In the same year, the island-nation had newly begun to assert its independence from China. News channels such as TTV had taken upon themselves to out and isolate them.

The crocodile was a lesbian who had piqued the national interest of Taiwan. The crocodile was both a national secret and a social outcast, at once protected and eradicated their protection leading to their eventual eradication. In Taiwan in 1987, everybody seemed very interested in knowing who among them was a “crocodile.” It made for cheap television and for trash talk. In the industrial Taiwanese society where these women live, the self-discovery of their own sexuality is considered to be a social condition and an epidemic. The narrator of Qiu’s cult classic Notes of a Crocodile declares very early in the novel, “I’m a woman who loves women.” Yet a few pages later, she thinks she should carry her shoes and tiptoe down the streets of Taipei so that no one will notice her. They are not necessarily hiding behind their animal pseudonyms but like any animal on the fringes of human settlement, they are loath to be seen. The beast in Qiu Miaojin’s modernist novels is the consciousness in women that is aware of a deviant lust for women’s bodies.

The chapter called “Rabbit” in Women in Love comes to mind, where a pet sustains society’s adulation until the moment it turns against its owners. Often animals from these woods were imagined as insensible beasts. The more the woods and the old mining towns of his childhood seemed to give way to industrial landscapes, the more easily animals seemed to have crept into his work.

Three of his novels are called The Fox, Kangaroo and The White Peacock. Lawrence seemed to have thrived on the animal spirit. “The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live bird,” he wrote of a man in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He often used animal lives to describe sex and male desire. “She is the modern type.” The other type is the hensure woman, “the old-fashioned demure woman who was sure as a hen is sure, that is, without knowing about it.’’ He made other references to animals and birds in his work. “A really up-to-date woman is a cocksure woman,” he wrote. Lawrence once used chickens to describe the two types of women. Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)ĭ.

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin