Qiu Miaojin

WINNER OF THE 2018 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award. An NYRB Classics Original Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

Notes of a Crocodile

Miao-chin Chiu

WINNER OF THE 2018 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE

The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin’s coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award.

An NYRB Classics Original.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. 

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

"From the look in her eyes in the dream, I know she doesn't blame me. She resents me. There's a rift between us, but she has to learn not to lament for the dead. It's like being struck in the heart with an arrow. I's not about the arrow. The fact is, the damage is done."

"Whoa! You're not offended, are you? How about if the three of us agree to have post-gender relations? I'm done talking about it. In the end, all three of us have been seriously warped by gender labels.”

I liked these two. And I knew that they liked me. There was no romantic interest whatsoever in that like. As for how much I liked them, the two of them were perhaps my very favorites out of all the people to whom that word applied. I liked them as individuals. I liked them even more when they were together. Were I a fanatical collector of figurines, these two would be my most prized pair.

"You start to fight the second you see each other. Does that mean it's mutual love or bitter hatred?"

"Doesn't Hsia Yü have a poem called 'Sweet Revenge? I only mention it because I thought you might know it. It's like the title says. Because love goes hand in hand with hatred, and because there's hatred, you're going to fight, and when you fight, you see that there's love. The three become inseparable.“

The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit. That it could never develop into anything, and in-stead, it would split apart like pieces of a landslide. As flesh and blood, I was not distinct. You turned me into my own key, and when you did, my fears seized me in a flood of tears that soon abated. I stopped hating myself and discovered the corporeal me.

She didn't understand. Didn't understand she could love me, maybe that she already did love me. Didn't understand that beneath the hide of a lamb was a demonic beast that had to suppress the urge to rip her to shreds. Didn't understand that love, every little bit of it, was about exchange. Didn't understand that she caused me suffering. Didn't understand that love was like that.

aywen

I said, Can we start over? She turned around. The ocean wept. I knew it was mutual love.

The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

nica

Whether I was sitting or running around or lying down, my mind was filled with things I wanted to talk to Xiao Fan about. In my heart, I talked to her all day long. The sheer volume of these conversations was too much to contain. They were practically oozing out of me, incapacitating me. My body had entered overproduction mode. Its mostly unsaleable products were piled in a warehouse, and the warehouse soon had to be demolished.

playing in the background: subway by chappell roan

Shui Ling, this separation has to be. Four months later, I’m in a completely different place.

On how to love well: Instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard.

Of all my memories, my memory of her is the single most beautiful. It should be evident by now that I can’t conceivably depict this woman. In writing this much, I’ve already condemned myself to failure and done her an injustice. It amounts to nothing more than a sham, and I’ve gritted my teeth trying all the while. There’s a raw passion that still lives in my blood, still courses through my veins. The mere thought of her fills me with enough desire to send me into a mad frenzy. Yet this memory is also the saddest and most painful of all, for I never really knew this woman’s heart, and I never would.

She’d ask me why I was sitting next to her, and I’d say because you’re smart. She’d also ask me why her. I’d say because you’re so beautiful. She said maybe you don’t know that I have nothing to offer you. I said doesn’t matter, other women don’t want me. She said you can’t handle me. I said let’s cross that bridge when we get there.

“in the past two years, I’ve become a woman. Nothing’s the same anymore. I’m not pure anymore. I can’t face her now. I just want our sweetest memories to stay in the past. That was probably the one time when it was totally pure. She’s the only one who made me live fearlessly.”

There are many important images in my mind that were captured at strange twists and turns, during the passage from one stage to the next, accumulating a weight I never expected. But I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.

“I have to jab you. I don’t want to be close to you because you’ll taint the memory in my heart. . . .” Her stare, brimming with hatred, said that she no longer knew me. “I won’t let you. No one can. It’s mine alone. You abandoned me and left me out in the cold. All I have left now is the you that I created, and it’s the best you there is. . . .”

