Taking the Arrows as Wings

Taking the Arrows as Wings is a selection of essays by the Taiwanese essayist Jian Zhen, edited by Xu Xue and published in 2015 by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House as part of the "Famous Authors' Bookshop" series. The title comes from the author's own account of her encounter with literature: when life was at its worst, literature shot into her life like arrows, yet those two arrows were trained into a pair of wings that let her fly away. Taking the arrows as wings figures trauma and redemption growing in the same place. This edition is arranged around the author's writing perspectives and is divided into three sections: "Native Land," "Dream Soil," and "The Rope of Love." In "Native Land," she traces in an almost epic manner her ancestors' sea crossing and settlement, writing of the water and rain, villages and rivers of the Lanyang Plain—a deep inquiry into her origins and the land. "Dream Soil" takes a young girl's blue dreams as its ground; the prose is light yet shadowed by melancholy and death, writing of the first rain, summer sounds, insects and butterflies, the moon and steles, revealing her sensitivity to beauty and disillusionment running side by side. "The Rope of Love" confronts family and romantic love, writing of the ties between father, mother, husband and wife, father and son; the modern woman—half warrior, half earth mother—argues within it over death and rebirth, entanglement and release, confinement and freedom. Jian Zhen's prose does not prize the clear and placid; it is ornate, intricate, and powerful, with a singular, aloof magnificence. This edition includes such famous pieces as "The Prodigal (Excerpt)," "The Plain Favored by the Rain God," "The Ends of the Earth," "Summer Verses," "Misty Blue," "The Fisherman," "April Torn Silk," "Book of Sleepwalking," "The Father-Son Umbilical Cord," and "The Rope of Love," with an autobiographical sketch by the author and an editor's afterword appended at the end. It is a fitting selection for understanding the shape of Jian Zhen's essays.