and acceptance of—even reverence for—the natural spaces, plants, and
creatures that struggle to survive in symbiotic relationship with the
sprawling urban-industrial centers that threaten to overwhelm Taiwan’s
entire western coast. Owing to this feature, Liu’s works continually
inspire respect and empathy for nature while painting a bleak picture of
its precarious state, keeping readers at a distance long enough not to feel
accused of complicity in the situation yet putting us in such intimate and
moving contact with nature that we cannot help but be infected with an
anxiety over the fate of blameless, beautiful, delicate creatures and
places, a fate that is connected to our lifestyle:
Exile of the Mangrove Swamp
A cluster of finely-woven green sprouts
Like the crowding of tiny fishes
Searching with difficulty for a spot
against the current
The location where their ancestors disembarked
Once vast as the sea
They continue in exile
Amidst vanishing patches of waves
and mounds of garbage
Preparing to recline into a posture of decay
(K. Liu 2004b: 269)
At other times, this sense of anxiety is conveyed through an entirely
different method, in prose that borrows from more familiar discourses
such as (in the following excerpt) those of cinema and drama, perceiv-
ing the world in narratives that create new and unprecedented
awareness of connections between self, society, other, and nature,
incarnating heretofore unrepresented emotional knowing:
Dusk, setting sun and sand, add some hovering seagulls, some lingering
soldiers and fishermen who can’t draw themselves away, circling the
black whale, watching it struggle, ceaselessly trying to push the whale
out to sea, though it diligently beaches again itself each time, on the
verge of death. These five days (from its discovery on the 13th to the
17th) news reports on black whales have followed one upon the other
like climax after climax in a movie. The backdrop is a beach, and it’s the
last climactic scene, the last screening of a tragedy...
When I’m standing motionless on Da’an beach, a hundred meters
from the waves, using my binoculars to confront this “Black Whale,” I
think of our common mammalian ancestors, and the several million
years since we parted ways—the distance between us now seems like an“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 93
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