Irish Writer Maurice Manning Reads “Field Hospital” In Memory of Taiwanese writer Chung Chao-Cheng (Source: Agenda 21st century Taiwan)

Chung Chao-Cheng was born and educated during the Japanese Colonial Period, his mother tongue was Hakka, and Japanese was his first language. After the Chiang Kei-Shek’s Nationalist Party(KMT) took over Taiwan in 1949, Chung, like most of the Taiwanese people at that time, began to learn Mandarin, the official language of the Republic of China.

The dialects of Hakka and Taiwanese were repressed ever since, they were not allowed to be spoken in schools or any public occasion. Local Taiwanese writers hardly found opportunities to publish, and during the highly oppressive time under the Martial Law and the brutal censorship, literary creation was largely controlled or used for political propaganda only. Uncompromised, Chung Chao-Cheng kept writing stories about ordinary Taiwanese people, and restlessly helped other writers to be published. He used the term “stiff neck” to describe Hakka people’s unbendable mentality.

Throughout his lifetime, Chung Chao-Cheng had published hundreds of novels, novellas, short stories and memoirs. His voluminous “Trilogy of Turbid Rivers”(1967~1977) was the earliest roman-fleuve of modern Taiwanese literature. He also had translated dozens of literary works from Japanese language into Chinese(Mandarine), a language he acquired in his adulthood. Additionally, numerous literary works of his fellow Taiwanese writers had been published through his persistent efforts.

In memory of Chung Chao-Cheng’s passing, Irish writer Maurice Manning, the author of “The Kilderry Files”, made a recording of his reading Chung’s “Field Hospital”, a  short story about young soldiers during the end of WWII.

Prof. Maurice Manning is the Chancellor of the National University of Ireland. He also had served as a member of Irish parliament. Manning is also the President of the Irish Human Rights Commission and was Chair of the European Group of National Human Rights Institutions. His latest fiction “The Kilderry Files”(2017) is a novel of greed and betrayal. Through the thrilling plot, it looks into the paranoid Emergency period(1939~1976) in Ireland and the politics of Catholic church.