Notes of a Crocodile 鳄鱼手记

When I picked up Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, recently translated by Bonnie Huie, I was utterly enthralled. I’d never read a book quite like it—a young girl’s coming-of-age tale told through cinematic vignettes, journal entries, and love letters. More than a traditional novel, it feels like a collage of Qiu’s personal musings and sources of inspiration. I refused to put it down for three days, and even missed my stop on the subway while eagerly taking in Qiu’s words.

After I finished, I had to know more. Who was Qiu Miaojin? What inspired her to write Notes? Why had I never heard of her?

First published in Taiwan in 1994, and released in English in late 2017, Notes of a Crocodile is narrated by a young woman known as Lazi, a student at the prestigious National Taiwan University. The novel examines Lazi’s feelings about her attraction to women and charts her tumultuous relationship with Shui Ling, a fellow student. It also follows the lives of Lazi’s friends, who, like her, struggle to define their sexual identity in the face of homophobia, family dysfunction, and crushing academic pressure. All the while, the book offers sharp insights on living outside the bounds of social acceptability in the late 1980s.

In separate chapters, interspersed with the story of Lazi and her friends, the book also tells of an anthropomorphic crocodile forced to dress up as a human—a metaphor for closeted LGBTQ youth in a time when homosexuality was taboo.

The book is presented as a “survival manual” for the next generation, and at times the prose is brutal. Lazi repeatedly equates her lesbian identity with a prison sentence; in some passages, she calls herself a beast, a monster. Her relationship with Shui Ling ultimately crumbles, partly as a result of Lazi’s insecurities and depressive self-hatred. Afterward she writes, “The experience, every bit of it, brutally scathed me . . . You tore me open and exposed the man inside.”

These passages never feel self-indulgent, because Lazi’s voice is exceptionally earnest and self-aware. Her wry social commentary draws the reader in. “College—now there’s a system,” she writes. “Though it’s not quite death, it’s a pretty close second. It’s the nexus of three major institutions (compulsory education, compulsory labor, and compulsory marriage).”

On gender she remarks: “All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the lines of demarcation . . . Man’s greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.” Qiu’s critique of social norms make it clear why she remains a cult figure. The issues of gender and sexuality she addressed so boldly in 1994 are still relevant today.

Qiu was one of Taiwan’s first openly gay writers and a pioneer within its avant-garde and counterculture literary circles. In university she published short stories that drew on her encounters with art house cinema and Japanese modernism, and these influences appear in Notes of a Crocodile, which uses the language of film—with scene cuts, freeze frames, and camera zooms—to narrate the story. Just one year after the book’s publication, Qiu committed suicide in France, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in clinical psychology at University of Paris VIII.

Twenty-three years after her death, Qiu’s work is still a source of wonder. A documentary on her life aired on Hong Kong’s RTHK aired in January of last year, and a few months later NYRB Classics published the English translation of Notes of a Crocodile. I recently spoke with the book’s translator, Bonnie Huie, about Qiu’s work and legacy, and about the challenges of translation.

Neocha: How did you first come across Qiu Miaojin’s work?

Bonnie Huie: Qiu’s books came to me as a thank-you gift. A Taiwanese artist friend, who knew my work as a writer, had asked me to translate her own poetry collection. Though I translated the poems as a favor, what I received in return was of much greater value.

Neocha: What compelled you to bring Notes of a Crocodile to readers of English? When did you have the “aha” moment?

Bonnie Huie: I had the “aha” moment from the very first page of the book. Notes of a Crocodile has an uncanny combination of both strangeness and familiarity, and Qiu has a bold way of describing herself that’s not typically seen in Chinese or English literature. Her voice is idiosyncratic and striking. And the persona of Lazi—female, queer, and Chinese, an artist as well as an intellectual—is of monumental importance: in Taiwan, “Lazi” became a term for “lesbian.” She offers a rebuttal to the myth of a fetishized, genericized Asian woman that in the West goes hand-in-hand with ignorance about the history of colonialism in Asia.

