How the suicide of a female author sparked Taiwan’s Me Too movement – Jessie Tu
China Channel
Date: January 17, 2020
By: Jessie Tu
In February 2017, indie-press Guerrilla published a novel by 26-year old Taiwanese author Lin Yi-Han, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. The story follows a young girl who is raped by her cram school teacher over a period of five years, beginning from the time she was 13 years old. The book sold more than 200,000 copies in Taiwan, and has been translated into Korean, Japanese and Thai. Speculations arose that the novel was based on the author’s own life when, two months after publication, she died by suicide.
Despite Lin’s public denial before her death that the novel was not autobiographical, it was widely reported that she’d attempted suicide several times before her death, and that the cause of her depression was the years of abuse she suffered at the hands one male teacher. Before her death, Lin was an outspoken advocate for mental illness and had been admitted into psychiatric clinics since the age of 16. In an interview with an online critic before her death, Lin said: “I don’t want people to think of Si-Chi (the protagonist in the novel) as just another fictional character. I want people to sympathise with her.” The preface of the book reads: “The characters in this novel were adapted from real people.”
After her death, the Taiwanese government established a law requiring the names of teachers to be publicly accessible, and forced regular police checks on teachers. Lin’s parents released a statement accusing a male teacher in his 50s, well-known throughout the country, of perpetrating the acts detailed in the novel, and of driving their daughter to her death. He was taken to trial, but the case was dropped on account of “a lack of credible evidence.” When interviewed, the man claimed he’d entered a relationship with Lin when she was 18 – of consenting age in Taiwan. One news site published an op-ed by a Taiwanese journalist who said the legal investigation was conducted only to calm an indignant public. [FULL STORY]