“There was something about them, a kind of enviable pedigree. These girls, Tun Tun and Zhi Rou, bring out the big sister in her, drawing her out of her dark cocoon of pain that is her ever-present condition since meeting Shui Ling. Lazi also meets two winsome, brilliant girls who enter the college as new students while Lazi is busy throwing herself into the university’s various extracurricular activities in the hopes of putting Shui Ling out of her mind. Despite this, Meng Sheng doesn’t abandon Chu Kuang though he still dreams of his lost “goddess”, a girl he admired from afar from school and never approached. Another one of Lazi’s friends, Chu Kuang, is in love with Meng Sheng but may himself be dealing with schizophrenia.

“It was strange, to say the least, to be waiting around for some guy I’d met only once to come and beat me up, but in fact, I felt like we were old friends.” Meng Sheng turns out to be both alarming and a true friend, recognising in Lazi’s sadness an element of her queer desire that she herself is unable to fully articulate. She falls into a doomed love relationship with the woman of her dreams, Shui Ling, and enters into an unconventional friendship with a handsome, possibly bisexual man named Meng Sheng who is given to alarming behaviour, forcing a friendship with the reticent, awkward Lazi by writing her a note saying that he will beat her if she doesn’t see him. The young narrator of the book is a university student nicknamed Lazi, which is slang in Taiwan for lesbian. Told in a series of eight notebooks, it charts a young woman’s queer awakening without false hope and a denial of sadness but with plenty of subtle humour throughout.

The sensitive and fluid translation by Huie presents a work that is charmingly postmodern.

It was first published in Chinese in 1994 and the English translation by Bonnie Huie was released by New York Review of Books in early 2017. Notes of a Crocodile by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin is a bittersweet, idiosyncratic anti-novel of vignettes, diary entries, and letters. Many of the satirical moments ring true precisely because the slow shift in queer rights discourse in my country of Malaysia took a similar turn.

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin