Calling Mars Home

This article examines Huang Chongkai’s sci-fi short story, “How to Live Like Wang Zhenhe” (“Ruhexian Wang Zhenhe yiyangdi huozhe”) from his 2017 short story collection The Content of the Times (Wenyichunqiu). Parodying nativist author Wang Zhenhe’s 王禎和 Caricature of Beauty (Meirentu), published in 1982, and Rose Rose I Love You (Meigui meigui woaini), published in 1984, this story models Mars after the Taiwan represented by Wang’s two volumes of fiction to the effect that imbibing anticolonial and nativist consciousness into the Mars-born narrator of Taiwanese descent. The story stops at the teenaged narrator starting to craft his first piece of short story—at the same time the first Martian-authored literature. In this way, Huang Chongkai evokes the call for cultural autonomy emerged in the nativist literary debate between 1977 and 1978, which further evolves into the literary-critical discourse on Taiwanese literature. With Mars evoking Wang Zhenhe’s rendition of Taiwan in the Cold War period, the story ultimately problematizes the notion of “native soil” as well as relativizes the divide between benshengren (people of local province) and waishengren (people of foreign province).