Boy meets girl when both happen to arrive on the same rooftop, on the same day, to kill themselves. Instead, they chat and make a pact that sees their lives gradually entwine but unravel at the same time.
Qiu Miaojin was born in Taiwan in 1969, and died in Paris in 1995. She is one of Taiwan’s best-known queer female authors. Her novels include Last Words From Montmartre (tr. Ari Larissa Heinrich, NYRB, 2014) and Notes of a Crocodile (tr. Bonnie Huie, NYRB, 2017). Shengchi Hsu (b. 1979) is a Chinese-English translator based in Taiwan. He received his MA in English from the University of Salford and studied for a Ph.D. in Literary Translation at the University of Warwick. After a 20-year teaching career in further and higher education in Manchester, U.K, he has returned to his hometown Taichung, where he now works as a tutor of English language and literature. His short story translations, “A Daughter” by Lin You-hsuan and “Violet” by Hsu Yu-cheng, are collected in Queer Taiwanese Literature: a Reader. His co-translation of eight classical Taiwanese Han poems with Canadian poet, Evan Jones were featured in the PN Review. He is currently working on translations of poems from the Japanese colonial period and the poetry of the prominent Taiwanese poet, Xiang Yang. His translation of "Cage" was longlisted for the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize.
