Author ｜
Yu-ting Wang
Abstract ｜
The Hong Kong-based Asia Publishing Company’s Asia Pictorial magazine established the well-endowed Asia Pictorial Short Story Competition on its second anniversary year in 1955. Running from 1955 to 1962 and taking place a total of eight times, the competition was eagerly followed by the literary community in Taiwan. This paper examines the background of Taiwan’s mainland-born male authors who received Asia Pictorial Short Story Competition awards during this period as a vehicle for exploring the dominant aesthetics of the period, how these aesthetics reflected the Cold War structures and U.S. aid culture, and how this competition helped foster an anti-communist “united front” phenomenon in the literary communities of Taiwan and Hong Kong. Furthermore, by adopting war-narrative and war-legacy perspectives, this paper analyzes how these authors, most of whom lived in military enclaves that were relatively isolated from Taiwanese society at large, used their status first to accumulate and transform their cultural capital and then to gain an expanded audience through the competition award. Next, this paper considers from a micro-perspective the interplay between individual authors and the Taiwan-Hong Kong mechanisms of cultural production. From the results of the Asia Pictorial Short Story Competition published in vols. 1-12 of Asia Pictorial magazine, this paper focuses on the works of Kuo Chih-fen, Nilo, and Mei Hsun to elicit a deeper understanding of war and the legacy of war. Finally, the literary works of frequent Asia Pictorial Short Story Competition award winner Peng Ko are examined to consider their perspectives on war, to highlight the association between the framework of war and nationalism under the contemporary influence of historical trends and the Cold War, and then to reflect upon the complex relationship between painful experiences and aesthetic form.
keywords ｜
Asia Pictorial Short Story Competition, Taiwan’s mainland-born male authors, cultural asset, war legacies, Peng Ko