Lung Ying-tai’s Wild Fire Creates a Sensation

Source: Wild Fire Collection
From: Wikipedia
Date: Last revised July 4, 2017. Author: Collaborative editors

Wild Fire is a work by contemporary writer Lung Ying-tai. Beginning in 1984, she serialized three articles in the Ren Jian supplement of Taiwan’s China Times — “Chinese People, Why Don’t You Get Angry?”, “Getting Angry — Is It Useless?”, and “A Mother Who Has Syphilis” — primarily offering criticism of civic quality and environmental disorder in Taiwan without engaging directly in political critique. In 1985 the articles were collected and published by Yuan-Shen Publishing as Wild Fire Collection.

After publication, Wild Fire Collection immediately became a bestseller in Taiwan. As Yang Ze, deputy editor-in-chief of China Times, noted: “It went through twenty-four reprints in twenty-one days — an unprecedented sensation. Reader response was enthusiastic across all social strata, and it had a profound influence especially on the ‘fifth-graders’ cohort around the student-movement generation. It reportedly became a handbook that virtually everyone owned, a guide to student activism and social movements that could be found in almost every household.”

Cover of Lung Ying-tai’s Wild Fire Collection (Source: Wikipedia)

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External Links

• Re-reading “Wild Fire Collection” Twenty Years Later — A Letter to Lung Ying-tai (Yang Zhao)
• From “Running the Household” to “Being the Master”: Reflections on Re-reading Lung Ying-tai’s Wild Fire Collection Twenty Years Later (Hsiang Yang)
• The Posture of Lighting the Fire — Reading Wild Fire Collection Twenty Years Later (China Times)