She had tied me up with wire and left me to die. But when all was said and done, she wanted me to die in her arms. So before entering my dreams every night, she yanked the wire tight to make sure I was still there.

my high school years, filled with secret crushes and the camaraderie of friends who laughed and cried together, later torn apart in the process of growing up. Even if we had prevented that estrangement, our former kindredness would be replaced by a pained silence if we were to meet again. My college years were spent among people who were like oil in water, unable to form bonds. A few friends had broken through my shell and made me less alienated, but I didn’t treat them well, and it was my loss. My only salvation—Shui Ling—was as short-lived as a rainbow. What the two of us had was an achievement on par with landing on the moon, then floating in space with zero gravity. Images of all these people flooded my mind. Some emotion of mine—whether love, pain, or sorrow—had been preserved in each of their faces. But there was no escaping separation, which was left to the mercy of fate. One by one, those dearest to me had disappeared, and my memories, which I had so closely guarded, were ultimately of little consolation.

Twenty. I was stuck in a rut and feeling hopeless. I couldn’t go on.

“From the look in her eyes in the dream, I know she doesn’t blame me. She resents me. There’s a rift between us, but she has to learn not to lament for the dead. It’s like being struck in the heart with an arrow. It’s not about the arrow. The fact is, the damage is done.”

I’d wrongly assumed that I, having played the role of protector far too often, was overreacting the way a parent frets over a child getting sick. But no, this was an important turning point for me. For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I’d rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean. I’d taken the mirror and smashed it to pieces, unable to stand the sight of my hideous, disfigured self.

So I didn’t need Shui Ling, then? She’d become the mythical goddess Nüwa—a snail of a woman curled up inside a shell somewhere beyond my recollection. I dove down to a coral reef at the bottom of the sea, a long, grueling journey to a place where all kinds of caves could be found. The reef was a microcosm of deep-sea consciousness, from its pink bud-like tentacles to the moist, black marrow of its skeleton. Whenever I ventured into the wrong cave, the snail woman would emerge from her shell to temper my alcohol-hardened brain, mending the membrane layer where freshly spawned desires were being sundered by a death wish.

It was hard enough to demolish just one little part. It hurt everyone, including me. To make up for it, I let them form a new image of me. It’s been a constant struggle. I’ll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don’t, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence. And using those would be like retreating before the battle’s even begun.

That guardedness was a by-product of my lifelong socialization, of other people labeling me and putting me in a box.

I knew there was no way I could protect her from the real world or from being yanked around by the tail. That said, I’d still step in and save her regardless. I was such a shitty human being, why not take advantage of her state of disgrace and kick her while she was down? No matter what kind of trouble she was in, I’d run over in an instant to toss a rope down and pull her back to safety. Now that I’d shown myself to be blindly at her beck and call, she was beaming again.

🪢

Saffy

“You can’t hold on to a beautiful thing forever— not in your memory, not even if you keep loving it. If you tried, it would only die in your possession. Beauty must be free to run its course.”

liked how its written as a journal for eyes of only the narrator to see.. allowed for raw and sometimes exaggerated feelings of the desire to love and be loved.. AND although exaggerated it tells without undermining these emotions the characters have.. making it justifiable to their own experiences

ryan

"There are some sorrows so great they are unspeakable, taking hold in the body and leaving a void after the fact. There are some depths that love can never again reach. The mind anoints every fossil with significance in an attempt to preserve it—but in time, they all invariably turn to dust.

Man's greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire."

trin

"There are some sorrows so great they are unspeakable, taking hold in the body and leaving a void after the fact. There are some depths that love can never again reach. The mind anoints every fossil with significance in an attempt to preserve it—but in time, they all invariably turn to dust.

Man's greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire."

“On how to love well: instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard.”

shen

A sad but uplifting coming-of-age story. It offer a deep look into the psychology of self-sabotaging behaviours but sometimes the plot feels a bit forced just to demonstrate this view.

Viet-Hung Nguyen

this is literature, thank the universe for literature 

I finished this book a week ago, but I'm still trying to process what I've read. It was beautifully written, beautifully translated. My god I felt everything.

