The Bear Whispers to Me

The Bear Whispers to Me, a rare example of Taiwanese fiction available in English, is an emotive story of one of the now culturally-endangered aboriginal peoples of the island. It evokes a world of shamans, tree-spirits, bears, forests and whispers.

It is not widely-known, or at least remembered, that Taiwan's original inhabitants are not Chinese at all, but related to Filipinos and Malays. Indeed, some hold that the Austronesian people, as they are jointly referred to, spread outwards and south from Taiwan. Chang Ying-Tai's novel, therefore, is a particular and still unusual kind of Chinese story, of people that aren't Chinese yet are still of China. In this, it is similar to The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, which tells of the reindeer-herding Evenki people of China's far north. The similarity may be less than coincidental, for one of Chang's (reportedly) best-known other works is the short story Hunting the Oroqen – the Oroqen being a people related to the Evenki. Like The Last Quarter of the Moon, Chang's novel is mostly set a generation or so back, when native peoples were still isolated enough to allow some robust continuity with traditional practices and belief systems.