A Pail of Oysters

By Vern Sneider and Jonathan Benda

The most important English-language novel ever written about Taiwan.

"Touching, tragic; a testimony to the stubbornly optimistic human spirit."

-The San Francisco Chronicle

Set against the political repression and poverty of the White Terror era in Taiwan, 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camphor Press Ltd
• Release date: May 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910736333

Book preview

Introduction

Vern Sneider (1916–1981) is best known for his 1951 novel about the U.S. occupation of Okinawa, The Teahouse of the August Moon, which was adapted into a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play by John Patrick that in 1956 became a Hollywood movie starring Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford. Sneider had spent part of World War II in Asia, and after the war he was stationed in Okinawa and Korea. In a talk given at a Friends of American Writers awards luncheon in April 1952, Sneider described the experiences he had had in Okinawa that led to the writing of Teahouse.[¹] Like Captain Fisby in the novel, Sneider had been assigned to participate in the military administration of Okinawa. He told the audience that his experiences helping rebuild the Okinawan village of Tobaru were not very different from what he had depicted in his novel. He concluded with the remark that just as that village was built up, Asia must be built up – with understanding.

At the time Sneider gave his talk, he was in the process of writing his second novel, A Pail of Oysters. Sneider told his audience at the luncheon that he was halfway through a novel about Formosa but that he had been so discouraged by the difficulty of the task that he was about to give up the idea. Receiving the Friends of American Writers award, however, encouraged him. He told the audience that he was going to Taiwan the next month for firsthand observation. After that trip, Sneider was able to finish the book, and it was published in 1953.

Although the summer trip in 1952 was Sneider’s first visit to Taiwan, he was not unfamiliar with the island. During the war, after serving in the Pacific, he had been sent to Princeton University by the U.S. Army to study Taiwan in preparation for a possible future military occupation and administration of the island.[²] As a Japanese colony and base for Japan’s military expansion, Taiwan was considered by the United States to be an important target and a potential jumping-off point for an invasion of Japan. In the end, however, plans to invade Taiwan were scrapped, and Sneider was sent to Okinawa instead, and later to Korea. Interestingly, it was in Korea that he met a group of people from Taiwan and from their stories began to write about the island.

Sneider’s first work about Taiwan, a short story entitled A Pail of Oysters, was published in 1950 in the Antioch Review, a well-known American literary magazine. The story describes events in the life of Li Liu, a nineteen-year-old part-Hakka, part-Pepohuan Aborigine who lives with his extended family in central Taiwan. The story is similar to the beginning of the novel, relating how members of the Kuomintang’s Save-the-Country Army force Li Liu’s family to give them the few bits of food that the family possesses and then try to steal the family’s kitchen god, a framed picture of a god that the soldiers think they might be able to sell. A biographical note accompanying the story comments that in Korea, Sneider met Taiwanese from whom he gathered the material for the story.

Whether they were Fukien, Hakka, or Pepohuan, says Mr. Sneider, their grievances against the soldiery were always the same. Afterward, he and a group of Chinese intended to create a fishing fleet, build food processing plants on the Pescadores Islands off Formosa, and distribute their products through the East. The situation became too chaotic, and he came home[,] where for the past three years he has been trying to bring the desperate plight of Asia to light through fiction.[³]

The desperate plight that Sneider was depicting in his fiction had to be written about cautiously. As Sneider observed in an October 4, 1953, interview in the New York Times, On Formosa you have to be careful not to talk politics, although there’s an intellectual group anxious to have its story told.[⁴] Talking politics in 1950s Taiwan would have been especially risky for Taiwanese people; after the island was taken over by the Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) government at the end of World War II, governmental corruption and popular protests against that corruption and incompetence culminated in 1947 in a massacre of at least ten thousand Taiwanese by KMT troops sent over from the mainland and in the establishment of martial law. The massacre itself, called the February 28 Incident (commonly referred to by the abbreviation 228), was quickly blamed on Communist and Japanese influence among the Taiwanese, and the government did not allow public discussion of what really happened. During the martial law period (known as the White Terror) that followed and lasted until 1987, people who criticized the government risked being arrested and sent to prison or, particularly in the early years of martial law, even summarily executed.