Abigail

rory

danakim

reading engagement be like 📉📈
the plot was lacking but the writing saved it

Relating to the narrator terrified and comforted me in equal measure

Ada Lu

one of my favorite books ever. i love you qiu miaojin. i wrote this in my journal, jan. 5, 2024:

“I realized last night that I never processed Notes of a Crocodile. I said once that “I found pieces of my heart” because of her writing. She wrote a lot about the self-loathing one would feel navigating the queer world, when the dominant belief is centered around heteronormativity. How shameful it is to even engage in self-discovery. To hate yourself because you love. And to run away from your heart, because why must it hurt, when you are only so capable of love? There were also other elements: fearing commitment (another similarity between us), unrequited yearning for a woman, the unknowing of the self, and much more that have shaped my late adolescence/early young adulthood growing up queer. 

The way Qiu writes is a different story altogether. Poignant, cuts to the bone. I think I described it once as fruit being cut so carelessly (almost violently), leaving it exposed. It spills over. It slices through. Through and through, past the bones. Until it is both no longer, and yet its very essence remains. How do I explain this?

Qiu is exceptionally skilled, the rawest writer I’ve read. Sensitive, with a rich inner world. Interiority oozing out in writing. It’s a blade of possibility. That’s it, yes – a blade of possibility.”

Alyanna

one of my favorite books ever. i love you qiu miaojin. i wrote this in my journal, jan. 5, 2024:

“I realized last night that I never processed Notes of a Crocodile. I said once that “I found pieces of my heart” because of her writing. She wrote a lot about the self-loathing one would feel navigating the queer world, when the dominant belief is centered around heteronormativity. How shameful it is to even engage in self-discovery. To hate yourself because you love. And to run away from your heart, because why must it hurt, when you are only so capable of love? There were also other elements: fearing commitment (another similarity between us), unrequited yearning for a woman, the unknowing of the self, and much more that have shaped my late adolescence/early young adulthood growing up queer. 

The way Qiu writes is a different story altogether. Poignant, cuts to the bone. I think I described it once as fruit being cut so carelessly (almost violently), leaving it exposed. It spills over. It slices through. Through and through, past the bones. Until it is both no longer, and yet its very essence remains. How do I explain this?

Qiu is exceptionally skilled, the rawest writer I’ve read. Sensitive, with a rich inner world. Interiority oozing out in writing. It’s a blade of possibility. That’s it, yes – a blade of possibility.”

faye

(4.5) i'm struggling to distill my feelings about this book into words, but my copy has been dog-eared and annotated to near-destruction, which i think both qiu and lazi would have wanted. it's asian queer nihilism at (what i believe to be) it's best: satirical, absurd, surreal. i can see how the depressive railing can get tedious/melodramatic, but i'm fond of scattered narratives when they feel like the only way this story can be told. i do wish i could have seen more of the characters, but i suppose the power of this piece is the mystery that shrouds the potential for happiness amongst queer teens in post-martial law taipei. many thoughts but somehow no words to encapsulate them. there's just something about this book...

https://literal.club/activity/cl6qz3jfg13068560ixh1oinsr5u

Bartosz Skalny 

雪 xue

i read this at such a formative age that this book is forever etched into my soul

Maxime van der Wal

If you're in your early twenties, mentally ill and queer, you HAVE to read this.

Sandaru Ravihari

I read this for the Women In Translation month. I really enjoyed the story in the begining but towards the end it got somewhat monotonous and repetitive. However I loved the way the author included small stories of crocodiles in human suits (the LGBTQ community) as a metaphorical manner. Hearing that the author committed suicide and how Lazi, the main character, similarly is being potraied as a lesbian woman suffering from depression and social confusion who often has throughts of ending her life made this book a really depressing one. For some reason I am attarcted to depressing emotional stories. I liked the book and the story, but I wish it was not dragging like it did in the last quarter of the book.

Brianna Hawkins

Took longer than normal to finish because I had to pause so many times to reflect… this one hits close to home. 

Notes of a Crocodile

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