These wooden houses were once dormitories where schoolteachers lived during the period of Japanese rule, and after the war, they became the home of a writer.…
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These wooden houses were once dormitories where schoolteachers lived during the period of Japanese rule, and after the war, they became the home of a writer.
Zhong Zhaozheng was born in 1925, here in Longtan, a Hakka writer. He was raised and educated in Japanese, and after the war, he relearned Chinese from scratch in order to write novels.
His mother tongue was Hakka. The language of his schooling was Japanese. And the language in which he wrote was Chinese. He was a man who lived his life moving between three languages.
His masterwork, The Taiwanese Trilogy, is a sweeping saga that portrays the lives of Taiwan's people across generations, spanning from the period of Japanese rule through the postwar era. Even while standing at the podium as a teacher, he continued to write, and later devoted himself as well to efforts to preserve Hakka culture. As one of those who laid the foundations of Taiwanese literature, his works are still read and passed down today.
In 2020, he passed away at the age of ninety-five.
On the veranda of the dormitory, the leaves of the garden trees scatter the afternoon light into trembling fragments as they fall.
The stories written by a hand that moved between three languages are still read today, in the language of this land.
