Abstract
This paper focuses on the theme of depicting Taiwan presented in the female prose of the 1950s and aims at observing on four works of the first generation Chinese female immigrants-”Yu Kang Shu Chien” (《漁港書簡》), ”Wu Tsai Taipei Chi Chi Ta” (《我在台北及其他》), ”Feng Ching Hua” (《風情畫》), ”Leng Chuan Hsin Ying” (《冷泉心影》). The multitude of significance of these works are re-examined within the historical context of Taiwan in the 50s in order to decipher the relations between the dominant ideologies of anti-communism and of nostalgia in the political and cultural fields. Many critics have provided fruitful reading of the works from these post-war female prose writers and depicted how they differ from the ”political correctness” embraced by the advocators of anti-communist literature. However, these interpretations tend to read the difference between female and male writers based on sexual essentialism-that is, while the male writers are regarded as echoing the governmental policies on anti-communist literature, the writing strategies and themes of the female writers are generally labeled as female resistance towards patriarchy and as symbolically moving from Mainland China to the Taiwan island. Such double interpretations have failed to embody the complexities of the dialectic relations between sex and nation.Moreover, diverted by a generalization that deems these female experiences of depicting Taiwan as a homogeneous entity, the attention has rarely been paid to the diversity and complexity in themes and narration of their prose.By re-examining how the four female writers-Ai Wen (艾雯), Tsu Chung-Pei (徐鍾珮), Zhang Shu Han (張漱菡) and Chung Mei-Yin (鍾梅音), depict Taiwan, this paper explores the complexities, diversity and heterogeneous nature of their works in order to present a spectrum of perspectives on the first generation diasporic womanhood in Taiwan.