Fangge Dupan

Fangge Dupan (Chinese: 杜潘芳格; pinyin: Dùpān Fānggé; 9 March 1927 – 10 March 2016) was a Taiwanese poet. Born to a prestigious Hakka family in Xinpu, Hsinchu, she began writing as a teenager in high school. Most of her early work is written in Japanese because she was educated in that language. Due to political pressure, she stopped writing in Japanese and did not publish until the 1960s, in Mandarin. In the late 1980s, Fangge Dupan turned to her native Hakka language.

In this Chinese name, the family name is Dupan.
Fangge Dupan
Native name
杜潘芳格
Born9 March 1927
Xinpu, Hsinchu County
Died10 March 2016(2016-03-10) (aged 89)
OccupationWriter
NationalityRepublic of China
Alma materNational Hsinchu Girls' Senior High School

Her main works are Ghost Festival (中元節), PinAn Drama (平安戲), Paper Man (紙人), and Vegetable Garden (菜園).

Life and career

Fangge Dupan's family was a prestigious family in Xinpu, Hsinchu. Her grandfather, Pan Cheng-chien, was chief of the village during the Japanese colonial period. Her father, Pan Chin-wei, studied law in Tokyo. Her mother, a native of Kansai, Hsinchu, was adopted and attended Third Taipei Girl's High School. Fangge Dupan's background influenced her writing greatly.[1]

Fangge Dupan was born in Xinpu, Hsinchu on 9 March 1927.[2][3] She had three younger sisters and three younger brothers. The family moved to Japan with her father soon after she was born and returned to Taiwan in 1934.[2] Due to her background, she was able to enter the "elite primary school" , normally for Japanese, for aristocratic education. There, she was bullied by Japanese schoolmates. Fangge began attending National Hsinchu Girls' Senior High School in 1940, where she continued to face bullies. She attempted to get along with her Japanese classmates, and started writing in Japanese, including poems, novels and prose.[1][4](p69)

After leaving Hsinchu, Fangge Dupan enrolled in Taipei Girls Senior High School. At school for two years, the classes included domestic arts such as: ikebana, the tea ceremony, sewing and knitting, as well as literature and history. As a whole, Taipei Girls Senior High School's educational mission was to develop humble, virtuous women to serve husbands and educate children. What she learned in Taipei inspired Fangge Dupan to ponder the status of women, which became a recurring theme in her writings.[5] After World War II, she returned to Xinpu to teach junior high school. There, she met her future husband, Dr. Du Ching-shou.[1] By 1946, Fangge Dupan stopped writing in Japanese because the Kuomintang had banned the use of that language.[2] In the 1947 228 Incident, her maternal uncle Chang Chi-liang, and two other people were killed by the Kuomintang. The loss of family members affected Fangge Dupan's work deeply; she expressed an ironic attitude towards politics in her work.[1] The next year, Fangge Dupan married Du despite opposition from her family. She and Du moved to Chungli, Taoyuan. Fangge Dupan worked at her husband's clinic, while writing articles as a freelancer.[1] She did not publish under her own name until the 1960s, when she began writing in Mandarin.[2] This language shift marks Fangge Dupan as a member of what writer Lin Heng-tai called the "translingual generation" in 1967, Taiwanese writers who were educated in Japanese while Taiwan was governed by Japan, but later published in Mandarin Chinese as the Kuomintang asserted control of Taiwan.[2]

In 1965, Fangge Dupan joined the Bamboo Hat Poetry Society. On 17 September 1967, her husband was badly injured in a car accident, but recovered. Fangge Dupan, a Christian, turned to religious works, and began preaching. In May 1982, Fangge Dupan became an American citizen. [4]:69[6] She began writing in Hakka in 1989.[2] In 1992, her poem 遠千湖 written in Mandarin, English and Japanese was awarded the first Chen Xiuxi Poetry Prize.[1][7]

On 10 March 2016, Fangge Dupan died at home at the age of 89.[8] A memorial was held on 19 March at the Presbyterian Church in Zhongli, where she was posthumously presented with a presidential citation by Hakka Affairs Council minister Chung Wan-mei.[9]

References
  1. "作家導讀：杜潘芳格". 中華民國客家委員會. Archived from the original on 7 March 2016. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  2. Han Cheung (5 March 2017). "Taiwan in Time: The sweet sound of the mother tongue". Taipei Times. Retrieved 5 March 2017.
  3. "Les souvenirs de la poète Tu Pan Fang-ko exposés au NMTL". Taiwan Info (in French). 12 March 2015. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  4. 莫渝 (2007). 台灣詩人群像. 秀威資訊科技股份有限公司. ISBN 9789866909634.
  5. "Out of the shadows". Taipei Times. 21 November 2008. Retrieved 5 March 2017.
  6. 莊紫蓉 (December 1998). 痛苦的教贖——宗教與文學 [Painful Redemption – Religion and Literature]. 台灣新文學 (in Chinese) (11). Archived from the original on 16 March 2016.
  7. Yeh, Michelle; Malmqvist, N. G. D. (2012). Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry. Columbia University Press. p. 116. ISBN 9780231518413.
  8. 客籍詩人杜潘芳格 家中辭世享壽90歲 (in Chinese)
  9. "During the memorial service for the late Hakka poet Tu Pan Fang-ko, Minister Chung Wan-mei presented the Presidential Citation to her on behalf of the President of Taiwan, R.O.C." Executive Yuan. Hakka Affairs Council. 19 March 2016. Retrieved 5 March 2017.
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