Two Paths in "Notes of a Crocodile"

Qiu Miaojin's Taiwanese lesbian novel portrays queer angst while honoring the queer imagination. Also, you can become a paid subscriber now, if you'd like to support my writing in a dollars sense.

I am opening my Substack to paid subscriptions. When I started writing here, I thought of it as a practice space, a way for me to push myself to write publicly and experiment with ideas. I knew that if I looked at it as a self-promotional tool, as anything that required marketing or related to growing a “platform” or “audience,” I’d abandon the project. A few years in, I don’t feel the same need for writing practice, but my deep discomfort with self-promotion remains. Substack has also begun to occupy a different role within the literary sphere than it did in 2021. I’ve been mostly a lurker in the literary community here, and I’d like to participate more fully.

So, in another attempt to challenge myself, I’m going to shift this blog in a more purposeful direction. I’ll be writing at least one free post and one post for paid subscribers each month. I also might post more fiction and poetry here, we’ll see how it goes.

If you like my writing, you can now support this blog at $5/month if you so choose. You can also choose to give me more than that, or continue reading for free. You can also choose to tell your friends to come take a gander. Tell them my substack will give them dewey and younger-looking skin and that I have the secret to living well on four hours of sleep a night. It’s nominally a free country, so you don’t have to do any of that, but do keep reading, there’s a book I want to tell you about.

I was assigned to read Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Huie, for a class this past spring. First published in Taiwan in 1994, Notes of a Crocodile chronicles the coming-of-age of an unhappy university student in Taipei, Lazi, and the unhappy relationship between her and the woman she loves, as well as her friendships with other, equally miserable queer people in the city.

When I lived as a cis woman, a period which happened to align with the years I spent romantically floundering before I met my wife, my tastes in lesbian media (when I sought it out at all, preferring to live in a fantasy world where my queerness could be expressed as a man) ran towards the doomed, angst-filled end of the spectrum. In fandom terms, my favorite F/F¹ ship was always Buffy/Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because their homoerotic relationship was characterized less by affection and warmth than by mutual obsession, resentment, competition exploding into violence, seeing the self in another and seeking to destroy it.

Perhaps I ate this shit up because my own romances with women were unhappy stories, characterized by the classic queer emotional stew of do I want to be her or be with her or be better than her or ruin both of us. Perhaps my tastes as a reader simply run in the non-cozy direction. Regardless, while reading Notes of a Crocodile I found myself dog-earing every other page, amazed at how this author writing decades ago, in another country, in another language, could have captured the inward experience of my own young queer turmoil so accurately.

I don’t mean to universalize Miaojin’s work. The novel can’t be removed from the political context of Taiwan in the early 90s. But what I connected with is Miaojin’s subtlety as she weaves together Lazi’s romantic failures and psychological problems with the repressive society surrounding her characters. The external force of homophobia does not intervene to prevent Lazi and Shui Ling from being together, not quite. But heteronormative society has shaped both of them, to the point that their ultimate inability to reconcile represents both an individual and a collective tragedy.

The novel states explicitly that Lazi’s lesbian desire alienates her from her own gender, and therefore from society more broadly. She writes to Shui Ling, “Society still counts you a normal woman. Your love for me was a feminine, maternal love that can just as easily be extended to any man… But me, our relationship left me fundamentally altered. You tore me open and exposed the man inside. The new me has no rightful place in humanity.” (p135-6) Seeing no place for herself to exist, Lazi behaves erratically and becomes self-destructive, and she can’t figure out how to love without turning that destruction outward.

Miaojin draws similar portraits of the other queer friends that Lazi makes in her university days. In 2025 U.S.ian terms, many of these characters are “problematic,” and the author presents their behavior without any attempt to exculpate them. Meng Sheng, an impulsive and often violent rich kid, begins his friendship with Lazi by threatening to beat the crap out of her if she doesn’t agree to meet up with him. She still rides off on the back of his motorcycle and their friendship deepens because he is queer too, and they can freely express both their masculine and feminine sides around each other. When Miaojin introduces Chu Kuang, Meng Sheng’s on/off boyfriend, he is reeling from a fight that began when he attacked Meng Sheng, and ended with Meng Sheng beating him with a chair. Both of these characters are frequently suicidal–Meng Sheng has previously saved Chu Kuang’s life from a suicide attempt–and for them love is inextricable from violence. As Chu Kuang explains it: “[L]ove goes hand in hand with hatred, and because there’s hatred, you’re going to fight, and when you fight, you see that there’s love… Once your sexual frustration reaches a certain point, if you don’t either fulfill or rid yourself of your desires, you’re going to find yourself deep in the abyss of meaninglessness… your desires will turn against themselves in full force.” (p87)

Queer love is destructive for these characters, and there is no Pride in this novel, no sentiment that would fit on a Pride Parade sign. This is queer desire as experienced by damaged people who see no chance of acceptance in the broader world. But if there’s no Pride, there’s not as much shame as you’d think. The prose style is diaristic and matter-of-fact (how much of this is down to the translation, I don’t know), with some emotional beats expanded on for pages and some, like Meng Sheng’s initial threat to Lazi, dismissed with one sardonic sentence. The characters themselves seem to hold each other’s disturbing behavior at a distance. While nothing in Lazi’s chapters deviates wholly from realism, the most dramatic interpersonal conflicts do not feel “realistic,” as in the author has made no attempt to make them feel grounded. The realism Miaojin seems chiefly concerned with is Lazi’s recursive and sharp interior life, as she reflects on her world and as she breaks up with her girlfriend again, and again, and again.