Although newspapers had published stories about the massacres, and there were some Americans who criticized the U.S.-supported government of Chiang Kai-shek, this was the McCarthy era, a period of virulent anti-Communism in America, and those who spoke out against Chiang’s regime risked being classified as pro-Communist and blacklisted. Much of the writing about Taiwan, particularly that published in Henry Luce’s publications such as Time and Life, were pro-Chiang and portrayed Taiwan as Free China. Politicians and writers praised Taiwan as a beacon of freedom in Asia. James Michener, for instance, described the Chiang regime as probably the most efficient government in Asia today, not even excepting Japan’s. It has solved the food problem. It has rationed goods so that everyone gets a fair break. It polices the island so that even white men can move about at night without risk of murder. It has launched an education program, prints liberal newspapers and insures just trials.[⁵]

Vern Sneider wanted to counter those images of Taiwan, and as he argued in a letter to former U.S. diplomat George H. Kerr, fiction was a powerful medium for doing that because fiction allows for that thing called emotional pull, and a writer can reach the feelings of the reader, along with an appeal to the mind.[⁶] In a November 1952 letter to Kerr, who was in Taiwan during the February 28 Incident and later wrote about it in Formosa Betrayed (1965), Sneider expressed part-confidence, part-hope that A Pail of Oysters would be able to help the Taiwanese, who were suffering under martial law:

I think this novel will blow the roof off things, Mr. Kerr. My viewpoint will be strictly that of the Formosan people, trying to exist under that government. Certain editors who have seen the outline and sample chapters have termed it the most powerful thing they have ever read, which means this to me – that I’m on the right track. And that, maybe, in my small way, I can do something for the people of Formosa.

Sneider stayed in Taiwan for about three months in the summer of 1952.[⁷] During his time there, Sneider appears to have stayed mostly in Taipei, but he traveled extensively around the city, interviewing a range of people and collecting materials such as copies of the local English newspaper, the China News (the article Our Hats Off! quoted in Chapter 15 is an actual China News story). According to Keelung Hong, co-author of Looking through Taiwan, Sneider employed a young Taiwanese man to act as his interpreter.[⁸] Sneider’s extensive research about Taiwan is evident in the notes he took while he was there.[⁹] They cover a wide variety of topics related to Taiwanese society, religion, customs, agriculture, and politics. His notes and materials clearly reflect the concerns of a foreign novelist determined to paint a realistic picture of another society. For instance, his notebook includes not only observations gained from walking around Taipei but also pages of notes on topics such as milkfish farming and the educational system in Taiwan. There are also details of Taiwanese female naming conventions and of religious festivals; lists of stores, barber shops, and taxi services in the city (some of which appear in the novel); and two pages of typed notes on what appears to have been an interview about the pedicab industry in Taiwan (in the novel, Li Liu works for a time as a pedicab operator in Taipei). Sneider even had his palm read, an experience that he used when describing a trip to a fortune-teller in Chapter 12. Although A Pail of Oysters does not read like an academic text, it is clear that, for example, its discussion of oyster farming is not based simply on Sneider’s imagination. There are a few factual errors in the novel, it is true – at one point Sneider suggests that Li Liu’s home in Changhua is north of Taichung, rather than south, as it should be – but overall the feeling of verisimilitude one gets from the novel comes from Sneider’s close observations of and research into Taiwanese society. Some of what he took notes on, such as the Ghost Festival and blind masseurs, does not even appear in the novel, but seems to reflect leads that he followed as he worked on understanding Taiwan more deeply.[¹⁰]

One important way in which the book A Pail of Oysters parts company with the earlier short story is that, in the novel, Sneider introduces several other characters who share the spotlight with Li Liu. In the novel, readers meet Precious Jade, a young Taiwanese woman sold into prostitution by her unscrupulous adoptive father, and her brother, Didi, who has also been adopted by the same father. Sneider’s notes from his trip to Taiwan contain references to children who are adopted or bought – daughters, to become prostitutes, and sons, to take care of [the] father after death. In an interview with the New York Times in 1953, Sneider said that Precious Jade was based on a girl who was actually sold; the story of the boy I’ve made her brother was suggested by a story told me by a missionary.

Readers also meet Ralph Barton, an American journalist who has come to Taiwan to investigate conditions under martial law. While Barton isn’t the only character whose thoughts we can read, his perspective on what is happening around him is important to the novel’s American readership. In a letter dated January 31, 1952, Robert Amussen, Sneider’s editor at Putnam, expressed concern about the American that Li Liu meets in Taipei: I can understand the necessity for bringing him in in order that you have someone outside the situation to comment on it. I think you will have to be very careful though, in dealing with the American, in order that he does not become merely a mouthpiece or a symbol. Amussen appears to have warmed to the character by the time he responded to a later draft; on March 4, 1953, Amussen wrote to Sneider, suggesting that the American be made a newspaper man who has been sent out to Formosa to do a series of articles for … a large magazine rather than being a fiction writer, as Sneider had originally imagined him. Barton eventually becomes an important character through whom readers learn about Taiwan, reflecting the role that Sneider is playing as the author of A Pail of Oysters.

