The Taste of Apples

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Research Paper
Part 1 – Chosen Text: The Taste of Apples: Taiwanese Stories by Huang Chunming
Focused topic: How Taiwan’s old conservative culture clashes with the new ideas of modern Taiwan?
I am trying to learn about the people of Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s by studying short stories written in that time. I wish to find out how the writer portrayed Taiwan during that time period and how Taiwanese people were during this period in terms of their social, economic, and cultural aspects, as well as what their mindsets were, and how they perceived foreigners and one another. For this paper, a text is chosen which is then analyzed. Translingual practice is essentially an experience that is relevant in more than a single language. It also implies a phenomenon that exists in several languages or having similar meaning in multiple languages (Kelley and Jost 12). The short stories in the text were written in both Mandarin Chinese, the language spoken in China, and in Taiwanese Hokkien, the dialect that roughly 70% of the population of Taiwan speaks. As such, these languages represent those of the people of Taiwan and from mainland China.
Part 2 – The short stories were translated by Howard Goldblatt
Taste of Apples is essentially a collection of bittersweet, simple short stories. Each of the author’s short stories regarding rural Taiwan disentangles perceptions regarding the way that things seem to be. The language used by Huang Chunming in simple and unambiguous and offers little elaborate foreshadowing. Reading the translation, one can easily forget that the setting of the stories is Taiwan roughly 3 to 4 decades ago. Howard Goldblatt, the text’s translator, lived up to the daunting task of interpreting vague rural Taiwan idioms into the English language. In this collection of short stories, none of them relate to one another, however, it does describe how people lived at that time period in Taiwan, reflects people’s desires and shows how a conservative community meets modernized Taiwan.
The subject matter of the author in this text is the people of Taiwan. One key feature of their lives that Huan Chunming’s stories in the text treat is how the lives of the people of Taiwan contrast with mainlanders as well as mainland culture – mainlanders are the Chinese people. A major theme is the influence of language – Mandarin Chinese versus Taiwanese Hokkien – on keeping these 2 groupings of people different (Bai 4). The other important theme that emerges from the text is the change and the impact of modernity. The author in the introduction to the translation in English states that: during the 1960s and 1970s when the contemporary world started to make inroads into Lanyang, which is the out-of-the-way town wherein the author was born, the struggles between the old and the new resulted in a rich source of remarkable and forceful ...