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Yao-Chang Chen (author), Pao-Fang Hsu, Ian Maxwell, and Tung-Jung Chen (translators), Puppet Flower: A Novel of 1867 Formosa. Columbia University Press, 2023, 298 pgs.
The American servicemen are in a fix. Thousands of miles from home, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, they are pursuing an elusive adversary, about whom they know very little, through impenetrable jungle terrain about which they know even less.
Are we in the Philippines, in 1900 or 1944? Okinawa in 1945? South Vietnam in the 1960s?
No: The surprise of Yao-Chang Chen’s historical novel Puppet Flower is that the U.S. sailors and Marines are in southern Formosa, present-day Taiwan, in June 1867. They’re on the trail of native tribesmen, seeking retaliation for an incident that took place in March of that year, after a U.S. merchant vessel, the Rover, was shipwrecked off the island’s southern coast. When fourteen survivors from the Rover (including one woman) made it to shore, they were promptly slaughtered by a local indigenous tribe who brooked no incursions by “Red-Hairs” (i.e. Westerners) on their ancestral lands.
Upon learning of the incident, American officials protested to the Qing government in mainland China, since Formosa was, at least partly, Qing territory. The Qing replied that the native Formosan tribes operated in a part of the island over which they had no jurisdiction (essentially, its whole eastern half), so there was little they could do. Hence the punitive American expedition.
As it happens, the military incursion is a minor disaster. One American officer is killed, and the 181 U.S. servicemen are so unprepared for the indigenous tribes’ guerrilla-warfare tactics that they retreat to their ships after just one day of combat, never to return.
Chen’s novel begins with the massacre on the beach (which makes for an arresting opening), and the Americans’ failed expedition comes roughly midway through the narrative. In between these two events he sets in motion a teeming cast of characters that includes several real-life historical figures like Tauketok, the chief of the eighteen indigenous tribes who inhabited southeastern Formosa, and Charles Le Gendre, the U.S. Consul in Amoy (present-day Xiamen, right across the Strait on the mainland) who ultimately won a diplomatic agreement with the tribes that guaranteed shipwrecked sailors’ safe passage through indigenous lands.
Interacting with the historical figures are a fictional sister and brother, Butterfly and Bukkiet, who are half-Hakka Chinese and half-indigenous. Their mixed-race status, and the nuanced perspectives they derive from it, make them apt reader surrogates in this story of multiple cultures overlapping and colliding in a relatively confined geographic space. Bukkiet will gravitate toward the native side of his heritage, eventually serving as an aide-de-camp to head tribesman Tauketok; Butterfly, impressed by the efficacy of Western medicine, becomes a trainee at a hospital run by the Scottish doctor Patrick Manson (another actual historical figure, later knighted, who helped establish the Western discipline of “tropical medicine”).
If an early graphic vignette depicting Manson’s treatment of a patient wounded in a boar hunt is a standout moment in Puppet Flower, that’s likely because its author is unusually qualified to write about such matters. Yao-Chang Chen is a doctor, professor, and medical researcher who was already an authority on blood-cell diseases before turning his hand, in his sixties, to writing historical fiction. Puppet Flower, originally published as Kui lei hua in 2016, is part of a five-novel sequence that spans Taiwan’s history from the mid-17th century, when Dutch colonists were still a presence on the island, to the period of Japanese occupation in the early 20th century. The first book in the series to be translated into English, it was adapted into a hit twelve-part TV series, Seqalu: Formosa 1867, aired by Taiwan Public Television in 2021; both the novel and the show are credited with helping to popularise a revisionist take on Taiwan’s history that draws overdue attention to its historical diversity.[1]
The medical episode above stands out as an instance where Chen takes his time with his material, rendering a scene with a moment-by-moment level of detail. Quite often, though, he summarises events rather than inhabiting them novelistically, which yields a brisk narrative but can make the book read more like a work of nonfiction than fiction. (Reading it, you can see how the story would benefit from the space afforded by an expansive miniseries treatment.) At times, too, the author or his three translators will opt for dead-on-arrival phrasing: “The whole of Chasiang was like a cat trying to walk on a hot tin roof.” “Butterfly was trapped in a nightmare from which she could not awaken.”
