Chinese Name: 黃娟
Birth Name: Huang Ruijuan
Date of Birth: January 18, 1934
Place of Birth: Hsinchu City (Northern Taiwan)
Did You Know?
Joyce Weng is one of the representatives of the second generation of postwar Taiwanese writers. Her early works focused commonly on topics of feminine love and marriage, telling tales of girls coming of age. After moving to the United States, she expanded the scope of her work to focus on issues of national and cultural identity, writing the "Yangmei Trilogy"—"Footprints from History (歷史的腳印)," "Winter Cicada (寒蟬)," and "Formosan Landed (落土蕃薯)." The Yangmei Trilogy was a landmark work in Weng's creative career, and is one of the few historical trilogies completed by a female author in the history of Taiwanese literature.
Joyce Weng was born in Hsinchu in 1934 and moved to Taipei with her family shortly after. Later, she moved to Taoyuan’s Yangmei to complete her elementary schooling amid the outbreak of war in the Pacific Theater of World War II. The experience of living in the Hakka village of Yangmei planted Hakka memories in her mind and laid the groundwork for her future writings on her hometown. Graduating from Taipei Women's Teacher’s College (now the University of Taipei), she obtained her teaching qualifications and worked as a teacher in elementary and middle schools. In 1961, her first short story, "Bud (蓓蕾)," submitted by writer Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), was published in the United Daily News under a nom de plume given to her by Chung which she continues to use in Chinese.
After starting her literary career, Weng published several collections of short stories presenting the various encounters of women in marriage and love, as well as a full-length novel, "A Girl Who Loves Françoise Sagan (愛莎岡的女孩)," which depicted the misery and sorrow of young people in the 1960s. During this period, Weng's works stuck to a creative credo of following everyday life, presenting the ordinary lives of Taiwanese at the time with simple words, delicately portraying the sorrows and joys of her fictional characters. At the same time, she levelled criticism at the oppression and control of women by the old-fashioned concepts of the patriarchal society of the time and further developed the self-awareness of her female characters through reflections on marriage and love. In 1968, Weng emigrated to the United States, initially publishing only a little here and there afterward before ultimately stepping away from writing for over a decade. It was not until 1983, when she was invited to join the North American Taiwan Studies Association, which studies Taiwanese literature and encourages exchanges with Taiwanese writers in Taiwan, that she again began publishing works, returning to the literary world in 1985.
After making her return, she continued to write about the plight of Taiwanese-Americans and the culture clashes they face, while also incorporating Taiwan's democratic movement and political events into her works from the perspective of an overseas Taiwanese, showing her continuing concern for her homeland. Since then, Weng has published several long-form novels, including "Broken Marriage (婚變)," "The World of Hong Hong (虹虹的世界)," and the Yangmei Trilogy, as well as several collections of short stories and literary criticism. Her later work has been praised by Chung Chao-cheng as making her “the standard bearer for Taiwanese-American literature."
Joyce Weng's semi-autobiographical Yangmei Trilogy took more than ten years to complete, from field research and data collection in Taiwan to drafting and writing. The story spans the period from the end of Japanese rule in 1945 to the first change of ruling political party in 2000, recording the struggles of the Taiwanese people for democracy with deep literary and historical significance. The novels focus on the history of Taiwan as seen through everyday life, and differ from the usual male perspective of historical novels as Weng "offers a peek into massive times through the tales of the little people," writing about the growth and transformation of women at the center of these major historical shifts.
Through her elegant and graceful prose, Joyce Weng shows the awakening of female consciousness, the effort to keep Hakka community culture alive, and her concern for her homeland through the perspectives of everyday women, Hakka, and Taiwanese Americans, drawing upon a lifetime of experiences. In 2019, she donated manuscripts and documents of her life to the Hakka Cultural Development Center of the Hakka Affairs Council. Weng has received numerous awards, including the Wu Cho-liu Literary Award (吳濁流文學獎) in 1988, the 22nd Wu San-lian Literary Award (吳三連文學獎) in 1999, the Achievement in the Humanities Award at the 2001 Taiwanese-American Awards, the Oxford Prize for Taiwanese Literature in 2007, the Hakka Lifetime Contribution Award in 2008, and the 21st National Award for Arts in 2019.
(Photo courtesy of Joyce Weng)