우밍이의 ≪자전거 도난기≫ 읽기 — 타이완 정체성 탐색을 위한 기억의 서사전략을 중심으로

Abstract

The Stolen Bicycle (2015) depicts the process of understanding the father’s history while searching for the traces of the bicycle that has disappeared with him. The relationship between the fathers and sons in the fiction was severed, and one of the main reasons for this was the silence of the fathers. The silence was made by the colonial history that Taiwan had to endure, and also by the influence of Mandarin-centered education enforced by the Kuomintang(國民黨) government. The disconnection of language led to the disconnection of relationships and the emergence of a ‘lost generation’, resulting in the disconnection and suppression of memories. In Taiwan, it is the aboriginal ethnic people who have been protecting their own land that lost their own language and history before anyone else. The Kuomintang had enforced Benshengren(本省人) and the aboriginal people to use Mandarin Chinese, which, enforcing the silence, was rather an ‘anti-language’ in that it enforced the silence. The search for ‘forgotten’ memories raises questions about the ‘public memory’ enforced during Taiwan’s Japanese colonial period and the Kuomintang’s martial law period, and reveals that there are memories discarded and marginalized as junk items and that it is urgently needed to rediscover and reevaluate them. Considering that the subjects the author seeks to restore are all peripheral beings who have suffered outside of power, it would be safe to call the author a postcolonial ecologist.