With his novels Mysterious Train (2003) and The School of Water-Ghosts and the Otter Who Lost His Mother (2005), Kan Yao-ming earned the recognition for his status as an outstanding writer in Taiwan, and established the reputation as a pioneer in new Taiwan nativist literature and a distinctive writer of Hakka literature in Taiwan. The style of Kan's early works changes a lot, and the works often contain fantastic elements from folklore, fables and fairy tales. With a mixed use of Mandarin, Japanese, Hakka, and other Taiwanese dialects, his works show characteristics of experiment and linguistic hybridity in Taiwan. After 2009, Kan started to integrate into his novels historical memories, ethnical, national identities, and concern for the local, with an attempt to rethink the history of Taiwan from a writer's perspective. Killing the Ghost narrates the oscillating and perplexed postcolonial identity of Taiwan people during the period between late Japanese colonization and early Kuomintang rule after the Second World War. By depicting the declination of Taiwan's forestry, The Pangcah Girl (2015) gives a look of the crisis and predicament in the economic transition in 70s Taiwan. Kan expresses his serious concerns about history and politics in the fantastic, pure and nostalgic forest he built in the novel.
The Kan Yao-ming Archive Project was completed in 2015,initiated by Dr. Kuei-fen Chiu, Director of the Research Center for Humanities and Social Science (RCHSS) of National Chung Hsing University (NCHU), with Dr. Min-xu Zhan as the web editor-in-chief. In addition to illustrating the writer’s life by TIMELINE JS, the digital team went to Kan's hometown Miaoli to collect images for representing the elements of Hakka culture reflected in Kan's works. The archive also contains the ecordings of the writer's reading lines from the novels in Mandarin, Hakka, and Taiwanese to highlight the hybrid use of languages in the works. This website provides Kan’s first-hand photos, chronology of publications, on-line reading of selected works, manuscripts and interviews.
The digital team of RCHSS would like to acknowledge the assistance of all the people and administrations that contributed to the website: Ms. Lin Mei-lan, director Yeh Yi-chieh, The Grayhawk Agency, Trend Education Foundation, Taiwan Public Television, China Times Book Review. The website is designed by boxColor. The digital team of RCHSS consists of Dr. Kuei-fen Chiu (Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, NCHU), Yu-yi Chen (Department of Management Information Systems, NCHU), and digital assistants Ming-lun Wu, Yi-lin Tsai, Chien-mei Hung.
Contributors:
Project Director: Kuei-fen Chiu
Website Adviser: Kan Yao-ming
Technical Adviser: Yu-yi Chen
Website Editor: Min-xu Zhan
Website Designers and Executors: boxColor, Ming-lun Wu, Yi-lin Tsai, Chien-mei Hung
Translator: Fran Lee
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