Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up

By Chang Ta-chun

These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun's intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth.

Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator's younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family.

In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 22, 2005
• ISBN: 9780231500050

Reviews for Wild Kids

[bluepigeon-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As I read the first story that makes up the first 128 pages of Wild Kids, I almost quit reading several times. I am was not sure if it was the story itself and the way the author chose to tell it that bothered me or if it was the translation. Then I read the second story, and now I know that it was certainly not the translation, as the second story flows a lot better than the first (but the translator is the same.) The first story is an adult remembering his childhood and recollecting all the dysfunctional family dynamics and attempting to explain what has become of him and his kid sister due to the family life they have had. The second story is about a young student who runs away from home and hangs out with a small-time gang. Despite the fact that the storyteller is older in the first story, the language used by the author is much better flowing and eloquent in the second story. The first story becomes painful to read sometimes as awkward sentences pile up and certain phrases are repeated over and over. The second story, I would say, is better written than the first.

With that said, both stories have something interesting to offer. The biting cultural and political commentary is delivered with a strong sense of cynicism. Everyone from uncaring, cheating parents to ignorant, nosy school principals to insensitive skirt-chasers to ghost-seeing hoodlums get their share of cynical judgment. The narration, though uneven, gives a sense of urban grit from dilapidated "juancuns" to the dangerous back alleys of a bustling city. The point of view of the narrator is often comical as much as cynical. There is some sexual and gang violence, again described with a cynical voice, in the second story that contrasts well with the slow and steady decline of the narrator's mother's emotional health, which can be equally disturbing. In both stories, parents are detached, uncaring, self-centered weirdos. All in all, it is a harsh critique of urban life, though it is not easy to generalize from.