Three-Legged Horse
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
- Publish date: 11/01/1998
Cheng Ch'ing-wen's stories tell of men grappling with their fears and frustrations, from "The River Suite", in which a ferryman -- championed throughout his small town for twice saving a drowning person -- lacks the courage to confess his love to a young woman before she dies, to "Spring Rain", in which a man struggles to come to terms with his seemingly rootless life as both an orphaned child and an infertile husband. Here too are illustrations of the changing place of women in Taiwan, as they take on more powerful roles and awaken to a sense of their own sexuality: a woman forcibly separated from her husband by her jealous mother-in-law walks for hours through the night to see him on his birthday, only to turn back and go straight home before her absence is noticed; a disappointed young female scholar with a deformed hand comes to realize -- after many painful rejections -- that loneliness is not reason enough to become intimate with aman. And generations clash in "Thunder God's Gonna Getcha", as a mother's cruelty is repaid years later by a son's coldness.
Death reverberates throughout these stories as characters recall deceased spouses, lovers, relatives, and friends in vivid detail. The focus, however, is not on the dead but on the living. In the title story, an old man carves exquisite lame horses as both a penance for having terrorized a town as a police officer during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in World War II and a memorial to his deceased wife, who was nobler and more courageous than he. This book is a kind of gallery of three-legged horses: portraits of people maimed and transformed -- for better or worse -- by the suffering that life brings.
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