MCLC |

Born in Tainan in 1987, Yang Fumin is currently a graduate student at the National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature. In 2010 he published the short story collection Sixty-Year Old Boy—a stellar example of how a Seventh Grader author might carry on the vitality of the native Taiwan language via a grotesquery of Taiwanese scenes. In these stories, sound is an element not to be overlooked, from the suonas and gongs of funeral processions, to current popular songs, the Taiwan-inflected Mandarin Chinese of the new generation, and the Chinglish of ABCs, which all add up to a writing full of noise and bombast. Recently, in his Liberty Times column "Blustering," Yang has written on the boldness and lack of restraint among youth, on the old ways of Tainan, and reflections on how little he understood the world in his youthful ignorance. In his new work, tentatively entitled What Happened to the Huang Family, the passing of the Old Uncle, the last member of the Huangs, closes a chapter. Yang, though himself not yet 30, writes from the point of view of the Huang family's old soul, tracing, in this unconventional historical narrative, the memory of the clan, an account of how its members got scattered, how the number of its ghosts grew. It is currently under serial publication.

See Asymptote's Sinophone "20 Under 40"