own turmoils.
This primary narrative of Crocodile is interwoven with a second story, which told in third person, details the days of a cartoon-like crocodile living in Taipei who is plagued with the fear of being discovered as a crocodile by the media and public and thus traipses around donning a ‘person suit’. The island’s people, however, already suspect the presence of crocodiles among them, which sparks a media-driven witch hunt that leads to the croc almost being tricked into removing its suit. Lazi intervenes just in time and drags the creature to her basement, where they make a film together that they hand over for public broadcast. The film is shown, and its final scene portrays the crocodile floating out to sea in a burning bathtub while the words of gay British filmmaker Derek Jarman are heard, saying “I have no words.”
It is likely that the crocodile in Notes is meant to serve as a euphemism for the isolated and ostracised queer body, with Qiu allegorizing lesbians as crocs to emphasize society’s dehumanizing attitude towards sexual minorities. The text also explores the psychoanalytic notion that the compulsion to prey on queer people is often born of one’s own repressed desires and self-torment. Additionally, via the queering of the central character and experimentation with genre, the book also broke ground in its exploration of nonconformity and the multiple possibilities of gender and sexuality at a time when those ideas had not yet been part of the LGBTQ liberation dialogue in Taiwan.
By publishing Notes Of A Crocodile under her real name, Qiu Miaojin effectively came out of the closet right at the start of her literary career, becoming what is still considered the first ‘out’ lesbian author in modern Chinese literature. She also ‘came out’ by publicly confronting the repressive social norms of her country at a time when, given the only recent lift of the restrictive martial law, it was still quite brave to do so. As a result of its subject matter, Crocodile made waves upon its release and was passed around the underground lesbian community in Taiwan while remaining a bootlegged item in China for many years. Bonnie Huie, the nominated translator of Notes Of Crocodile, lauded the novel’s impact, describing it as: “intended to be a survival manual for teenagers, for a certain age when reading the right book can save your life.”
Though Notes Of A Crocodile may have since rescued many a Taiwanese lesbian teen’s life, it could not do so for its own creator, as Qiu Miaojin committed suicide the following year in 1995. At just the tip of an impactful and successful career as a writer, Qiu shocked the country with her death at the painfully young age of 26. Immediately, speculation arose as to the exact cause of Qiu’s death, with most accounts suggesting that the author stabbed herself in the heart with a kitchen knife. Some even compared her death to that of the famed queer Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, positing that Qiu’s knife-stabbing was inspired by his 1970 suicide by seppuku.
Aided by the news of her suicide Qiu Miaojin rapidly shot to fame and became a household name in Taiwan. Fairly quickly, the cultural impact of Miaojin’s novel took form and the word “Lazi” entered the Taiwanese lexicon as slang for “lesbian” around the country. The term soon spread to Mainland Chinese language as well, which then developed into the word “Lala”, still the preferred term to date for Chinese individuals identifying as lesbians. Additionally, the word “Eyu”, or “Crocodile”, also became another codified word in Taiwan as a way to refer to a lesbian.
Only a year later, Qiu’s next novel, Last Words From Montmartre, was published posthumously, the final completed work in her oeuvre. Comprised of her writings dated between 4/72/95 and 6/17/95, the latter of which was only a week before her suicide, Montmartre is a conceptual novel as a compilation of twenty letters that can be read in any order of the reader’s choosing. In its semi-epistolary, experimental format, Montmartre is a novel of anti-structure, likely influenced by the non-narrative structures of avant-garde films, and it challenges the limits of any preexisting literary genre. Response to the book even included discourse as to whether Montmartre could be considered a book at all, as it was such a deeply personal work meant to be experienced over and over again and in no particular order.
Book or not, Montmartre begins with a haunting dedication: “For dead little Bunny, and Myself, soon dead.” Bunny, as the reader soon learns, was the pet rabbit that Montmartre’s narrator, Zoë, bought with her ex-lover, Xu, who is the addressee of most of the letters in the work. The reader also learns that in the past year, Xu has abandoned and betrayed the narrator Zoë, who many feel is an obvious stand-in for Qiu herself. Regardless of whether it is Zoë or Qiu, the narrator throughout Montmartre is both processing and mourning the deaths of both her rabbit and three-year relationship. What is not clear, and what many readers and fans have been eager to unearth, is whether actual copies of the letters in the novel were ever sent to their intended recipient(s) in real life, and who those recipients actually are.
