Lin Hai-Yin is the founder of Taiwanese Children’s Literature with immense
contribution in areas of composition, editing, and publication. In regarding composition,
Memories of Peking: South Side Stories (1960) is undoubtedly her representative work.
This autobiographic novel takes readers back to Lin Hai-Yin’s childhood memory in
Peking. It describes the course of Ying-Zi, a little girl who lived in the south side of
Peking during the age of 5 to 13. According to this, many scholars view the Memories of
Peking: South Side Stories as a positive novel on growing up written for the purpose of
describing female’s maturation process. A closer examination would further reveal that,
while Ying-Zi is physically maturing, readers can also sense the author’s dream of going
back to childhood’s utopia and rendering the novel a taste of anti-maturing. Through the
novel, the discussion will attempt to depict the relationship between anti-maturing and
childhood’s utopia. It will also uncover the subtle self reflection of the author in this
novel, demonstrating children’s unwillingness leave their utopia and to enter and accept
the rules of the adult world.
