flâneur

Qiu Miaojin’s Groundbreaking Notes of a Crocodile - Ploughshares

pshares.org · 1,690 words · saved by 1 readers

In 1994, Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin published her first novel, Notes of a Crocodile. She was just twenty-five at the time, and the novel crackles with youthful vitality as it relates the semi-autobiographical story of an anonymous “woman who loves women,” eventually nicknamed Lazi, and her band of merry troublemakers as they navigate university life and sexual orientation. Despite or because of her youth, Qiu was daring enough to be the first to portray queer relationships in Asian literature, and Crocodile has become something of a cult classic due to its transgressive nature. It continues to find a wide audience and was first translated into English in 2017 by Bonnie Huie.  Its literary merit does not, however, merely rest on its groundbreaking laurels. Crocodile is full of risky and unusual narrative choices that flirt with disaster before ultimately paying off. These gambits allow Qiu to tell a story that had never been told before in her own way and to create a work as relevant

In 1994, Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin published her first novel, Notes of a Crocodile. She was just twenty-five at the time, and the novel crackles with youthful vitality as it relates the semi-autobiographical story of an anonymous “woman who loves women,” eventually nicknamed Lazi, and her band of merry troublemakers as they navigate university life and sexual orientation. Despite or because of her youth, Qiu was daring enough to be the first to portray queer relationships in Asian literature, and Crocodile has become something of a cult classic due to its transgressive nature. It continues

saved by

related reading