Taiwanese writer and filmmaker Qiu Miaojin was BOTD in 1969. Born in Changhua County, she attended a prestigious private school and studied psychology at the National Taiwan University. After graduating, she worked as a counsellor, and began publishing short stories in local newspapers. In 1990, she won the Lianhe Literary Prize for her novella-length story The Lonely Crowd. Her short story Platonic Hair, published in the Independence Evening Post and later in her story collection The Revelry of Ghosts, turned heads for its open focus on lesbian identity, years before the emergence of the “tongzhi” LGBTQ movement in Taiwan. After working as a reporter for weekly magazine The Journalist, Miaojin moved to Paris in 1994, studying psychology and feminist theory with philosopher Hélène Cixous. While in Paris, she wrote and directed her first short film, Ghost Carnival, and completed her debut novel Notes of A Crocodile, a dual narrative about a lesbian named Lazi pursuing an unhappy college relationship, and a city-dwelling crocodile who wears a human suit to avoid discovery. Miaojin committed suicide in 1995, apparently by stabbing herself with a knife. The publicity surrounding her death made Notes of a Crocodile a bestseller in Taiwan, and was posthumously awarded the China Times Literature Award. Her final work, Last Words from Montmartre, was published posthumously in 1996. Now recognised as Taiwan’s foremost lesbian writer and a key proponent of queer Asian literature, Miaojin’s work is now studied in high schools in Taiwan. Lazi, the nickname of the protagonist of Crocodile, has become a popular slang term for “lesbian” in Chinese.

Aided by the news of her suicide Qiu Miaojin rapidly shot to fame and became a household name in Taiwan. Fairly quickly, the cultural impact of Miaojin’s novel took form and the word “Lazi” entered the Taiwanese lexicon as slang for “lesbian” around the country. The term soon spread to Mainland Chinese language as well, which then developed into the word “Lala”, still the preferred term to date for Chinese individuals identifying as lesbians. Additionally, the word “Eyu”, or “Crocodile”, also became another codified word in Taiwan as a way to refer to a lesbian.

Only a year later, Qiu’s next novel, Last Words From Montmartre, 蒙馬特遺書 was published posthumously, the final completed work in her oeuvre. Comprised of her writings dated between 4/72/95 and 6/17/95, the latter of which was only a week before her suicide, Montmartre is a conceptual novel as a compilation of twenty letters that can be read in any order of the reader’s choosing. In its semi-epistolary, experimental format, Montmartre is a novel of anti-structure, likely influenced by the non-narrative structures of avant-garde films, and it challenges the limits of any preexisting literary genre.

Response to the book even included discourse as to whether Montmartre could be considered a book at all, as it was such a deeply personal work meant to be experienced over and over again and in no particular order.

Book or not, Montmartre begins with a haunting dedication: “For dead little Bunny, and Myself, soon dead.” Bunny, as the reader soon learns, was the pet rabbit that Montmartre’s narrator, Zoë, bought with her ex-lover, Xu, who is the addressee of most of the letters in the work. The reader also learns that in the past year, Xu has abandoned and betrayed the narrator Zoë, who many feel is an obvious stand-in for Qiu herself. Regardless of whether it is Zoë or Qiu, the narrator throughout Montmartre is both processing and mourning the deaths of both her rabbit and three-year relationship. What is not clear, and what many readers and fans have been eager to unearth, is whether actual copies of the letters in the novel were ever sent to their intended recipient(s) in real life, and who those recipients actually are.

Another integral element of Montmartre is Qiu’s frank exploration of “T-Po” lesbian relations, which is relatively comparable with, though not identical to, the better known “butch-femme” dynamics. “T” is an abbreviation of the English term “tomboy,” which defines the role as more dominant, marked by masculine dress and short haircuts. Meanwhile, “Po” is a derivative of the colloquial term “Laopo”, or “wife”, and draws from normative femininity, like makeup and dresses. Qiu’s portrayals of T-Po relationships in Montmartre convey the author’s own struggle with them, as she vacillates between bolstering the conservative ideologies of masculinity and femininity and trying to destabilize them. Qiu/Zoë writes in Montmartre: “As I naturally love women, the women I love do not need the prerequisite of a sexual orientation for loving women…I don’t believe that my desire for, or union with, women is all that different from when a “man” wants a “woman”.” In reality, Qiu herself struggled with this duality of masculinity and femininity while exploring her own sexuality and gender identity, and it is clear that the author used writing as a medium to work through some of her troublesome thoughts.

Last Words From Montmartre was quickly regarded as a cult classic. It cemented its author as a counterculture icon, who, like other artists or public figures that died tragically young, became mythologized and idolized by the masses. Qiu was celebrated in local lesbian subcultures and deemed Taiwan’s best-known lesbian author, while both of her full-length novels are considered integral parts of the international lesbian canon. With her death, Qiu was also championed as a martyr and figurehead for LGBT rights in her country. In the decades since, Taiwan has become the most progressive country in Asia, legalizing same-sex marriage in 2019.

Long after her death, Qiu’s friends and fans have also since memorialized her in various other ways. In 2007, a two volume set of Qiu’s diaries were published posthumously, edited by her dear friend Lai Hsiang-yin. Meanwhile, Taiwanese author Luo Yijun published a book, Forgetting Sorrow, written in Qiu’s memory, and Qiu’s collective works as a filmmaker were given to the MoMA’s archives in NYC. Most recently, a documentary about Qiu’s life was released in 2017, directed by Evans Chan and produced by Radio Television Hong Kong. At the end of the documentary, her former professor, Hélène Cixous, reminisces about her former student, and quite fittingly exclaims that when Qiu died, the author had intentionally left the world with her aesthetic creation and had invented life in death and life after death.

Qiu Miaojin’s life, work, and circumstances of her suicide have been made by Evans Chan^[22] into a documentary film, Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死, with the participation of Lai Xiangyin 賴香吟, award-winning novelist and Qiu’s literary executor. The film originated from a 50-min short, Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特 · 女書, commissioned and broadcast by RTHK in 2017. Chan later expanded it into the full-length Love and Death in Montmartre,^[23] which was premiered as a Best Film nominee at the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival in 2019.^[24] Subsequently, the San Diego Asian Film Festival^[25] presented its US premiere in 2020. Hélène Cixous^[26] described the Evans Chan film as “fascinating” and “marvelous,” with Qiu evoked as “a moving apparition in search of lost love.”^[27]