Chapter Four
The View from the Buckwheat
Field: Capturing War in the
Poetry of Ya Xian
Steven L. Riep
During the mid-to late-1950s, the Republic of China on Taiwan
(ROC) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party (GMD) faced
an increased threat of war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Having lost a civil war to the PRC and now in island exile on Taiwan,
the ROC found itself in a difficult military position. Skirmishes over
the disputed offshore islands, Jinmen and Mazu, took place in 1954
and again in 1958. The Nationalists sought to retake lost territory on
mainland China but lacked the forces to do so.
While poets such as Luo Fu (b. 1928), Yu Guangzhong 光
(b. 1928), and Shang Qin 商(b. 1931) wrote works that took the
impact of war as their themes, Ya Xian (Ya Hsien)瘂(b. 1932)
created arguably the most significant, well-crafted, and poignant treat-
ments of combat and its impacts in post-1949 Taiwan literature. Some
of his best works reveal the physical and emotional costs of war with
a candor unique to the period. That Ya not only looks back to such
key events in recent and remote Chinese history as the War of
Resistance and ancient wars of the Shang dynasty for allusions in his
work but also expands his treatment beyond the scope of Nationalist
and even Chinese history to treat the topic of war in more universal
terms that embrace war-torn Naples as well as Luoyang during World
War II attests to the comprehensiveness of his vision. He thus produces
a general critique on the institution of war, a critique that is inclusive
of non-Chinese cultures. Since Ya’s career as a poet lasted little more
than a decade and a half, these poems made up a significant portion of
his total creative output. Given the importance of military spending,
combat readiness, and the continued goal of national reunification in
Taiwan in the 1950s and early 1960s, Ya’s antiwar works written