In creating a monastic character like Lin, Chao sidesteps what might be called the romantic fallacy—the misconception that all characters wish for a partnership to make them truly whole. Too often in fiction, the want of love can become a dramatic crutch, insincere and overly convenient. It speaks to the depth and diversity of Chao’s creations that a character like Lin is given equal attention as those with lifestyles more sensational or salacious.
Lin’s exposition is just one example of how Chao establishes character in a few deft strokes. Her descriptions are unceasingly vivid, concise and evocative. Her prevailing point-of-view is thirdperson limited, but given the breadth and scale of Sex & Taipei City, the collection as a whole comes to feel cumulatively told by a single omniscient narrator, a judicious tour guide plumbing the fears and obsessions of her ensemble cast. In fact, these nineteen stories often feel more like vignettes: they allude and suggest, and they resist closure. Some end with ellipses and some with questions.
For example, in the story “Immersion,” a sociology grad student takes work as a PR girl (essentially, a prostitute) both for research and for added income. In the end, she’s arrested and taken to a jail cell, where she enumerates her regret:
I really don’t want to call my parents. I can just see it—Chinese New Year, everybody in the family whispering about my scandalous lifestyle, how my parents failed to bring me up right, how I used to be such a good girl but see how I am ruined now, how nobody will ever marry me, a tainted, worn-out shoe….
With those ellipses, the story ends: nothing resolved, nothing conclusive. We move onto the next set of characters, in this case a newlywed wife and her husband who withholds affection in favor of his beloved tabby cat. Often, Chao creates her characters’ inner lives with such subtle precision that to linger for more than eight or ten pages would be to risk redundancy.
If Sex & Taipei City was a movie, it could expect an R rating, but only for the maturity of its themes. There’s little vulgarity and almost no graphic content in these stories. Chao recognizes that characters don’t need to remove their clothes to make themselves vulnerable. Much more consequential is wanting something so deeply—whether it’s security, variety or liberation—that to pursue it is to run afoul of one’s cultural values. The result is a true-tolife survey of the conflicted Taiwanese psyche: conservative yet rebellious, traditional yet deviant.