Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)

These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun's intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth. Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator's younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, __My Kid Sister,__ evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family. In __Wild Child,__ fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic __The Catcher in the Rye,__ but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy. Contents Translator’s Introduction MY KID SISTER A Present Just for Me Nausea A New Breed of Woman First Love Her Taboo On Treatment All That Remains Is Our Shell of Flesh Listening Intently and Telling Stories The Awakening of Laughter Chronicle of Death Ending in Insanity WILD CHILD Friends The Beginning In the Streets In the Heart of the Night Stories Games Good-for-Nothings The Handgun Annie The Past On the Rooftop Brothers Mistakes The Hotel The Port Changes The Poster Secrets The Window Happiness Learning From Birth Pitiful The Celebrity The Adoption The Negotiation The Birthday And Supposing Forgetting "In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy."--BOOK JACKET