Those issues aside, Puppet Flower is an absorbing tour through the multicultural hodgepodge that was Formosa in the mid-19th century. As Michael Berry suggests in his helpful introduction, this is a novel that seems almost specifically conceived to upend easy binary distinctions between East and West. The “foreigners” here include American, British, and Dutch officials all jostling for their respective countries’ self-interest. The Han Chinese on the island, settlers themselves, comprise Hakka from Canton and Hokkien from Fujian who are by no means harmonious neighbours, even as they navigate a wary truce with Formosa’s indigenous population. Chen is clear too on the diversity of the native peoples: Tauketok presides over an uneasy coalition of eighteen tribes, each with their own ideas of how they should contend with the newcomers encroaching on their space.
Some of the book’s most piquant moments—and the ones with the clearest historical resonances—concern the peculiar political situation of the local Chinese, who are nominally ruled by Qing officials in remote Beijing. “We live here, enjoying our freedom. The emperor is as far from us as the clouds in the sky,” one Hokkien merchant says contentedly, echoing an old proverb. The arrangement puzzles the American envoy Le Gendre as he tries to make sense of his new assignment: “In fact, for the most part, the Qing government officials and military officers behaved as if they knew very little of this island that supposedly belonged to them… Sometimes it seemed they regarded this place as theirs, and yet at other times they most certainly did not. How did such a country come to exist?”[2]
In the short term, Le Gendre’s treaty, the 1869 South Cape Agreement, was a victory for diplomacy and a coup for the Americans. But though it ends with the threat of greater bloodshed averted, Puppet Flower is far from being a feel-good historical pageant. By the novel’s end native chieftain Tauketok has few illusions about what’s in store for his people, and a coda whisks us forward several years, to when Qing authorities are conducting bad-faith negotiations with the indigenous people and, just as ominously, the Japanese have already made their first contact with Formosa. (I’ll read any of Chen’s other historical novels as soon as they’re translated, but the one I’m most curious about is 2021’s Dawn of Formosa, which is set in the period of Japanese rule.)
There’s another sting in this tale, too. Any 21st-century novel set in 19th-century East Asia that features a female protagonist named “Butterfly”, moreover a multidimensional Butterfly who is shown to be resourceful and ambitious, is unmistakably in dialogue with a canonical Western take on the East-West encounter. David Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly, based on a now-forgotten 1898 short story by one John Luther Long, premiered in New York City in 1900; Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, drawn from Belasco’s drama, opened in Milan four years later and is filling seats at an opera house somewhere in the world as you read this. Through much of Puppet Flower, I wondered what Chen was up to by giving his lead female character the name he did; this Butterfly’s ugly, unambiguous sexual encounter with an American officer near the end of the book gave me an unexpectedly brutal answer. Some power imbalances, it seems, can’t be redressed through negotiation and diplomacy.
Watch a trailer for Seqalu: Formosa 1867, the miniseries based on Yao-Chang Chen’s Puppet Flower:
[1] See, for instance, Ho Lai-mei, “Changing perspective on history,” Taipei Times, Sep. 14, 2021, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/09/14/2003764325.
[2] The author shows his hand more overtly when he writes of Bunkiet, “He could not imagine this beautiful place being destroyed in the hellish fire of war.”
How to cite: Tompkins, Jeff. “Send in the Marines: Yao-Chang Chen’s Puppet Flower.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 26 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/26/puppet-flower/.
Jeff Tompkins is a writer and zine artist in New York City. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, IMPULSE, and Words Without Borders, among other outlets. In previous incarnations he was a Senior Producer for Asia Society New York and the Online Content and Community Manager for Library of America, the non-profit publisher. [All contributions by Jeff Tompkins.]
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