Fangge Dupan

Fangge Dupan (; 9 March 1927 – 10 March 2016) was a Taiwanese poet of Hakka descent, renowned as a member of the "generation that straddles between (Japanese and Chinese) languages." Born to a prestigious Hakka family in Xinpu, Hsinchu, she began writing as a teenager in high school. Most of her early work is written in Japanese because she was educated in that language. Due to political pressure, she stopped writing in Japanese and did not publish until the 1960s, in Mandarin. In 1965, she joined the Li Poetry Society with a strong emphasis on the sense of place, and in the 1980s she began actively creating Hakka poetry. In the late 1980s, Fangge Dupan turned to her native Hakka language.

Her main works are Ghost Festival (中元節), PinAn Drama (平安戲), Paper Man (紙人), and Vegetable Garden (菜園).

Life and career Fangge Dupan's family was a prestigious family in Xinpu, Hsinchu. Her grandfather, Pan Cheng-chien, was chief of the village during the Japanese colonial period. Her father, Pan Chin-wei, studied law in Tokyo. Her mother, a native of Kansai, Hsinchu, was adopted and attended Third Taipei Girl's High School. Fangge Dupan's background influenced her writing greatly.

Fangge Dupan was born in Xinpu, Hsinchu on 9 March 1927. She had three younger sisters and three younger brothers. The family moved to Japan with her father soon after she was born and returned to Taiwan in 1934.

After leaving Hsinchu, Fangge Dupan enrolled in Taipei Girls Senior High School. At school for two years, the classes included domestic arts such as: ikebana, the tea ceremony, sewing and knitting, as well as literature and history. As a whole, Taipei Girls Senior High School's educational mission was to develop humble, virtuous women to serve husbands and educate children. What she learned in Taipei inspired Fangge Dupan to ponder the status of women, which became a recurring theme in her writings. After World War II, she returned to Xinpu to teach junior high school. There, she met her future husband, Dr. Du Ching-shou. By 1946, Fangge Dupan stopped writing in Japanese because the Kuomintang had banned the use of that language. She began writing in Hakka in 1989.

During the 1990s, Fangge Dupan served as the director of Taiwan Literature, as well as the president of the Female Whale Poetry Society. In 1992, she authored a collection of poems titled Faraway Thousand Lake (Yuan Qian Hu) in Beijing Mandarin, English, and Japanese, winning the first Chen Hsiu-hsi Poetry Award. Her major works include Ghost Festival (Zhong Yuan Jie), Well-being Drama (Ping An Xi), Paper Man (Zhi Ren), Vegetable Garden (Cai Yuan), etc.

On 10 March 2016, Fangge Dupan died at home at the age of 89. A memorial was held on 19 March at the Presbyterian Church in Zhongli, where she was posthumously presented with a presidential citation by Hakka Affairs Council minister Chung Wan-mei.

Style Owing to her family background, Fangge Dupan had the privilege of enrolling in a Shōgakkō (elementary school), at the time it was normally exclusively catered for Japanese children, where most students were of Japanese descent. She began to express herself through Japanese writing as a means of alleviating the torment of being bullied. Since she had learned to think and write in Japanese, it was quite challenging for her to relearn Chinese after World War II.

However, she did not cease her creative endeavors. Instead, she regarded her poems as a form of diary, a means to vent the inner anguish she had no other outlet for. In 1947, the 228 Incident erupted, leading to the arrest and subsequent execution of three of Fangge Dupan's family members by the Kuomintang (KMT) authority. This tragic event deeply affected her, and in her later works, she strongly demonstrated a critical and satirical attitude towards politics.

The Li Poetry Society's poets primarily concentrated on depicting the minutiae of daily life under the influence of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in the early 1920s. Fangge Dupan's poetry also frequently employs common objects and scenes as symbols. However, the themes she addresses in her work can be profound, encompassing reflections on time, mortality, and the concept of nationhood.