Reviews of A Pail of Oysters were generally positive, though several reviewers noted the much more somber mood of the novel as compared with the humorous tone of Teahouse of the August Moon. Keelung Hong noted in a speech to Taiwanese students at Berkeley that unlike the situation with Teahouse, there was no interest from Hollywood in A Pail of Oysters. This is confirmed by a letter to Sneider on September 20, 1951, from his literary agent, A.L. Fierst, who, while praising Sneider’s plan for the novel, notes that a story editor for Paramount Pictures considered the novel too bitter and too unrelieved to have much of a chance with motion pictures.

The novel was also heavily criticized, especially by members of the pro-KMT China lobby, including politicians, publishers, and other public figures. Perhaps most notably, the book figured in the testimony of a former director of the U.S. Information Service in China, John Caldwell, to a 1954 U.S. Senate subcommittee session on the Strategy and Tactics of World Communism. Testifying on the effects of Communism on U.S. publishing, Caldwell presented A Pail of Oysters as an example of how Communism had influenced writers and publishers to produce predominately anti-Chiang and pro-Communist materials. In a statement that was entered as part of his testimony, Caldwell argued:

As far as I know there has never been a best selling or even moderately well selling book on the Far East basically favorable to our logical allies. There have been numerous books on the other side. These titles have been vigorously promoted and have sold well. This has been the pattern since Thunder Out of China by White and Jacoby became a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1945 until the most recent effort to smear Chiang bookwise appeared in the form of a book titled A Pail of Oysters by Vern Sneider. Published last fall, this thoroughly dishonest book received rave reviews. In the Saturday Review of Literature it was reviewed by one Pat Frank who stated that the book cast a bright light thrust into the infected peritoneum of Formosa * * * it is a true light. Mr. Frank says that the Nationalists are rightly described as swine and concludes his review with the statement that anyone who reads A Pail of Oysters will understand why all of our money and all our men can't put Chiang Kai-shek together again.[¹¹]

Sneider knew about such criticisms and other negative comments made about both his book and he himself. As he wrote on March 11, 1954, responding to a fan’s letter, In an attempt to discredit the book an American official wrote to someone over here that, in effect, I was on Formosa about two weeks, stayed with some British people, never got out of their house or out of the Friends of China Club. The fact is, I was on Formosa for months, as practically the whole colony knew, and that I was out on Formosa, talking with people in all walks of life. He seemed to be discouraged by this criticism, writing to the reader, I’m afraid my writing about Formosa is over, at least for the time being. I have been branded ‘an unf[ri]endly writer who distorts the truth.’ So with that label can’t you imagine my walking into a Chinese Nationalist Consulate and getting a visa.

Sneider’s friend K.C. Wu, an exiled former governor of Taiwan who was also critical of the Chiang regime, tried to encourage Sneider in a letter of April 10, 1954. You need not be peeved by this sort of smear tactics, he wrote of the unfair criticism Sneider had received, for that must have been expected as it was customary with ‘them.’ Wu was very familiar with their smear tactics, having been attacked with false accusations from the KMT government after leaving Taiwan and speaking out against Chiang’s regime (see his June 29, 1954, article in Look magazine, Your Money is Building a Police State in Taiwan).

Sneider had interviewed Wu in Taiwan in 1952, when Wu was still governor of Taiwan Province. Sneider noted that Wu had a much better reputation among Taiwanese people than other KMT politicians did. In a March 2, 1954, letter to Mrs. Julia Berlet, a reader, Sneider noted that when the character of Chou in Oysters spoke to Barton of prominent mainlanders[¹²] in a more progressive faction of the KMT (the democratic-technique group), Sneider was thinking of Wu, and had originally even included Wu’s name in the manuscript. He might also have been thinking of other prominent pro-democracy mainlanders such as Hu Shih and Lei Chen, who started the Free China Fortnightly (Ziyou Zhongguo Banyuekan), a magazine that was highly critical of Chiang’s government. Lei was eventually arrested in 1960 after attempting to start an opposition political party, and publication of the Free China Fortnightly was halted.

