In May 2019 the news spread around the world that Taiwan is the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Among many people who went to the streets of Taipei those days to celebrate with colourful flags, where some who at some stage of their lives read the inconspicuous book Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, a cult novel among the LGBTQ+ community in Taiwan, published over twenty years earlier.
Qiu Miaojin wrote Notes of a Crocodile as a 23-year-old student. The protagonist is her peer, who at some point gets a nickname Lazi. She and her friends are living in Taipei in the late 1980s, right after the end of Taiwan’s martial law. Lazi is a lesbian, in love with an older friend, but – like the rest of her friends – she is constantly looking for something new, tests new relationships. Most of them wane, often end up dramatically. There isn’t much going on in the storyline; the action takes place somewhere “in the meantime”, between the pages. We, as the readers, follow their daily talks about seemingly nothing: Japanese books, French philosophers, European film, counterculture. Everything that 20-year-olds live and breathe at university.
The story is broken down into several short notebooks, each of them into very short episodes: some are written like a typical novel, others are pieces of letters, some – very intimate diary notes. Lazi’s story is intertwined with somewhat humorous episodes about a world of humanized crocodiles – a metaphor for otherness and oppression in our world?
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