Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” serves as an ideal hermeneutic imagefor readings of Huang Chun-ming’s (黃春明) work, especially stories inwhich the narrator may be imagined as the angel flying backward into thefuture, surveying the rubble of traditional Taiwanese life in the wake ofincreasingly pervasive post-war urbanization, attempting to awaken hiscountrymen to the dark side of utopian progressionism and the rhetoric of“newness.” Although this concern is most clearly developed in Huang’s storieswritten after the rise of the Taiwanese “Economic Miracle” in the 1980s, itsroots are clearly visible in earlier works such as “The Drowning of an OldCat” (1967) and “The Taste of Apples” (1972), in which the author dramatizeshis concerns about modern cultural change, often foregrounding local belief asa locus of misunderstanding, loss, and denial in relations between ruralTaiwanese and “outsiders” from Taipei and other Taiwanese cities as well asthe West. Read from a Marxist, post-colonial critical perspective, these talesdevelop a powerful dialectic not only between the cultural past of individualcharacters and the “newness” thrust upon them by social/economic/politicalforces they can neither understand nor control, but also between theimpossibly positive narrative of utopian progressionism and the stark reality ofcultural ruin in the wake of modernization leading inevitably to globalization.