Bamboo Shoots After the Rain

January 4, 1993
These tales travel through emotional time, from the nearly feudal values of the 1920s and '30s to the alienated, questing attitudes of contemporary Taiwan. Several stories explore the pain of women under the old system: in ``Candle,'' a forlorn wife retreats into illness when her husband brings home a beautiful concubine; a woman is raped in the story ``In Liu Village,'' and her husband must wrestle with the traditional response of discarding her and his own feelings of love. The paranoia of the Maoist years is elegantly captured in ``Chairman Mao Is a Rotten Egg,'' in which a young child's playful taunt leads his parents into a nightmare. Moving to the present day, tragedy results when a naive teenage girl tries to convince a boy that she is sexually sophisticated in ``The Aftermath of the Death of a Junior High Coed.'' Unfortunately, the didactic summaries that precede each story detract from their impact. With its vibrant, tumultuous energy and its evocation of the contending lifestyles of a society in transition, this collection is best left to speak for itself. Carver is professor of English at the University of North Carolina, and Chang is assistant professor of Oriental languages and literature at the University of Texas.