In addition to the criticism of the novel, there was word of an attempt by the CIA to suppress the publication of Oysters – enough for Sneider to conduct a Freedom of Information Act search request to find out if that rumor was true, though it is unclear what the results of that search were. There were also rumors that pro-KMT agents in the United States stole copies of the book from American libraries.[¹³] Though these rumors cannot be proven, they are reminiscent of substantiated attempts by the KMT and its supporters in the United States to suppress criticism of the Chiang regime, even when the criticism was in English.

In his 1952 talk to the Friends of American Writers, Sneider had argued that fiction gives a pattern for action. In A Pail of Oysters, Sneider tried to give his readers such a model for action on Taiwan, not only by touching their emotions over the tragic intertwining stories of Li Liu, Precious Jade, Billy, and Ralph Barton, but also by suggesting – through what Barton learns from the people he meets and his subsequent actions – what Americans could do to prevent further tragedy. It was meant to make Americans think in particular about the regime they supported in Taiwan, but more generally about what the U.S. role in Asia should be.

Now, more than sixty years since the publication of A Pail of Oysters, Taiwan is a maturing democracy, enjoying freedoms of speech and the press that Sneider did not live to see; however, these reforms have taken place under the shadow of an increasingly powerful China. The conflict over Taiwan’s future – whether or not its leaders should bind the island more and more to the fortunes of China – is closely connected with debates about Taiwan’s past. Americans, many of whom know little about Taiwan, might be asking again what, if any, role the United States should play. This new edition of A Pail of Oysters will allow readers to consider this question anew in light of Sneider’s vision of Taiwan’s history and of what might have been if this novel’s impact had been different.

Jonathan Benda

Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

January 2016

1. Sneider’s talk at the Friends of American Writers luncheon is discussed in an article by Fanny Butcher, The Literary Spotlight, Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, August 6, 1952, p. 7. Accessed December 1, 2015, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1952/04/06/page/289/article/the-literary-spotlight.

2. In a February 1, 1966, letter to George H. Kerr, who served as a U.S. vice consul in Taiwan after World War II, Sneider wrote that he still had a set of handbooks from his studies at Princeton. See Su, Yao-tsung, ed. Correspondence by and about George H. Kerr, vol. 2 (Taipei: Taipei 228 Memorial Museum, 2000), p. 661.

3. See Vern Sneider, A Pail of Oysters, Antioch Review, Autumn, 1950, pp. 315–339.

4. See Lewis Nichols, Talk with the Author of ‘A Pail of Oysters’. New York Times, October 4, 1953, p. BR18.

5. James Michener, The Voice of Asia (NY: Random House, 1951), p. 106.

6. Letter reproduced in Su, Yao-tsung, ed. Correspondence by and about George H. Kerr, vol. 2, pp. 562–563.

7. See Sneider’s January 25, 1954, letter to Mrs. Julia Berlet, available in the Vern Sneider papers in the archives of the Monroe County Historical Museum, Monroe, Michigan. Except where otherwise noted, correspondence to and from Sneider cited herein can be found in the Vern Sneider papers.

8. See the transcript of Hong’s February 28, 2003, speech, My Search for 228, available at https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bst/228/DrHong228Lecture2003.htm.

9. These notes are available in the archives of the Monroe County Historical Museum. My thanks to Caitlyn Riehle for her great help finding and scanning relevant materials.

10. In fact, in earlier drafts Sneider evidently brought in too much of his research. In a letter to Sneider dated March 4, 1953, his Putnam editor Robert Amussen complained about a thirty page history of farm and land policy in Formosa that interrupted the narrative in that draft.

11. See United States Senate, Strategy and Tactics of World Communism: Hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., 95 (1954) (testimony of John C. Caldwell), p. 99. Available at https://archive.org/stream/strategytacticso0105unit#page/98/mode/2up.

12. A term used to describe Chinese who went to Taiwan after World War II, especially those who retreated to Taiwan after the Kuomintang lost China.

