![]() Something of a misfit, Lazi explores the counter-culture of Taipei, struggling to embrace an identity that is labeled queer. Half journal and half epistolary, the story follows the troubled protagonist Lazi as she tries to understand her place in society during her years at university. ![]() ![]() More than twenty years on, the English-speaking world can now also enjoy this daring, youthful, and insightful book at an important moment in Taiwan’s history.īecause the author Qiu Miaojin committed suicide a year after the book’s publication in Chinese, the story carries an extra weight of anguish not normally found in coming-of-age tales. Qiu’s frank exploration of lesbianism was a breakthrough for the island’s literature and modern Chinese fiction as a whole. ![]() Despite many challenges that still persist politically with the ruling, it indicates a more liberal attitude toward non-heterosexual relationships than when Qiu Miaojin published the novel Notes of a Crocodile in the early 1990s. Taiwan’s top court just recently ruled in favor of gay marriage, culminating in what could be Asia’s first jurisdiction to allow members of the same sex to marry. ![]()
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