Wu Ming-Yi, the youngest ever recipient of Taiwan’s prestigious National Award for Arts for literature, has become one of the defining voices in global ecological fiction. His novel The Man with the Compound Eyes has reshaped conversations about environmental storytelling, island ecologies, and the relationship between migration and imagination.

In The Wu Ming-Yi Companion, the first comprehensive English-language volume devoted to his oeuvre, edited by Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu, Wu reflects on the creative evolution of this landmark novel in an extended interview the chapter “In the Magician’s Studio.”

Photo: Michael Berry and Wu Ming-Yi. Photo © Michael Berry. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution without written permission is prohibited.

Below is an excerpt from that conversation, in which Wu discusses how a late-1990s short story experiment eventually grew into the 2011 novel.

Interview Excerpt

Can you talk about the relationship between your 2003 short story “The Man with Compound Eyes” and the later novel of the same name?

My first two short story collections were primarily written in a realist style, as those were the writers I admired at the time. But during that early stage of my career, Taiwanese literary critics were quite harsh. They felt that, as a young writer, I was lagging behind the times and stylistically backward because postmodernism was the dominant trend at the time. But when I wrote the short story “The Man with the Compound Eyes,” I took a different approach. That was because, at the time, I had already begun participating in various activities with environmental groups. It was an exciting period in my life—I was being exposed to all kinds of new knowledge and information.

For instance, I learned about some species of butterflies that are native to Japan but had been discovered in Taiwan after flying here. It makes sense for some species of butterflies from mainland China to fly to Taiwan—it is only around 100 kilometers—but from Japan? That was astonishing. Taiwan also has species of butterflies capable of reaching the Philippines, which actually isn’t that far from Orchid Island. They are such small creatures, and yet their behaviors, movements, and migration patterns are much more complex than we had imagined. I began to see these butterflies as a metaphor for Taiwan, a metaphor for movement itself.

So, when I was writing “The Man with the Compound Eyes” it was still during the Cold War era, when the U.S.S.R. existed. I had read in a science magazine about one of their proposed projects: planting crops on the moon. Of course, that plan was never realized, but it stayed with me. I combined that idea with what I had been learning about butterfly migration to write “The Man with the Compound Eyes.” I loved that story. Even though I was still in my twenties when I wrote it, I felt that no one had ever written fiction like this in Taiwan. It felt fresh and original—like a direction I could continue to explore in the future.

Fast forward to 2007, when Routes in the Dream began to garner some attention, I finally had the courage to continue the experiment I had begun with the short story version of The Man with the Compound Eyes. That’s how I came to later write the 2011 novel The Man With the Compound Eyes. I wrote the short story version in 2000, or perhaps even earlier. It was published in 2003, but I think I wrote it in the late 1990s. I took some of the descriptions from that earlier short story and transplanted them into the novel. I’m not sure if any readers discovered this, but there is a section of text in the novel that was taken word for word from a 2007 essay I wrote titled “Home is So Close to the Water’s Edge” (Jia li shuibian name jin 家離水邊那麼近). I always hoped that my readers would discover this. At the time, I visited an Amis school and noticed a sculpture there. Someone working at the school asked if I liked it, I told him I loved it. Then he revealed that he was the sculptor—he was an Amis artist. He showed me some of his other works and asked me if I had any interest in seeing bats. I asked him where we could see them. He told me that if I waited until 6:00 p.m., they would appear. There would be more than 1,000 bats flying down from the trees. So I waited until 6:10 p.m., and then witnessed more than 1,000 bats suddenly emerge from a group of four or five trees. That scene eventually became one of the more magical scenes in my novel. Those four or five trees have now been cut down, and the bats are gone. That was back in 2007 when I would walk everywhere on foot, taking photos and making sketches. But I really hope readers realize that there are aspects of that book that go back much earlier. It’s like a seed was planted early on. I also intentionally used the same title to tell my readers that this was a story I had been wanting to tell for a long time, but it was only much later I finally had the opportunity to get it on paper.

Read more of the extensive interview in The Wu Ming-yi Companion, the first comprehensive English-language volume dedicated to Wu’s work. Featuring essays that examine his fiction and nature writing through environmental, Indigenous, and Sinophone perspectives, along with a personal essay and images selected by Wu Ming-Yi himself, the volume offers an essential guide to Taiwan’s literary imagination and its place in world literature.

For scholars and students of environmental humanities, Taiwan studies, world literature, and contemporary fiction, this collection provides foundational insight into one of today’s most important ecological writers.

For more information, see The Wu Ming-Yi Companion: Literature, Environment, and Translation through Compound Eyes by Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu.

Praise for The Wu Ming-Yi Companion:

“Wu Ming-Yi stands as one of the most outstanding living writers of environmental and nature-related speculative fiction and critical literature in any language. In this compelling volume, Berry and Chiu have assembled a world-class cohort of critical thinkers from Taiwan, North America, and Europe to examine Wu’s remarkable body of work and introduce English-language readers to his literary genius. Wu’s celebrated novel The Man with the Compound Eyes, which has garnered widespread acclaim in translation, exemplifies his mastery of blending ecological themes with speculative narratives. This volume is required reading for anyone seeking innovative perspectives on the global environmental crisis—from ‘CliFi’ enthusiasts and world literature scholars to environmental activists and visionary policymakers. A brilliant volume.” —Ari Heinrich, Australian National University

“A timely and bold intervention, this landmark volume illuminates the many talents of one of Taiwan’s most celebrated literary figures. While he is best known for his environmental imagination and nature-centered storytelling, this companion reveals Wu Ming-Yi as a gifted educator, an incisive ecocritic, a cosmopolitan naturalist, and a talented writer and artist deeply engaged with Taiwan’s Indigenous worlds and ecological futures. Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu bring together a definitive collection of essays that are at once conceptually rigorous and beautifully crafted, impressive in both breadth and depth. The book is a fascinating guide to Wu’s work, which itself stages Taiwan’s global odyssey through inviting dialogues between fictive idioms and social patterns, ecological disasters and orders of knowledge, biopolitics and nonhuman agents, and the layered momentum of history and the shadow of modernity.” —Howard Chiang, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi has emerged as a major presence in contemporary global literature, at once grounded in his environmental and social worlds and remarkable for the imaginative force of his storytelling. His work spans case studies of ecological distress—such as his research on butterflies—to scholarly books on nature writing, and , above all, to the speculative novels that have earned him international acclaim—works of striking imagination, emotional depth, and political resonance, such as The Man with the Compound Eyes, a contemporary classic. Coedited by leading scholars Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu, this collection gathers insightful essays on all aspects of Wu’s oeuvre. It includes analyses of his literary works, his environmental commitments, perspectives on translating his fiction, and Wu Ming-Yi’s own reflections on his intellectual project through a translated essay of his writing process and an in-depth interview. The volume concludes with an appendix of Wu’s own images and an extensive, multifaceted bibliography. Meticulously edited and thoughtfully organized, this companion is an indispensable resource for scholars and teachers of Chinese and Sinophone literature, as well as for readers interested in environmental studies. The contributors represent an international cross-section of scholars, some of whom are widely recognized as among the leading voices in modern Chinese and Sinophone writing. This book is essential reading for anyone engaged with Taiwan studies and for readers committed to environmental issues.” —Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta