Wu Zhuoliu:
The Fig Tree
edition cathay, Vol. 1
1994; 155 Pages; Language: English
ISSN 0946-2325; ISBN; 978-3-928861-18-2

Looking back over his life from the perspective of the 1947 massacres, the Taiwanese writer and Journalist Wu Zhuoliu describes his rural childhood in the Japanese colony of Taiwan, his growing political consciousness as a teacher in the Japanese school system and his growing awareness that China - the idealised "motherland" - was no more his home than the Japanese empjre. The Fig Tree, whjch concludes with an impIicit plea for an independen Taiwan, is both a personal record of the colonial experience in a non-Western colony and a reluctant critique of the political ineptitude of the Chinese Nationalist (KMT) government in which the Taiwanese had placed so much hope.