As Taiwan continues to reclaim its suppressed past, there’s been a proliferation of documentaries on notable writers in this case the legendary author and critic Yeh Shi-tao (葉石濤) in a bid to bring them back to the national consciousness, especially among young people.
Born in Tainan in 1925, Yeh showed his genius from a young age, publishing his first novel as a teenager. Things went south for him after World War II; as a member of the “translingual generation” he was forced to compose in an unfamiliar language Mandarin. Additionally, he was thrown in jail for three
<strong>Dec 6 to Dec 12</strong>
Yeh Shih-tao (葉石濤) once compared writers to beasts as those who devour dreams to sustain themselves. For the first 18 years of his life, Yeh’s well-off family could afford to let him daydream, and he shut out the world that was being ravaged by World War II, seeking refuge in the world of literature.
Despite a concerned teacher warning his father that the boy was “useless,” Yeh had penned three novels by the time he finished high school. His third attempt, A Letter from Lin (林君來的信), was modeled after the work of French novelist Alphonse Daudet