13. See Keelung Hong, My Search for 228.

About the Author

photo of Vern Sneider

Vern Sneider in Taiwan, 1952

Courtesy of the Monroe County Museum

Vernon John Sneider was born on October 6, 1916, in Monroe, Michigan, the second child of Fred and Matilda Sneider. He went to St. Michael’s Catholic School and Monroe High School. Except for his time as a student at Notre Dame University and his military service in Asia, Sneider mostly stayed close to home in Monroe, where his ancestors, immigrants from Baden and Bavaria, had settled.[¹]

He first became interested in fiction writing in high school, where an English and journalism teacher, Howard Collins, conducted an after-school writing class. Sneider wrote for his college newspaper and for the yearbook while at Notre Dame.[²] After graduating in 1940 with a degree in philosophy, Sneider worked as a credit manager for Sears, Roebuck until he joined the army in April 1941. His military experiences in Okinawa and Korea figure heavily in his fiction – in addition to The Teahouse of the August Moon, Sneider wrote short stories about Korea and U.S.–Korean relations; these were collected in A Long Way from Home (1956), a volume of previously published stories. A Long Way from Home also includes A Pail of Oysters, the 1950 short story that provided the first building block for Sneider’s novel of the same name three years later. Another story from that collection, A Child of the Regiment, was made into an episode of The 20th Century-Fox Hour in 1956.

Perhaps because of the bad post-publication experience Sneider had with A Pail of Oysters (1953), his next novel, The King from Ashtabula (1960), returned to the more light-hearted humor of U.S.–East Asian cross-cultural confusion that characterized The Teahouse of the August Moon (though with less commercial success). He wryly commented in a 1960 article, In 14 years of writing of Asia, the only noticeable effect that I have had upon the far east is that there now stands in Naha, Okinawa, an oriental version of a cocktail lounge, called ‘The Teahouse of the August Moon.’[³]

According to his widow, June Clark Sneider, by the time they were married in the 1970s, Sneider didn’t display any bitterness about the response to A Pail of Oysters: He was past all that.[⁴] He reviewed books about Asia, particularly ones about U.S.–Asian cross-cultural relations, for the New York Times; but his later work moved away from that setting. Sneider told George Kerr in a 1966 letter, in the past few years I have been working in TV and the musical comedy.[⁵] His last novel, West of the North Star (1971), left Asia entirely, being a novel about the War of 1812. A gourmet, he also wrote articles on food and was working on a cookbook, though it was never published.

In 1953, Sneider married Barbara Lee Cook, who died of cancer in 1968. They had no children. He married June Clark in 1974. On May 1, 1981, Sneider died at the age of sixty-four of a heart attack at his home in Monroe.

June Sneider characterized her husband as a very thoughtful and understanding man, who, despite the celebrity he acquired (especially in Monroe) as a result of The Teahouse of the August Moon, preferred to avoid the spotlight. He enjoyed cooking and would sometimes test his recipes on his friends at the Monroe Club, which June Sneider described as a place where he could be himself. Although he cherished his privacy, in his later years he was more than willing to help would-be writers find markets for their work. (In fact this is how he met her.)

June Sneider said that Sneider would become so involved and so lost in thought in writing that when interrupted he would almost shudder … he would get that deeply involved in his writing. She would try to protect him from outside disturbances when he was working on his writing. Sneider also read voraciously; according to June, after his death, the secondhand bookstore that she contacted sent a semi to collect his books, which were in bookcases all over the house. Although she regrets not having been able to save his book collection, she made sure to preserve his papers, which are now at the Monroe County Historical Museum.

Jonathan Benda

1. See Earle F. Walbridge, Vern Sneider, Wilson Library Bulletin, vol. 31 (1956): 300.

2. See Earle F. Walbridge, Vern Sneider.

3. See Vern Sneider, Christmas Wish for Asia: A Prosperity of Pigs, Chicago Daily Tribune, December 4, 1960, p. E18.

4. Interview with June Sneider, December 22, 2015. My thanks to June for her enthusiastic conversation about the book and about Vern Sneider.

5. Letter reproduced in Su, Yao-tsung, ed., Correspondence by and about George H. Kerr, vol. 2 (Taipei: Taipei 228 Memorial Museum, 2000), p. 661.

A PAIL OF OYSTERS

1

The sun was dipping into the Straits of Taiwan and the western slopes of Formosa’s green mountains were bathed in the golden light of evening, when the convoy of China’s Save-the-Country Army came rolling down through the tidal flats on the road leading from Lok-kang, to Ho-bi, to Sai-se.

As the hum of the motors drifted out, disturbing the quiet of the plains, Li Liu — ankle deep in the sea water — looked up from the cluster of oyster shells, firmly secured to the short bamboo stakes. And while his high cheekboned, bronzed face, beneath the conical straw hat, was impassive, still his dark eyes burned with surprise. He was a slender