Huang, Wen-Yi

Introduction

Huang received her PhD in History from McGill University, Canada. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. Her research interests include the history of migration and the history of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. Huang previously served as the editor of Eslite Reader Magazine. Her personal creations and articles have been published in the media such as Youth Literary Cub, Stories, and the Ink Magazine.

Resident planning

During the Japanese rule, many indigenous women acted as intermediaries and played a significant role in the process of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. However, they did not leave enough historical information to establish their legacy, and as a result, their roles have been neglected in historical writing and in fiction writing to date. However, this is not the case of Yabun Rahen, an Atayal woman born in the mountains of Nanao, Yilan. Her presence can be found in official documents, news reports, and photo essays of the time. Therefore, through the novel "Yabun Rahen's Dream," I hope to reconstruct the life of an indigenous woman during the Japanese rule in Taiwan through a blend of historical fact and fiction. Through the practice of writing this book, marginalized characters in terms of geography, ethnicity, and gender are reset back to center stage as an alternative way to give voice to the underprivileged. In addition, writing Yabun's story is also an adept format of transformative justice by intervening in historical memory through literary works. In this way, I hope to provide a different interpretation of history than the official version, and to provide a broader and more complex understanding of the history of Japanese colonization of Taiwan.