I May Be a Crocodile, But These Tears Are Real

The queer 1990s in Taiwan

Creatures, Goodreads is a funny place. They read things oddly there. The Goodreads summary for Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, translated by Bonnie Huie and emerging from the boundless depths of the NYRB Classics imprint, tells us: “Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university.”

This sounds fun, no? Breezy, carefree. “Hardly studying”! But always look for the original publication date, creatures, because 1994 is its own place, and no novel that name-checks Jean Genet and Derek Jarman will be the wholesome and constructive YA feelingsworld this Goodreads summary evokes.

Notes of a Crocodile is divided into diaristic “notebooks,” whose tales of lesbian love and squalor are, I expect, heavily autobiographical; these death-haunted queer stories are punctuated by scenes from the fable of the Crocodile, a lonely reptile in a “human suit,” whose strange condition has become a media sensation. Televisions across Taiwan are asking, “What are these ‘crocodiles’? How do they recognize one another? What do they do together? And—of course—where can we see one?”

This is just a newsletter, so I won’t try to come up with an elegant structure here. I’ll just tell you about the notebooks, and then about the crocodile story, and then about how they work together. The notebooks are often abstract (“Your neediness comes out inadvertently. You never exercise that part of yourself, so of course you’re not conscious of it”) and wallowing. They’re desperately adolescent. Every emotion is the only emotion the world has ever known. They’re also laced with self-abasing humor: “Secretly, though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn’t have a whole lot going on.”

There’s a collage or zine feeling to the way Miaojin’s narrator will suddenly compare her experiences to movies and books: Kobo Abe’s The Box Man, Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, “Betty Blue.” I had a hard time with some of these zigzagging youthful Theories of Relationships, these paragraphs of self-justification in which each sentence seems to contradict and yet logically flow from the one that came before it. There are also moments when the sheer alcoholic sincerity of it hit me right in the face.

There are some hauntingly evocative, beautiful scenes, mostly involving two girls together in one of the many varieties of Taipei rain. The novel needs those beautiful scenes, but I don’t think beautiful scenes are the point of it. There’s a certain queer 1980s and 1990s aesthetic that is violent—in this case, violent against oneself—and operatically desperate. A way of life with no future. So the beautiful scenes are in the novel to make you feel more painfully what was always inevitably going to be lost. I knew this before I read the novel, so maybe it warped my perceptions, but Notes of a Crocodile makes sense as something published posthumously from an author who committed suicide when she was twenty-six. There’s a feeling of always saying goodbye, and becoming increasingly convinced that it was always inevitable that you would be the one to say goodbye… and nobody would say it back to you, because you were such a jerk to them.

The crocodile is a brilliant little metaphor for the kind of queer experience where you think you’re monstrous. There are hints of Ellison’s Invisible Man and, for me, a more playful and ironizing echo of Rebecca Brown’s ferocious short story imagining an academic paper about the secret perversions of coffee-cart girls. The crocodile is endlessly self-conscious, and everybody wants to know all about it. This just in: Crocodiles love cream puffs! And so the crocodile thinks sadly, knowing she won’t be able to go and order them from the bakery anymore, “Oh no! I can’t resist cream puffs!”

The world’s attention is prurient, enthusiastic, and intermittently medico-disciplinary: Can crocodiles be treated, should crocodiles be registered. Are crocodiles coming for your children?

Well, what is a crocodile, anyway? “[T]he scientific definition of a crocodile would be ‘a Hula-Hoop (or dead bolt, etc.) optimized for secretly falling in love with other people.” Even this self-lacerating joke is followed up with further irony: “Ideally, the encyclopedia’s editor would be adept at the use of figurative language, though of course one would hope the same for the whole of humanity someday.” The crocodile is elusive, more metaphor than monster but more monster than woman.

There was a way of being queer, once, in which it meant or could be thought to require being lovelorn. Pope St. John Paul II got quite intense about the way our “original loneliness” reveals to us the nature of eros as lack—love’s earthly satisfactions become most important for your soul when they reveal their limits. Or to put it more churlishly, the more unfulfilled your desire, the greater the space carved within you for God to fill! (The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care—right?)

I know why everybody who survived it eventually left that 1990s queerness behind. It is good to be out in the world, eating cream puffs, without anybody checking you for your hardened and threatening scales. But there is something elusively appealing, too—isn’t there?—in this idea that maybe someday the whole of humanity will know itself to be Hula-Hoops optimized for pining.

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icymi

I’m quoted in this Our Sunday Visitor article about Pope Francis’s response to a question about “same-sex blessings.” My friend Grant Hartley offers further comment, and I’ve written about this general subject here and here. One thing I said that didn’t make it into the OSV piece, but which I do think is important, is: Don’t let yourself get distracted by the sexy, controversial subject of paired same-sex love. You guys know that I believe there are Scripturally-, historically-, and theologically-grounded ways of living out devoted, covenant love of another woman or another man. But not everyone is called to this path, and not everyone who might be called will find it. If you say, “Gay people can be in covenant friendships! There, I solved your problem!”, you create a church of winners and losers: people who found love and people who didn’t. The central facts about your life are that God loves you and will give you ways to love as deeply as He does. Which ways will those be? Well, probably not the ones you expect, and maybe not the ones you want. God, too, can be a bit of a Hula-Hoop: disinclined to explain Himself.

Now Playing

The Pet Shop Boys (of course), “Always On My Mind.”

Smiling alligator (yes I know) photographed by KimonBerlin, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.