From trains to classrooms to mountains, in this collection of short stories, Huang Chunming traverses across the Taiwan island to deliver his readers bewitching stories of love, loss, and family. Each story crafts a poignant snapshot depicting private minds in public spaces. A young man has an obsessive desire to dissect the world with his pocket knife; an uneducated father struggles to understand what it means when his son gets expelled for lack of national consciousness; a beautiful young woman bewitches men for sport.
As each of Huang's characters struggles with their individual sorrows, they are surrounded by a collection of people and places just as complex as they are. Huang Chunming's mournful, yet beautiful portraits of Taiwanese society bring us into a world both unsettling and enticing. With his fluid prose, he depicts the common humanity that unites us all.
Contents: The Street Sweeper's Son (1956), Young Bach (1957), Northgate Avenue (1962), Playing with Fire (1962), Raise the Bottles (1963), Got a Light? (1963), Fat Auntie (1963), A Man and His Pocketknife (1965), Damn-It's, Misery! (1965), Follow My Feet (1966), The Face in the Mirror (1966), A Headless Wasp (1967), The Gong (1970), Uncle Gan Geng at Dusk (1971)