Zhu Tianwen and "Notes of a Desolate Man"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the book "Notes of a Desolate Man" by Zhu Tianwen and relates that the author's way of fitting in so many non-Chinese influences, past and present, his homosexuality, and the death of an old friend in Japan due to AIDS, fit together to produce a deliberately disjointed psychic environment in which the narrator can only feel thankful for small reminders of a world that seemed normal. The writer points out that throughout "Notes on a Desolate Man", the past continues to be mixed up with the present. The writer believes that this book leaves the reader with no doubt as to the narrator's emotions, sense of being displaced and that his life has been rather pointless, though one wishes the narrator could also see through this state of ennui to find the answers of purpose that were suitable for modernists.

From the Paper:

"Like many a post-modern character, the narrator, Xiao Chao, can observe his own isolation, well aware of what is happening, amid Western consumerism and media influences. His friend, Ah Yao, is a former lover, a person with whom he has been able to discuss Chinese poetry but also the culture arriving from the West including 1960s avant garde films and thought. Set in the 1990s, Xiao Shao reflects on his 20s as a well to do young Taiwanese in Europe and in America just as countless other persons at mid-life tend to reflect on how they spent this earlier interval in their lives. Like Ah Yao, he had known the gay scene in New York, Paris and Rome, and also the complications of being a gay Chinese male in a conservative Taiwanese society where both men's families were known in Taipei."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Zhu Tianwen. Notes on a Desolate Man. Trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

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• Essay # 56412 : "Notes of a Native Son"

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