Wikimedia Taiwan/GLAM/Taiwan1000/Fangge Dupan

Fangge Dupan (March 9th, 1927 – March 10th, 2016) was a Taiwanese poet of the so-called “translingual generation.” These Taiwanese experienced as young adults the official banning of Japanese from the public sphere and its forcible replacement by Mandarin Chinese – a new and unfamiliar language. Fangge was born into a distinguished Hakka family in today’s Xinpu, Hsinchu County. She joined the nativist Bamboo Hat Poetry Society in 1965 and in the 1980s refocused on writing poems in her native Hakka language. In the 1990s, she served as president of both Taiwan Arts & Cultural Press and the “Female Whale” Poetry Society. In 1992, she published Yuan Chien Hu, a collection of her poems in three languages – Mandarin, Japanese, and English, for which she earned the very first Chen Hsiu-Shi Poetry Award. Fangge was honored in 2007 with an Outstanding Achievement Award and Taiwan New Literature Award from the Hakka Affairs Council and in 2008 with an Oxford Award for Taiwan Writers from Aletheia University. “Ghost Festival”, “The Peace Play”, “A Paper Man”, and “The Garden” rank among her best-known works.

Biography

Fangge Dupan was born into a distinguished Hakka family in the village of Sinpo (Xinpu) in modern-day Hsinchu County. Her grandfather, Cheng-chien Pan, was the administrative head of the town during the Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945), and her father, Chin-huai, the Pan family’s middle son, had spent time in Tokyo earning a degree in law and expanding his perspective on the world. Fangge’s mother, Wan-mei Chan, was the adopted child of a physician’s family in Guanxi, Hsinchu County. Somewhat unusual for the period, she studied through secondary school and earned her diploma from the 3rd Girls' High School in the colonial capital of Taihoku (modern-day Taipei). Fangge Dupan’s life and career were greatly influenced by the background and life experiences of her family. Born on March 9th, 1927, Fangge Dupan was the oldest child of seven, with three sisters and three brothers. Her earliest years were spent with her father in Japan until his return to Taiwan in 1934. Although her family’s status gained her admission to an elite local primary school normally reserved for Japanese nationals, she was regularly bullied by her Japanese schoolmates. The bullying persisted after her admission to Shinjuku (Hsinchu) Girls' Middle School (today’s National Hsinchu Girls’ Senior High School) in 1940. It was here that, to escape the reality of her schoolmates’ colonial prejudices, she began writing poetry, novels, and prose in Japanese.   After middle school, Fangge tested into the private Taihoku (Taipei) Girls’ Vocational Academy, which offered a two year curriculum in the domestic arts such as flower arranging (ikebana), the tea ceremony (sadō), sewing, and other “women’s work” as well as morality, literature, philosophy, and history. It was the mission of this school to cultivate women able to humbly and selflessly support their husbands and children. Her experience there encouraged Fangge to ponder more deeply the status of women. With the end of the Second World War, Fangge cut short her academic pursuits and took a teaching job at a public school in her hometown. It was there she met and fell in love with Dr. Ching-shou Du. In 1947, Fangge’s great uncle on her mother’s side, Dr. Chi-lang Chang, and his two sons were arrested and brutally murdered in the East Coast city of Hualien by Taiwan’s new Chinese Nationalist authorities during the infamous 228 Incident. This event had a formative influence on Fangge’s writings, which soon took on a critical and mocking tone toward government and politics. In 1948, Fangge wed Dr. Ching-shou Du against her family’s wishes, and the couple moved to Zhongli in Taoyuan County. Fangge assisted her husband in his clinic while continuing to write. She was also an ikebana consultant to teachers in the area. Fangge joined the Bamboo Hat Poetry Society in 1965. After living for several years in the United States during the 1980s, she returned to her home in Zhongli and began writing Hakka poetry in earnest. A car crash in 1967 had left her husband gravely injured. Fangge attributed his subsequent successful recovery to Christian prayer, leading her to also to engage in Christian missionary work. Fangge became a US citizen in May 1982. She served as President of Taiwan Arts & Cultural Press and the “Female Whale” Poetry Society during the 1990s, and in 1992 published a trilingual (Chinese, English, and Japanese) collection of poetry entitled Yuan Chien Hu, which was honored with the first-ever Chen Hsiu-Shi Poetry Award. Fangge Dupan passed away in her sleep at home on March 10th, 2016 at the age of 89.

Literary Qualities

Fangge Dupan wrote poems reflecting a “daily diary”-style intimacy that gave voice to the pressures and adversities of everyday life. Although, like many aspiring authors of her generation, she faced a tremendous challenge in shifting the language of her creative output from Japanese to Mandarin (the newly imposed official language of Taiwan’s Nationalist Chinese rulers), she nonetheless prevailed. Fangge saw poetry as the ideal literary medium for expressing one’s subjective feelings and insights about the status quo and contemporary problems. Thus, her works celebrate honest, emotional expression over aesthetic technique. The descriptions of scenery in her poetic works capture brilliantly the visceral imagination of the poet. Early linguistic fluency in both Japanese and her native Hakka and her fluency in Mandarin learned much later as an adult posed regular challenges throughout her creative career. Influenced heavily by the German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) art movement of the 1920s, members of the Bamboo Hat Poetry Society broadly focused their creative energies on exploring the issues and affairs of everyday life. While Fangge Dupan’s poetic efforts frequently centered on scenic imagery, her underlying messages, touching on issues such as temporality, death, and national identity, were nonetheless deeply consequential

Works

Although Fangge Dupan began writing during her teenage years, her first work of poetry was not published until 1966, when her Japanese poem “Spring” was carried in the July issue of Taiwan Arts & Culture (No. 10). Her first poetry collection, entitled Ching-Shou in honor of her husband and father, featured her Japanese poetry and was published in March 1977.