Last Words from Montmartre Afterword - Artifacts of Love: Qiu Miaojin's Life and Letters

Taipei to Paris Though nearly twenty years have passed, the circumstances of qiu miaojin's suicide in Paris at the age of twenty-six still inspire speculation in newspapers, scholarly journals, and across the gamut of social media in Taiwan. How did she die? Who were her lovers? Did she die of a broken heart? qiu's breakout novel, an accessible yet mordant work called Notes of a Crocodile (1994), gave voice to a gen-eration of Taiwanese lesbians and earned qiu a kind of cult status in queer circles. soon after her death, Notes of a Crocodile won the China Times Honorary Prize for literature in 1995 and her work catapulted from the margins into the mainstream. Her novels are taught in high schools and universities across the island, and several doctoral dissertations have tried to untangle her complex emotional grammar. at least one tribute memoir has been written (luo Yijun's Forgetting Sorrow, 2001), as well as a novelistic reflection by her friend lai Hsiang-yin (Thereafter, 2012). Besides reaching a popular audience in Taiwan, qiu's books were recently published on the chinese mainland—an astonishing turn, really, for not even a de-cade ago the only editions available there were bootleg copies circu-lating hand to hand in lesbian communities.