Neocha: In her journal entries, Lazi struggles to accept her sexuality as she falls in love for the first time. How did you convey that inner conflict in your translation?

Bonnie Huie: There’s no denying that Qiu’s prose derives its emotional force from the imagery of violence and mutilation. The gift of art is to make visible what cannot otherwise be seen, and Qiu, who studied psychology as an undergraduate, forged a figural language that illuminates some of the same phenomena that trauma studies explore today. I felt that my responsibility as a translator was to preserve the unstable, poetic dimension of the text by neither making meaning unambiguous nor rendering emotions into limp prose.

Neocha: Many of Lazi’s struggles overlap with the author’s own. Did reading Qiu’s diaries make the translation process easier?

Bonnie Huie: Qiu wrote Lazi’s diaries, but Lazi didn’t write Qiu’s. The distinction between those two voices is clear when you read Qiu’s diaries, which are drier than Notes and which I put aside while translating. Autobiography can be a dangerous thing, as it can turn reading into the act of mentally reciting what you already know while failing to observe the nuances of what’s in front of you. Too often the artistry of women is minimized through the default lens of autobiography. Notes is rich in allusion to the world cinema and literature that has infiltrated the Taiwanese landscape. Those elements pointed me to my approach: to interweave the traits of the narrator, who is stifled by her own society, with those of her cosmopolitan influences, which offer the hope of transcendence through art.

Neocha: You’ve noted that the love letters between Lazi and Shui Ling were the most difficult parts of the book to translate. What made them so hard?

Bonnie Huie: Finding empathy for those who seem awfully young can be just as challenging as trying to comprehend those who are older. It’s curious, because we’ve been through that stage of life ourselves and ought to show more understanding and less condescension. When I read the love letters between Lazi and Shui Ling, I felt conscious of parts of myself that had become deadened. But as a translator, I had no choice but to put conviction into those words.

Neocha: How has the book been received in English? Did the good timing—the translation came out just as Taiwan’s highest court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage—help garner attention?

Bonnie Huie: Notes of a Crocodile has certainly resonated with the kids of the Asian diaspora, a cosmopolitan audience that’s often denied visibility, and the translation has reached readers in countries where the primary language is not English. Qiu wrote the book in the months after she graduated from college in 1991, and it evokes the cataclysmic energy of its day—a desire for regime change—as exemplified by the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ruling in Taiwan not only provided a new cultural and historical context but drew a connection between art and politics.

Neocha: Notes of a Crocodile is presented as a survival manual for the next generation. Do you think the story lives up to that ambition?

Bonnie Huie: The fact that the same book can be seen as either triumphant or extremely depressing, depending on the reader, says a lot. Not everyone needs a survival manual in the first place. Many people will never have to navigate a reality in which expressing the innermost dimension of their being puts them at risk of being disowned by family or ending up unemployable and homeless. But for some, that is the cost. And that remains true, even in the era of gay rights. The book is right in suggesting that one needs a vision in order to break a vicious cycle. In the end, Lazi’s life aligns with the freeze frame of The 400 Blows, which hints at liberation and a future yet to be determined.

I saw a comment online that said, “Notes of a Crocodile is too good to be true.” Apparently, someone got the message but decided it was impossible. I laughed and thought, “Good. The book was written for you.”

Neocha: Notes of a Crocodile was long-listed for the PEN Translation Prize. Congratulations! What does this award mean to you?

Bonnie Huie: The book is an underdog in many ways, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. As a translator, I value the opinion of my peers above all others, and I am grateful for their ability to escape the masculinist tendencies of many institutions. Literature can be too conservative for its own good. In other disciplines, such as the visual arts, interdisciplinary work is commonplace, radical political views are given a platform, and general audiences are tolerant of abstraction. Still, literature in translation is inherently avant-garde, because whenever it embodies an aesthetic or political consciousness with a tenuous existence in the dominant culture, it has the potential to articulate what’s repressed.

To pick up a copy of Notes of a Crocodile in Chinese, please click here. For the English translation, please click here.

Contributor: Megan Cattel
Photographer: Xu Anrong
Additional Images Courtesy of Evans Chan