Wild Kids: Two Novels about Growing Up

by Chang Ta-chun

Book Overview

These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun's intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth. Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator's younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family. In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231120966
• ISBN13: 9780231120968
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 22 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Introspective journeys

Wild Kids is split into two stories, Kid Sister and Wild Child. I preferred Kid Sister but both were great stories. Kid Sister is about the narrator's younger sister getting an abortion and he recollects how she has affected his life. Wild Child is about a young boy that has a wild side that leads him to the wrong place where he ends up on a destructive path. Both stories examine the narrator's family life, inner problems, issues, how society affects people and relations with others. Neither of the stories flow in a conventional manner, jumping from different events while intertwining thoughts and recollections of childhood memories. The story still does not lose you and keeps you engrossed to the end. I definitely reccommend this book.