Qiu Miaojin brings a formal experimentalism to her novel that makes it stand apart. Lazi’s narrative is haunting, but what elevates Notes of a Crocodile is the interjecting chapters about crocodiles. In this para-narrative, the crocodile is an endangered species, a mythical creature that most Taiwanese have never witnessed and that many believe do not exist, a national celebrity with an obsessive fanbase, and a romantic being that must live in hiding. We follow a single crocodile as he navigates a life that demands secrecy even as he longs to connect with others, and this crocodile has never met another one of its kind. The public hungers for news of crocodiles, and the state’s political apparatus takes an interest in crocodiles. A radio broadcast:

“In accordance with best practices, and in order to preserve the very essence of our nation, our news bureau has instituted a unified set of provisions regarding the reporting of crocodile-related news… Since the actual volume of domestic data on crocodiles has grown and the nation has devised new measures to either protect or eradicate crocodiles, this category of highly sensitive classified information must not fall into the hands of foreign states… Each and every citizen, upon receiving news reports, must agree to maintain confidentiality in the event that the domestic crocodile situation reaches a critical state, as we as a nation could very well find ourselves shunned by the international community.” (p81)

Around the time that Miaojin was writing, Taiwanese media had an obsession with queer people and particularly with lesbians, to the extent that a TV reporter secretly filmed people at a lesbian nightclub without their consent, resulting in a scandal and implicated in the suicide of two teenaged girls that attended Miaojin’s school. The dialectical national will to “either protect or eradicate crocodiles” maps on to LGBT status in that time and place, but reading Notes of a Crocodile in 2025 U.S.A., where trans people are continuously thrust into national conversations against our will, a subgroup experiencing unasked-for national fascination and celebrity, I felt a livewire thrum of recognition. The crocodile is baffled by the attention, feels shy, embarrassed even, and how is a lone crocodile meant to feel about its existence being transmuted into a tool of the state?

Miaojin lets the crocodile metaphor flow wherever it needs to, portraying fanciful exploits, dipping into the surreal, letting her crocodile converse with Kobo Abe, disguise himself as Jean Genet, and quote Derek Jarman. The crocodile chapters are funny, satirical, and often whimsical, focusing as much on the crocodile’s yearning for connection as his need for secrecy. A crocodile is once defined as “a Hula-Hoop (or deadbolt, etc) optimized for secretly falling in love with other people” (p104). While the primary narrative is anguished, the crocodile chapters offer an imaginative glimpse into queer life that never loses its romantic soul, where the reptile blushes and eats cream puffs, where fleeting connection and kindness and passion for art can provide a kind of giddy solace.

Had I come across this novel when I was younger and more actively looking for art that made sense of my romantic disasters, I’m sure I would have treasured the passages about Lazi and Shui Ling’s tortured relationship, and maybe I would have romanticized Qiu Miaojin’s own suicide at age 26. Her novel captures the way queer people have adapted to political oppression by treasuring our own distress, by perhaps whispering ‘I’ll join you soon’ to our idols that died young, by fucking and getting fucked by the doomed nature of it all, by over-identifying with our capacity to secretly, hopelessly, tragically love.

Now, with angsty youth winking away in my rearview mirror, I find the crocodile chapters most poignant. My crocodile nature, it’s true, has me craving creampuffs even as my rights are being debated on national TV, and like the crocodile I’ll never stop dreaming of connection. But the novel’s power comes from the synthesis of its two strains. The last chapter is a postscript with the crocodile, as he addresses the public in a video recorded from inside the apartment he is confined to from fear of discovery. His monologue is upbeat and more funny than tragic, even as the camera follows him in a wooden bathtub sent out to sea, which then catches fire, presumably ending the life of the only confirmed crocodile in existence.

It is impossible not to think of Qiu Miaojin’s own suicide at the novel’s conclusion. Frequently authors that have taken their own lives reveal suicidal logic in their work, or perhaps it is the reader’s meta-knowledge that makes us look for clues. In this case you do not have to search very hard. Yet I struggle to interpret the last page as a final ending for Miaojin’s crocodile. The prose maintains its sardonic whimsy, there’s all the jokes and jaunty exclamation points, and then the last line: “Note: As Jarman said, ‘I have nothing more to say… I wish you all the best!’” (p242) Perhaps the crocodile hasn’t taken his own life. Perhaps he has found a way to fake his death on film and thus escape the public’s fascination, and his adventures will continue, beyond us, unknowable.

Lazi’s story ends not in tragedy, but in action, as Miaojin literally writes a freeze frame into the text as her protagonist climbs over a wall while trying to help Meng Sheng. One narrative extends indefinitely as the other gets snuffed out. If we can easily find life-ending logic in this novel, we can also find arguments for hanging on. Miaojin does not use her fantastical element to explore wish-fulfillment, but rather creates a framework for playful adaptation through naming the absurdity of your oppression, laughing at it, and keeping up the whimsy.

1. I hate the term ‘sapphic,’ I’m sorry, I recognize its utility for others but won’t use it myself.