Another integral element of Montmartre is Qiu’s frank exploration of “T-Po” lesbian relations, which is relatively comparable with, though not identical to, the better known “butch-femme” dynamics. “T” is an abbreviation of the English term “tomboy,” which defines the role as more dominant, marked by masculine dress and short haircuts. Meanwhile, “Po” is a derivative of the colloquial term “Laopo”, or “wife”, and draws from normative femininity, like makeup and dresses. Qiu’s portrayals of T-Po relationships in Montmartre convey the author's own struggle with them, as she vacillates between bolstering the conservative ideologies of masculinity and femininity and trying to destabilize them. Qiu/Zoë writes in Montmartre: “As I naturally love women, the women I love do not need the prerequisite of a sexual orientation for loving women…I don’t believe that my desire for, or union with, women is all that different from when a “man” wants a “woman”.” In reality, Qiu herself struggled with this duality of masculinity and femininity while exploring her own sexuality and gender identity, and it is clear that the author used writing as a medium to work through some of her troublesome thoughts.
Last Words From Montmartre was quickly regarded as a cult classic. It cemented its author as a counterculture icon, who, like other artists or public figures that died tragically young, became mythologized and idolized by the masses. Qiu was celebrated in local lesbian subcultures and deemed Taiwan’s best-known lesbian author, while both of her full-length novels are considered integral parts of the international lesbian canon. With her death, Qiu was also championed as a martyr and figurehead for LGBT rights in her country. In the decades since, Taiwan has become the most progressive country in Asia, legalizing same-sex marriage in 2019.
Long after her death, Qiu’s friends and fans have also since memorialized her in various other ways. In 2007, a two volume set of Qiu’s diaries were published posthumously, edited by her dear friend Lai Hsiang-yin. Meanwhile, Taiwanese author Luo Yijun published a book, Forgetting Sorrow, written in Qiu’s memory, and Qiu’s collective works as a filmmaker were given to the MoMA’s archives in NYC. Most recently, a documentary about Qiu’s life was released in 2017, directed by Evans Chan and produced by Radio Television Hong Kong. At the end of the documentary, her former professor, Hélène Cixous, reminisces about her former student, and quite fittingly exclaims that when Qiu died, the author had intentionally left the world with her aesthetic creation and had invented life in death and life after death.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Chakraborty, Ankita. “A Crocodile In Paris: The Queer Classics of Qiu Miaojin” Longreads, 2018, June 7, https://longreads.com/2018/06/07/a-crocodile-in-paris-the-queer-classics-of-qiu-miaojin/
Core, Leopoldine. “A Taiwanese Classic Now Available In English.” The New York Times, 2017 May 12, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/books/review/notes-of-a-crocodile-qiu-miaojin.html
Heinrich, Ari Larissa. “Consider The Crocodile: Qiu Miaojin’s Lesbian Bestiary”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017 May 7, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/consider-the-crocodile-qiu-miaojins-lesbian-bestiary/
Heinrich, Larissa N. “Begin Anywhere: Transgender and Transgenre Desire in Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words From Montmartre.” Transgender China, edited by Hoard Chiang. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 161-181.
Leung, Wing-Fai. “Life In Death, Life After Death: The Story Of Taiwan’s LGBTQ Pioneer.” The Asia Dialogue. (2018, February 9). https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/02/09/life-in-death-life-after-death-the-story-of-taiwans-lgbtq-pioneer/
Martin, Fran, translator. Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction From Taiwan. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2003.
Martin, Fran. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
Martin, Fran. “Stigmatic Bodies: The Corporeal Qiu Miaojin.” Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin & Larissa
Heinrich. (Honolulu: University Of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 177-194.
Miaojin, Qiu. Last Words From Montmartre. Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich. New York, New York Review Of Books, 1996.
Miaojin, Qiu. Notes Of A Crocodile. Translated by Bonnie Huie. New York, New York Review Of Books, 1994.
Myles, Eileen. “Missive Impossible.” Bookforum, (2014 June/July/August). https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/qiu-miaojin-s-philosophical-investigation-of-love-and-grief-13283
Sang, Tze-Ian D. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2003.